Overtime Rates Research Articles

Some Evidence of the Impact on Non-Wage Labour Cost on Overtime Work and Employment

Total labour costs can be considered to be a function of the hourly wage, a quasi-fixed component {mainly fringe benefits and training cost) and overtime rate. The theoretical model employee in this paper suggests that an increase in the ratio of quasi-fixed cost to overtime rate leads to an increase in the amount of scheduled overtime work instead of employment. The model, tested with Canadian data, yields statistically significant results.

Labour Supply and Income Tax Changes: A Simulation Study for Finland

It is well known that estimation of the labour supply function is complicated by the non-linearity of the individual's budget constraint. Non-linearity may be caused by a number of factors such as the structure of the tax/benefit scheme or overtime rates. Non-linearities also cause problems in interpreting the policy implications of the estimates. In this study we use a well-structured econometric labour supply model that mimics actual budget constraints as closely as possible to analyse the labour-supply effects of different income tax regimes and systems. In addition to the empirically-specified labour supply model, we construct, for the first time in Finland, a behavioural microsimulation model. Our intent is to contribute to the tax debate in Finland by simulating several suggested changes in the tax system. Our simulation results show that none of the proposed reforms are self-financing. Revenue-neutral move to a proportional tax system does not have major effects on labour supply. The most pronounced behavioural effects are achieved when marginal tax rates are reduced at the lower end of the income tax schedule.

Trusts cheat’ on overtime

Nurses lose hundreds of pounds a year because trusts avoid paying overtime rates

Does Teamworking Work, and if so, Why? A Case Study in the Aluminium Industry

Although teamwork is a leading innovation in work organization, detailed studies of employee responses, and the reasons for acceptance or rejection, are rare. Here, an advanced form of teamworking at a British aluminium smelter, part of a large Canadian multinational company, is examined. Direct supervision was abolished, and teamworking using semi-autonomous groups with job rotation, multiskilling and team briefing was introduced. Employees responded favourably to the initiative. Job satisfaction and labour productivity increased. Industrial action, overtime and accident rates fell. The conditions for this outcome included prior experience of job shedding, capital-intensive continuous process technology, union-management cooperation in the introduction of teams, and a pre-existing culture of strong work group solidarity. Some tensions remained, however, notably over the pay system and some aspects of work performance, and there was no evidence of a move towards high commitment.

Non-wage labour costs and employment: a note on some Canadian evidence from the 1970s

This note considers the relationship between quasi-fixed labour costs (paid absences, employee pension plans, etc.) and overtime hours worked. Specifically, it reports the results of testing the hypothesis that, the larger the ratio of quasi-fixed costs to overtime wage rates, the greater the incentive for employers to schedule overtime hours for the current work force and pay overtime rates rather than expand the work force and pay standard rates. The results fail to reject the hypothesis.

AVERAGE EARNINGS, MINIMUM WAGES AND GRANGER‐CAUSALITY IN AGRICULTURE IN ENGLAND AND WALES

AbstractThe Agricultural Wages Board (AWB) for England and Wales sets minimum wages, hours and overtime rates. Post‐war average earnings have always exceeded minimum wages. This paper examines the relationship between average earnings and minimum wages from 1948–1993 for regular whole‐time males using cointegration analysis. The results imply the existence of such a relationship, and that earnings Granger‐cause minimum wages. The AWB therefore has been reactive having had no impact on average earnings.

Working Time and the Application of Penal Rates of Pay: A Gender and Industry Analysis in the 1993/94 Year

New Zealand employers have followed the international drive for greater internal numerical flexibility and associated changes to working time patterns. In the post Employment Contracts Act era, the thrust of changes for internal numerical flexibility has been directed at the removal of and reduction in penal and overtime rates of pay. At the Fifth Conference on Labour, Employment and Work in 1992 (LEW5) the authors reported on the early developments in collective bargaining arrangements over working time that had been identified from a sample of collective employment contracts. At this 1994 conference (LEW6) the authors will update that data, reporting the latest trends and developments in the working time area. The database from which the paper will be written contains some 2200 'live' collective employment contracts covering some 11,500 employers and 340,000 employees. Changes to working time arrangements are very much industry specific and the data will be reported by industry. A particular focus of the paper will be the effects of changes to working time arrangements on women employees.

From the junior doctors conference: Hospital life is like a soap opera

The scenes in the recent television series Cardiac Arrest were true to life and seen in hospitals across the country, Dr Edwin Borman told the junior doctors conference last week. Dr Borman, who chairs the Junior Doctors Committee and is a senior registrar in anaesthetics in Birmingham, said, “I don't think that there is anything I have seen in Cardiac Arrest that I haven't heard of.” (The programme was reviewed on 23 April, p 1108.) Demands on junior doctors, he said, were outstripping what could be provided, and quality of care to patients was falling. Money and political will were needed to provide a service with reduced, safe hours for all doctors. Over the past year there had been calls from junior doctors for industrial action. Three prerequisites were required, Dr Borman pointed out. Firstly, junior doctors would have to prove that they had a just legal cause and that all other options had been pursued. Secondly, there would have to be a ballot of members and the BMA had now ensured that the mechanisms were in place if these were needed. Thirdly, the membership had to be motivated. The JDC's survey on hours of work earlier this year showed what sort of action doctors would be prepared to take if balloted on industrial action (26 March, p 860). Dr Borman believed that if action was taken over pay - the committee wants 100% overtime rates - the future of the review body could be in jeopardy with negotiations transferred to local NHS trusts. If action was taken over hours of work the new deal would be threatened. Junior doctors have rejected the idea of differential rates of pay in different hospitals and specialties. This excludes the different rates paid for rotas, partial shifts, and full shifts and for seniority …

Collective Employment Contracts and New Working Time Arrangements in New Zealand

The research reported in this paper examines the impact in New Zealand of the liberalisation of the statutory regulation on working time in collective employment contract bargaining. Specifically this research reports working time arrangements that are changed in three areas. First the reduction (or extension) of the working week - thus decreasing (or increasing) the number of hours worked by full time workers. Second, the scheduling of the hours worked each week by full time workers. Here changes to the span of days available (and whether that span includes weekend days) and the span of hours available for ordinary work each day have been identified. Third, the application of overtime payments and the specific overtime rate has been examined.

Equal opportunities.

Four unions representing hospital ancillary staff have made a claim for better treatment of 102,000 women parttimers. NUPE, COHSE, GMB and TGWU are asking for time and a half pay for working Saturdays, paid bank holidays and paid overtime rates for working extra hours. Malcolm Wing, NUPE national secretary, said: 'Our claim is to win equality for women part-timers.'

Correction (Juniors' overtime rates)

Correction (Juniors' overtime rates)

Wages Councils—Are they an Anachronism?

In July 1985 the government decided in favour of major reform of wages councils. It restricted their scope to setting minimum hourly and overtime rates of pay and removed people under 21 completely from their coverage. This raises questions about the functions of wages councils within the British industrial relations system. There is a need to adopt an industrial relations perspective on wages councils. Contemporary debate on the continued usefulness of wages councils is biased against them by virtue of failing to recognise that they exist not only to protect workers from low pay, but also represent state attempts to create collective bargaining and industrial democracy in situations where the capacity of workers for collective organisation has been too low to support voluntary developments. All these different identities of wages councils need to be understood and combined to achieve a comprehensive conception of their actual significance. There is a need for more research based on appropriate methodologies, studying the wages council sector itself and for studies to measure the effects of wages councils on efficiency and productivity.

The Fair Labor Standards Act and the 12‐Hour Shift

This article discusses the impact of the Fair Labor Standards Act on the Denver Water Department, where treatment plant operators have been working on a 12‐hour shift schedule since 1980. A recent ruling on the Act does not outlaw the use of extended shifts, but it requires that all hours worked over 40 in a work week must be paid at the time and one‐half overtime rate. The Denver Water Department found that it could minimize overtime by redefining the work week so that operators' work hours were more evenly distributed between weeks. The new schedule produces a maximum of eight hours of overtime pay per operator every four weeks. A table illustrating Denver's 12‐hour shift schedule is presented.

The Measurement of Labour Cost in Empirical Models of Production and Employment

T HE presence of adjustment costs for a firm altering its labour force or capital stock creates considerable problems for econometric work involving firm behaviour, either on the employment or the investment side. The usual way of handling these costs is to derive a so-called desired level for the choice variables based on an optimization assuming there are no adjustment costs and then to add an ad hoc lagged adjustment process, the nature of which however is not derived explicitly from the actual costs of adjustment. There are two problems with this. First, as noted by Nerlove (1972), the resulting paths would not in general be optimal for a profitmaximizing firm so there is an inconsistency between equilibrium behaviour and adjustment behaviour. Second, by allowing the adjustment process to be data determined without imposing the restrictions implied by optimization over adjustment costs, one makes it harder to discriminate between models on the basis of the data. This makes it difficult to test the appropriateness of assumptions about the underlying economic model (for example, the form of the production function used). The problem with including the adjustment costs in the optimization is of course that it leads to formulations that are intractable for empirical work. This paper is an attempt to avoid that problem by looking more carefully at labour costs and to see what can be said about the underlying production model without using ad hoc dynamic assumptions. In particular it recognizes the fact that, even for small firms, the wage rate for operatives is a step function in hours worked; up to a certain number of normal hours an operative is paid at one hourly wage rate but above that number of hours is paid at a higher, overtime rate. Of course, a firm would only use labour at the overtime rate if it cost less overall than hiring more labour at the normal rate. But since firms do regularly employ overtime labour, this suggests that they must face either a rising supply curve for labour or else a fixed cost in hiring additional employees; Since the latter enables one to retain price-taking behaviour in the labour market and can also provide an explanation for short-time working, that is what will be investigated here. What is relevant to the production decisions of a firm is of course the marginal cost of an additional hour of labour, provided, that is, that the average cost is not so high that it is unprofitable to produce at all. For a firm that has employees on short-time working, the marginal cost is the normal hourly wage rate. For a firm with employees on overtime, the marginal cost is the hourly overtime rate. These observations are formalized in the next section of the paper. In succeeding sections they are applied to models based on the Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function and to the vintage model of Malcomson and Prior (1979).

Farcical overtime rates

Farcical overtime rates

How Often Will the Firemen Get their Sleep?

We calculate the expected additional fire protection cost to a city implied by the 1974 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act. Under the amendments, if a city chooses not to pay its men who are on duty for more than 24 hours at a time for sleep and meal time, it may exclude up to eight hours of sleep time, but must compensate them at overtime rates for the entire sleep period if one or more alarms prevent them from obtaining at least five uninterrupted hours of sleep in that period. Interalarm times are modeled as a Poisson process, and both point and interval estimates of the additional annual overtime cost are computed for the city of Monterey by estimating the annual number of interrupted sleep periods. A model that permits the rate at which alarms are received and the length of die designated sleep period to be varied is developed for computing the proportion of nights in the year during which the firemen get five uninterrupted hours of sleep. A procedure for adjusting the model to allow for the time spent in response to an alarm is also described.

The Myth of Increasing Non-Work vs. Work Activities

The promised decrease of the average workweek below the present 40 hours is a myth. Three recent trends in the labor force are examined in terms of their impact on an expected increase in overtime and dual-jobholding rates: (1) changes in management philosophy and practice toward more job enrichment, (2) the increased participation of females, and (3) the increasing proportion of the labor force employed in the relatively inefficient service occupations. The author predicts a future increase in overtime among select occupations and a general rise in dual-jobholding families. In short, for those who are able to work and choose to do so, they will probably choose more of it. Moreover, the next major historical era that will substantially alter the distribution of work and non-work activities will probably consist of “counter-work cultures” that will seek to legitimize a new series of alternative value systems for the use of human time.

Harassment of women garment workers in Bangladesh

The study analyzed the different factors that are responsible for the harassment of women garment workers in Bangladesh. Three garment factories from Mirpur area under Dhaka district were selected purposively where garment factories are available. The sample consisted of 90 women workers taking 30 randomly from each of the three garment factories. Female workers are mostly employed at the lower category of jobs like operator, finishing helper, polyer etc. These jobs are very monotonous in nature. Because of the nature of their jobs, female workers sometimes lose interest in work and become depressed. A large number of female workers received low and irregular wages which create their job dissatisfaction. Only 22 female workers earned salary between Tk. 2700 to Tk. 3000 per month. Female workers are sexually harassed by their co-workers in the factory or by police or by mastans in the street. Communication problem is a major problem faced by most of the female garment workers. A long distance travel is not only physical strenuous but also mentally stressful. Their overtime rate is very low. Long working hours result in a number of illnesses and diseases like headache, eye trouble, ear ache, musculoskeletal pain etc. Women are exploited easily due to lack of technical knowledge and training. The employers do not pay any heed to this exploitation. Keywords: Garment industry; Women workers; Harassment DOI: 10.3329/jbau.v8i2.7940 J. Bangladesh Agril. Univ. 8(2): 291-296, 2010

Algorithms for Optimal Production Scheduling and Employment Smoothing

This paper seeks here a minimum cost production plan over a finite number of time periods. There is a known demand requirement (stated in production hours) to be met in each period from current and previous hours of production (stored as inventory). A production policy consists of scheduled amounts of hours, some of which are costed at regular-time wage rates, the remainder costed at overtime rates. Expansion or contraction of the work force (stated in production hours) is charged against the period-to-period variations in regular-time employment. The fluctuations in overtime production do not incur such hiring and firing costs. The amount of overtime used, however, is constrained not to exceed a specified fraction of regular-time utilized in any period. We describe algorithms for rinding an optimal policy under the assumption that all costs are described by linear functions and where demands are either monotonic increasing or decreasing in time. In addition to presenting the algorithms, we also examine certain planning horizon results implied by these algorithms. Specifically, we ascertain when optimal first period decisions can be made without knowing the precise values of all future demands and costs.

The Use of Computers in Systematics

Two possibilities of using computers which seem most likely to influence taxonomy are: (1) A replacement of our present taxonomic system with a completely logical (Aristotelian) system in which each taxon to which any organism belongs would be designated by a digit in an alphanumeric code number of not more than eleven digits for each species. The code number would therefore contain the complete classification of the organism. (2) The determination of relationships between taxa by means of computers which also can compile a complete taxonomic system based on similarity coefficients. This system called numerical taxonomy. In order to accept the first of these possibilities it will be necessary to discard all of the present rules of nomenclature. In order to accept the second of the possibilities it will be necessary to discard not only the rules of nomenclature but also all the other aspects of the present system and let the machines take over all phases of taxonomy except the recording of data. During the last decade computers have been applied to taxonomic problems in various ways (review, Jahn, 1962), and it seems highly probable that these applications will become both more extensive and more intensive. My purpose today to point out the direction of some of these applications and also some of their possible effects on the science of taxonomy as it now exists. However, in case there might be persons present who are not familiar with the scope of computer activities, I wish to state briefly what meant by the term computer. A computer a machine that performs logical operations. It a tool of the mind, comparable in many respects to the way a power saw a tool of the hand. Computer techniques comprise the central core of the field of intellectronics. The goal of intellectronics is to achieve a synthetic intelligence, part human and part mechanical, which combines the strongest features of both, to produce a new order of intellectual power exceeding that of either man or machines operating separately (Physics Today, March 1961, back cover). Therefore, intellectronics may be considered comparable to that field of engineering concerned with the design and operation of power machinery. In moder civilization not using a computer for a logical operation when it would be of help comparable to sawing wood by hand, or, on a larger scale, comparable Received for publication 13 August 1962. *Aided by ONR Contract NR-304-502 and USPHS-NIH grant No. 6462. to making an automobile by hand. It can be done but why do it that way?-except, of course, as a hobby. The simplest jobs for computers involve only arithmetic. The more complicated applications of arithmetic involve bookkeeping, especially payrolls, for which computers use information on rates of pay, number of hours worked, overtime rates and hours, social security tax rates, rules for tax deductions and for miscellaneous deductions, vacation time permitted and taken, etc. On the basis of these rules paychecks are issued or credited at a local bank. The complete calculations are made in small fractions of a second. In a similar way computers can perform statistical analyses and determine coefficients of similarity with extreme speed and accuracy, and this one of the computer techniques that has been used to great advantage in taxonomy in a manner to be described below (Sneath and Sokal, 1962; Ehrlich, 1962b; Daly, 1962). A more complicated common job for computers involves solving differential equations. The extreme rapidity by which this can be done by computer completely essential to the flight of both guided and ballistic missiles. Furthermore, it possible for computers to obtain arithmetical solutions to differential equations that are insolvable by the usual methods of calculus. A different application involves translation from one language to another. The languages used can be either human languages or the languages used by other types of machines