Profit Labor Research Articles

Notions of Care Labor Are Antithetical to Profitable Labor

We argue that women in the care workforce face a wage penalty because care work is perceived as something that people, especially women, are meant to do out of love (and for free). We focus on care labor, which is aligned with stereotypes about women's natural abilities as caregivers, to show that low wages cannot be explained by counter-stereotypic behavior alone. Instead, low wages in care labor can be explained by a perceived love versus money tradeoff. This tradeoff exists not only because of intrinsic rewards and fears of commodifying care but because of the idea that trading love for money amounts to trading the sacred for the profane. In other words, care workers are underpaid because many people, either implicitly or explicitly, perceive the very act of making money as counter to care, a stereotypically-feminine form of work. This stereotypical association contributes to the gender pay gap more generally because it implies that the work women are suited for is work that should be done for free. We expand on this idea with future directions and practice implications, which include building communal spaces for care workers to facilitate communication and organizing around higher pay and better working conditions.

The Bitter and the Sweet: Managerial Perceptions of the Well-Being of Ethiopian Female Apparel and Horticultural Workers

Observers of Ethiopia’s entry into export-oriented global value chains generally agree that social upgrading is crucial if these chains’ largely female workforce is to reap the benefits of participation. They disagree, however, on the extent to which a ‘business case’ can be made to involve in this upgrading the managers who link frontline workers to international buyers. This article takes a novel approach to these questions by directly asking these managers and those who advise them on human resources how they understand the well-being of their frontline workers. Drawing on 37 qualitative semi-structured interviews, we find great variation in the extent to which such actors are interested in pursuing worker well-being and social upgrading beyond basic compliance. This is indeed due in part to the sectoral dynamics that have shaped managers’ views of what constitutes a profitable labour regime but also by sociocultural factors that include managers’ own national contexts, gender and class.

The Non-Work Of The Unimportant: The shadow economy of Nubian women in displacement villages

In my search for spatial resistance in Nubian resettlement villages, I found a trend of spatial hacks located inside and around the household, and purposed to facilitate a shadow economy dominated by women and their small businesses. Despite the recognized importance of informal economies in Africa (Kinyanjui 2014), Nubian women and their society do not qualify their profitable labor as work, partly because of their domestic location and partly because of their roots in an indigenous culture that recognizes the emotional – an undervalued aspect in the formal economy. In this paper, I first present empirical evidence of the significant role these women, and occasionally men, play in the economic health of Nubians after going through the hardships of displacement, by sustaining households as well as preserving Nubian indigenous culture. Second, I highlight the role of these economic activities in expanding the use of dwelling units designed by the state and reforming the built environment. Third, I challenge the ontologies of “work” that have been forced on Nubians as part of their displacement, and discounted their indigenous ontologies of labour. I do so by examining the meaning of “work” as a drive for social and cultural capital. The materiality of displacement and dispossession in the case of Nubians women has occurred semantically: the claim of modernization came accompanied with cultural violence and the discounting of women’s labour in the gendered configuration of meaning. This article argues for a feminist onto-epistemology of work – one that recognizes emotion and its position as a capital that is generated and circulated via resources of care, trust, and sense of community.

A Spatial Evolutionary Study of Technological Innovation Talents’ Sticky Wages and Technological Innovation Efficiency Based on the Perspective of Sustainable Development

In China, with the deepening of the reform of industrial structures, the improvement of technological innovation has become a key issue. This is not only related to whether the strategic development of Chinese science and technology can be achieved, but also whether the Chinese economy and high-quality human capital can develop sustainably. Based on the theoretical boundary of sustainable development—free transfer of information—we see that sticky wages are the embodiment of information dissemination. Under the dual effects of profit-seeking behavior and information barriers, the relationship between the sticky wages of technological innovation talents (TIT), as the most profitable labor force, and technological innovation efficiency (TIE) has become more complex, and so far we still have a limited understanding of it. We explore this issue in an empirical study by using a two-stage chain Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) of TIE followed by modifying the wages of TIT; finally, we build a collaborative evolution model with spatial effects on a large dataset (from 2007 to 2016). The results show that the overall Chinese TIE is relatively low, and in the central and western regions the TIE has been seriously reversed; there are also divergences in the TIE at different stages in the regions we focus on. As the output of technological innovation, except for initial results (such as patents), the more important value is whether it has an ability to transform the initial results into production, and the core of it is whether it can match the market environment and technology transfer system (for example, market mechanism, transformation incentive mechanism, and institutional mechanism). So, considering these aspects, the central and west of China are obviously insufficient, while the east has obvious advantages; this can also explain the results of spatial diffusion, namely, in the eastern region it is higher than in other areas, but the gap between them is gradually narrowing; lastly, from the perspective of synergy, the wage stickiness of TIT in the central region is larger than that of the eastern and western regions, and the evolutionary relationship in the former is “extruding” while in the latter it is “cooperative.” Mainly due to the popularity of the eastern innovation network and the initial state of the west, the barriers of information transmission are relatively low, while the central part is undergoing economic transformation, so its extreme demand for TIT has pushed up the cost of information transmission.

Predestined Migrations: UndocumentedPeruvians inSouthKorean Churches

AbstractThis article explores how undocumentedPeruvian laborers have established a significant presence within some ofKorea's powerful evangelical churches through their identification ofrespuestas(answers or signs) fromGod. ManyPeruvians arrived inKorea in the early 1990s on their way to more profitable labor destinations, such asJapan orEurope, but stayed after finding factory work. Through their conversions toProtestantism inKorea, they have begun to identify events such as unplanned pregnancies or their ability to evade deportation as signs that their migration toKorea was predestined. Through promoting their respuestas to various audiences,Peruvians not only recast their unlikely migration as predestined but change their own status from being economic laborers to recognized leaders withinKorean churches.Korean church leaders embracePeruvians and respuestas as a way to promote their church's own cosmopolitan image and desires for launching global missions to locations such asPeru. As such, respuestas are a common framework through which migrants and church leaders co‐create their global aspirations and experiences.

The Hudson River School of Incarceration: Sing Sing Prison in Antebellum New York

New York's Sing Sing Prison's first two decades coincided with the emergence of the Hudson River School of Painting. The differences between the two were dramatic: the Hudson River School emphasized an idealized “natural magnificence” whereas the prison extracted silent, profitable labor through routine beatings. Tourists and other visitors to the prison struggled to reconcile their expectations of the Hudson River with what they witnessed in the prison on its banks. Prison practices and the Hudson River School unexpectedly converged between 1844 and 1848, when phrenology simultaneously influenced the Hudson River School and prison reformers. Although its influence on the administration of the prison was short lived, the Hudson River School of Incarceration would have a lasting impact in the shift from religion to science in the administration of prisons.

Review: The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome by Heather Hyde Minor

Heather Hyde Minor. The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome . Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies series, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010, 312 pp., 36 color and 112 b/w illus. $95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271035642 Despite its importance as the focus of the Grand Tour, eighteenth-century Italy—especially papal Rome—has traditionally been perceived as a cultural backwater, remaining relatively unaffected by the engagement with Enlightenment thought that catalyzed the transformation from early modern to modern culture in northern European countries. Since at least the 1960s, scholars in various disciplines have been working to dispel that antiquated notion, and in her recent book, Heather Hyde Minor ambitiously strives to follow suit by illuminating the influence of enlightened ideas on seven important building projects, initiated by popes or their cardinal-nephews, that spanned the years 1730 to 1758, when Clement XII Corsini and Benedict XIV Lambertini reigned as the supreme pontiffs. Minor's handsomely produced, well-illustrated study is divided into three parts, the first examining ecclesiastical commissions: the new facades of S. Giovanni in Laterano and S. Maria Maggiore as well as other renovations at the latter and the building of the Corsini Chapel at the former. The second section concerns the enlargement of two types of papal palaces: the family home of the Corsini, constructed for the pope's nephew, Cardinal Neri Corsini, and the “official” palace complex built for the pontiffs on the Quirinal Hill. The last part considers two important kinds of public institutions of learning, the newly founded Capitoline Museum and the Corsini Library at the family palace. Minor is mostly able to show how these projects were influenced by new and enlightened notions, but her claim that they constituted a distinctive “culture of architecture” is less effectively demonstrated; it stands in for a more comprehensive and serious consideration of the ways in which the …

Enabling trust in crowd labor relations through identity sharing

While online Crowdsourcing marketplaces provide a powerful avenue for facilitating new forms of information- driven micro-labor, their practical value is significantly reduced by worker “spam” and employer fraud. We hypothesize anonymity of parties is a major source of these problems, and we thus propose a human-centric solution: encourage employers and workers to voluntarily de- anonymize in order to reap a potential benefit of more productive and profitable labor interactions. To facilitate voluntary identity sharing, we have built a prototype identity management application allowing individuals to associate their crowdsourcing worker/employer identities to their public profiles on social network sites. By providing a vehicle for identity sharing, the prototype provides the foundation for a future user study of employers and workers engaged in known-identity crowd labor relationships.

Mark Twain and Fishing

From have equate Herman fostered fishing Melville a with grand spiritual tradition to Ernest quest, of Hemingway fishing as in stories. Hemingway's and Norman Often these Maclean, tales Old Man are American allegorical and writers Sea and , have fostered a grand tradition of fishing stories. Often these tales are allegorical and equate fishing with spir tual quest, as in Hemingway's Old Man and Sea , Maclean's A River Runs Through It , and even Melville's Moby-Dick , ultimate fishing story, very definition of a whopper. Sinclair Lewis declared in his 1930 Nobel Prize acceptance speech that he had learned as a boy that there is something very important and spiritual about catching fish.1 In a sense, fishing is nothing less than act of faith and a fisherman very type of stubborn optimist. Henry David Thoreau mused in Waiden that fishing is the true industry for poets and pondered whether he should go to heaven or a-fishing.2 Similarly, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote in Country of Pointed Firs that If there is one way above another of getting so close to nature that one simply is a piece of nature, following a primeval instinct with perfect self-forgetfulness and forgetting everything except dreamy consciousness of pleasant freedom, it is to take course of a shady trout brook.3 On other hand, unlike such sports as hunting, hiking, and swimming, fishing is literally a passive activity. It is not productive but a parody of work. Ben Franklin reminisced in his autobiography, for example, that as a young printer he seen at no Places of idle Diversion; I never went out a-fishing or shooting.4 On his part, Van Winkle, consummate loafer, suffered an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor and would sit on a wet rock, with a rod as long and heavy as a Tartar's lance, and all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nibble.5 Mark Twain later drew a crude picture of actor Joe Jefferson best known as star of a popular stage production of Rip Van Winkle while fishing.6 As usual, Twain was one of skeptics. He never described fishing as spiritually uplifting, and he never wrote a piece that contains word fish in its title. In Twain's stories, there are only two reasons to fish: fun or food. Put another way, fishing in Mark Twain's writings is either a form of play, sport, or leisure, suitable to old men and young boys, or a form of subsistence, suitable for those who cannot otherwise earn a living. In Pudd'nhead Wilson , Judge Driscoll and Pembroke Howard, elderly sons of First Families of Virginia, spend entire day on water: The day's fishing finished, they came floating down stream in their skiff, talking national politics and other high matters.7 Or in The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, Twain remembered that half soldiers in his Confederate militia, like boys in Tom Sawyer's Gang, went

A Theory of the Preferred Worker: A Structural Explanation for Black Male Dominance in Basketball

Black males' `dominance' in basketball is taken for granted and often explained in terms of racial difference and socio-environmental factors. However, this is only one side of the coin. Power needs to be considered for a fuller understanding. This article does this, providing a structural perspective of black male integration into basketball that builds from Edna Bonacich's work on labor and group relations. An occupational niche is two-way; a group finds and occupies a niche that they have been given access to by a hiring group. Black males do not dominate the collegiate and professional ranks of basketball simply because of ability. They were given access to the opportunity because it benefited capitalist interests and because of their marginalized position in society. In this specific context, they represent the most profitable labor source.

Resource use efficiency in cassava production in Ebonyi South Agricultural Zone of Ebonyi State, Nigeria

The study was aimed at ascertaining the efficiency of resource use in cassava production in Ebonyi South agricultural zone of Ebonyi State. A multi-stage random sampling technique was used to select sixty (60) cassava farmers for the study. A structured questionnaire as well as field observations were used to elicit the relevant information from the respondents. Data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics, relevant econometric and statistical tools, Cobb-Douglas production function and gross margin analysis. The results show that cassava production is profitable in the study area under the method of resource combination. Results also show that the resource inputs such as land, labour, capital and so on are positively related to output. On resource productivity, the Cobb-Douglas production function tested show that the combined effect of the six resource inputs brings about equal unit increase in output. Most importantly, it was recommended that the farmers need to reduce the level of labour used to get towards the point of profitable labour allocative efficiency. International Journal of Agriculture and Rural Development Vol. 7(1) 2006: 92-98

Barbara Hofland's Profession: Questioning the Calling

Little known to contemporary readers, Barbara Hofland published one volume of poems, twenty-one novels, and forty-three children's works between 1805 and her death in 1846. While her novels rarely went into second editions, her children's works were widely read on both sides of Atlantic and in French, Spanish, and German translations (Butts 5). (1) Like Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, Eliza Parsons, Mary Russell Mitford, and Letitia Landon, Hofland wrote to support her family. Before her marriage to brilliant but improvident artist, she published occasional verse, and after his death wrote prose to provide for her son. Reflecting her own life, her tales for children depict families encountering similar financial difficulties and solutions: her female characters work as milliners (a craft in which she was trained), teachers (a profession she briefly attempted), piecework sewers, and governesses to support their children or siblings. None of her characters choose writing for their career. Nevertheless, in demonstrating need for both men and women to apply their talents, including artistic talents, for money, Hofland's novellas present sustained defense of her own authorship. In particular, her trilogy of widow novellas, The Officer's Widow and her Young Family (1809). The Clergyman's Widow and her Young Family (1812), and The Merchant's Widow and her Young Family (1814), use occasion of children entering professional life to question what kind of labor positions family in middle classes. Hofland's portrayal of labor and class reflects two publishing traditions. First, following Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More, Hofland joined Evangelical children's authors such as Lucy Cameron, Mary Butt Sherwood, and Elizabeth Sandham in writing moral tales teaching piety and fortitude. (2) Like these Evangelical writers, Hofland portrays willingness to work as sign of virtue. Second, Hofland published at times with William Lane's Minerva Press and with Lane's successor A.K. Newman. Like other Minerva authors she portrays women's work as form of economic empowerment (although rewarding her characters in end with prosperous marriages). (3) Writing from both perspectives, Hofland's Evangelical notions of virtue grant middle class status to laboring women while her ideal of service to gives their work professional characteristics. In her model, all work that serves one's family qualifies as profession, and working women can mark their families' middle class status as well as domestic angels in house. On few occasions in which she discusses her role as author. Hofland suggests that writing for children is simply an extension of acceptable female labors, mothering and teaching. Hofland dedicates Son of Genius to her own son, and distinguishes her children's books from hack writing because she claims they teach virtue: in preface to The Officer's Widow, she insists that she writes to inculcate concepts such as filial duty in her young readers. Nevertheless, Hofland also writes for money, and working for money undermines middle class model of feminine purity that allows her to teach children morality in first place. As Mary Poovey has noted, a woman who wrote for publication threatened to collapse ideal from which her authority was derived (125). In novellas, in defending women's work as whole, she also defends women's literary work. In milliners and piecework sewers. Hofland implicitly portrays writing as productive profitable labor rather than an artistic calling, labor that is compatible with middle-class femininity. While some male contemporaries considered art as otherworldly expressions of genius, Hofland believed that art was worldly profession, theme she explores in her popular The Son of Genius. Mr. Lewis, highly acclaimed but impoverished painter, refuses offers of patronage, although his wife and son are destitute, insisting that the independence of his mind shall never yield to . …

Planning-Interval Duration in Labor-Shift Scheduling

This article proposes guidelines for managers and researchers regarding appropriate planning intervals in labor scheduling. This study distinguishes between planning intervals used for data collection and intervals used for scheduling employees. This distinction is relevant because it is not necessary for the two interval types to be of the same duration. The results of a simulation experiment show that both increased variability in the customer-arrival rate and high mean customer-arrival rates work to reduce the ideal length of both data-collection and schedule-development intervals. In fact, with a mean arrival rate of five customers per minute, the most profitable labor schedules originated with a five-minute data-collection interval combined with a five-minute schedule-development interval. At present, because of the paucity of procedures that can accommodate such brief intervals, managers will find fifteen-minute data-collection and schedule development intervals generally to be the most effective.

Edwards Revisited: Technical Control and Call Centres

Call centres represent a new strategy by capital to reduce unit labour costs. While this strategy has been applied to many different types of work, it is particularly successful in cutting costs in routine interactive service encounters. Telebank, the case study research site, is one of four integrated call centres throughout the UK. Data collection includes taped semi-structured interviews with customer service representatives and managers as well as non-participant observation of recruitment, training and the labour process. This article argues that management has developed a new form of structural control. Theoretically this draws heavily on Edwards's concept of technical control, but not only is this shown to be extended and modified, it is also combined with bureaucratic control, which influences the social structure of the workplace. Contrary to Edwards such systems are not distinct; rather they are blended together in the process of institutionalizing control. Part of the rationale for this is to camouflage control, to contain conflict by making control a product of the system rather than involving direct confrontation between management and workers. Despite such attempts the struggle for transforming labour power into profitable labour remains, and the article ends by exploring confrontation between workers and managers and worker agency more generally.

The social functions of correctional policy: A case study of the Alabama convict lease system 1845–1928

Private sector involvement in corrections is a controversial contemporary practice. This paper examines, from a historical perspective, one state’s experiment with leasing state sentenced convicts to private contractors for use on a variety of for profit labor projects. The convict lease system in Alabama was noteworthy for two reasons: first, Alabama relied on the lease system of convict labor longer than any other state, and second, the state operated one of the most profitable lease systems in the United States. Convicts in Alabama were used in agriculture, road and railway construction, manufacturing, in quarries and in the coal mines. It was in the coal mines that the lease system brought the greatest profit and controversy. Leases with the coal companies for convict labor became a major source of revenue for the state treasury while at the same time, prison reformers criticized the practice for its cruel and inhumane treatment of inmates (the death rate at some of the mining camps exceeded 40% of the inmates under custody per year). In addition, this paper examines some of the social consequences associated with the correctional policy of convict leasing.

LONDON SCRIVENERS AND THE ESTATE MARKET IN THE LATER SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

T HE doings of Tudor and Stuart scriveners were registered by contemporaries with noticeable disapproval. In addition to exercising their purely clerical art they frequently acted as legal and financial intermediaries, and thus came under fire from current opinion on middlemen. From this uncomfortable position they have found their way into the historians' pages and emerged as pioneers of banking and stock-broking. Prof. Tawney has shown how the booming land market of Elizabethan England, with the consequent increase in the business of drawing up bonds and arranging mortgages, provided much profitable labour for the scrivener.' It seems clear, too, that many of the profession turned from the legal work which would to-day be described as conveyancing to a type of financial business which contemporaries called 'scrivening', those engaged being sometimes distinguished as 'money-scriveners '.2 As is usual when specialized functions are gradually appearing, early practitioners covered a wide field. By I 624 scriveners were described in an Act of Parliament as persons who 'received other men's monies or estates into their trust or custody '. It has been suggested that attorneys and notaries were admitted to the Company of Scriveners-incorporated in i6I7-and in this way the Company contrived to preserve its monopoly of the conveyancing work which could apparently lead to a hybrid of functions.4 According to the needs of clients, they advanced money for marriage settlements or acted as financial 'contact-men'. Inevitably they figured as 'extortioners' and ' chargers of excessive usury'.5 Dekker, in the i630's could write of 'gull-gropers' and 'money-mongers',6 and a century later Defoe was warning his English tradesman against the wiles of the ' Procurer or Scrivener or Banker' and noting that the 'customary encroachments of Usurers, Money-Lenders, Scriveners etc.... have been the scandal of the times'.7 It is obviously difficult to draw the distinction in the work of early financial middlemen between banking and broking. Evidence to suggest that the scrivener figured amongst early bankers includes, for instance, Dudley North's observation that 'the Merchants and Gentlemen... keep their Money for the most part with Goldsmiths and Scriveners, and they, instead of having Ten