Ranks Of Labor Research Articles

More Reward Than Punishment: Labor Resilience at Midcentury

More Reward Than Punishment: Labor Resilience at Midcentury

Evidence of Organizational Learning and Organizational Forgetting from Financial Statement Audits

SUMMARYThis paper examines the association between audit firm tenure and audit production efficiency. The analyses are based on proprietary audit production data provided by a large international accounting firm. The results document evidence of learning over time. Specifically, repeatedly servicing a client increases production efficiency by reducing the total audit hours expended in an audit engagement. Learning rates vary across different ranks of labor and learning is more pronounced among higher personnel ranks, with lower ranks experiencing little learning. Further, learning rates are not constant over time; there is little incremental learning beyond the initial productivity gains consistent with the concept of the learning curve. Finally, the results show some evidence of productivity losses as audit hours increase for very long tenures consistent with the notion of organizational forgetting.JEL Classifications: M41; M42

At the Birth of Anzac: Labor, Andrew Fisher and Australia's Offer of an Expeditionary Force to Britain in 1914

On Monday 3 August 1914, the government of Joseph Cook authorised a cable to London offering an expeditionary force. The leaders of the Labor Party voiced no criticism. This article explores the background to Labor's acquiescence. In the context of a looming federal election, a number of factors came into play. As the international crisis opened, Liberals alleged that Labor would jeopardise Australia's security. Labor had been prominent in supporting Irish Home Rule in 1914, inviting charges of disloyalty. Andrew Fisher had been hurt politically by such charges in the recent past. The Labor leaders Fisher and Pearce were also aware that they had authorised planning for an expeditionary force when in office, 1910-13. Since the Boer War, Labor had retreated from suggestions that Australia might shun an imperial war. Instead, in fear of Asia, Labor preached absolute loyalty to Britain and the internationalist spirit remained weak in Labor's ranks.

Audit Labor Usage and Fees under Business Risk Auditing

ABSTRACTThe adoption of business risk audit (BRA) approaches during the 1990s by several leading audit firms has been the subject of considerable scrutiny and commentary. Under BRA, the auditor responds to the increasing complexity of auditee financial reports by acquiring a deep and comprehensive understanding of the auditee's industry, strategy, business models, and processes—tasks best accomplished by higher‐ranked labor—and by employing this understanding to make audit labor allocations. Using proprietary data for 165 audits conducted in 2002, we investigate three propositions about audit labor use under BRA. First, relative to pre‐BRA benchmarks for the same auditor, we expect BRA audits to use a greater proportion of higher‐ranked labor. Second, we expect engagements with high assessed auditor business risk (ABR), a summary risk assessment that reflects the BRA auditor's rich understanding of the auditee, to be allocated more labor and more higher‐ranked labor than pre‐BRA benchmarks. Third, at all ranks of labor, we expect a positive association between assessed ABR and levels of labor use. We find empirical evidence consistent with these propositions. We also find that total labor use in our sample is only modestly lower than pre‐BRA norms. Analysis of fee data from these engagements suggests that audit fees in 2002 are substantially less than would be expected under pre‐BRA benchmarks. After controlling for audit labor use, both total fees and fees per hour increase with assessed ABR for first‐year auditees but not for continuing auditees. Overall, our results provide evidence on the impact of the BRA audit regime and speak to the likely impact of BRA on audit effectiveness and efficiency.

The Hospital Employees' Union Strike and the Privatization of Medicare in British Columbia, Canada

AbstractIn April 2004, the Hospital Employees' Union (HEU) waged an illegal strike that mobilized sections of British Columbia's working class to the brink of a general sympathetic strike. Influenced by BC's class-polarized political culture and HEU's distinct history, the 2004 strike represents a key moment of working-class resistance to neoliberal privatization. HEU was targeted by the BC Liberal government because it represented a bastion of militant, independent unionism in a jurisdiction that appeared overripe (from the neoliberal standpoint) for a curtailment of worker rights and a retrenchment of public-sector employment. HEU also represented a direct barrier, in the language of its collective agreements and collective power of its membership, to the privatization of health services and dismantling of Medicare. The militant agency of HEU members, combined with anger generated by a constellation of social-service cutbacks, inspired rank-and-file workers and several unions to defy collective agreements and embrace sympathetic strike action. This revealed differentiation in the strategy and tactics of BC's labor leadership, and enduring sources of solidarity in labor's ranks.

Confronting American labor: the New Left dilemma

Confronting American Labor traces the development of the American Left, from the depression era through the Cold War, by examining representative intellectuals who grappled with the difficult question of labor's role in society. Since the time of Marx, leftist individuals in the West have raised time and again the question of how the intelligentsia might play a role in a movement carried out by the working class. Their modus operandi has been to champion those who suffer injustice at the hands of the powerful. From the late nineteenth through much of the twentieth century, this meant a focus on the industrial worker. Jeffrey Coker examines the ways in which leftist intellectuals confronted the labor question after 1945 through the lives and works of four individuals who represent a cross section of postwar radicalism. Each came of age on the socialist Left, expecting that an anticapitalist movement would emerge from the ranks of labor. Seymour Martin Lipset and C. Wright Mills were professional sociologists. Sidney Lens spent his early life working within the labor movement, and then became a political commentator for a variety of leftist magazines and journals in the postwar era. Historian Herbert Gutman created a new labor history that reflected broader transformations within the intellectual Left. In tracing their various approaches to the problem of labor, Confronting American Labor explores the diverse nature of the postwar Left in America. This important work will be of value to anyone interested in labor, class, and American thought.

From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class

From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class

From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class

From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class

Book Review: Historical Studies: From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class

Book Review: Historical Studies: From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class

Ben-Gurion's Diary for the 1967 Six-Day War: Introduction and Diary Excerpts

THE FOLLOWING ENTRIES TO BEN-GURION'S 1967 Diary have been divided into three sections. The first part, 18 May to 4 June, deals with political maneuvering prior to the Six-Day War that led to the appointment of Moshe Dayan, a key member in an aggressive opposition party, as Defense Minister. The second part, 5 June to io June, provides Ben-Gurion's intimate and personal perspective of the war. The third, ii June to 17 June, contains Ben-Gurion's outlines for Israeli policy in radically new circumstances. In these Diary entries, one can observe how, in less than one month, Israel was transformed from a country that perceived its survival threatened, into a secure and confident state facing choices that would shape its own future and that of its neighbors. When the Six-Day War broke out, Ben-Gurion was almost eighty years old. Although he was no longer the Prime Minister, having resigned four years earlier in June 1963, he was still a Member of Knesset and the leader of Rafi (the List of Israel Workers and Non-Partisans), a new party he formed with devoted followers drawn largely from the ranks of Labor. Nevertheless, he possessed enormous authority within both the Israeli public and a large body of political insiders, including leading politicians of other parties., Indeed, he was at the center of the opposition to Levi Eshkol, who replaced him as Prime Minister. The issues that divided them derived from diverging ideas on how to handle "the Lavon Affair," an espionage fiasco carried out in Egypt by Israeli intelligence operators in the mid-I95os. For reasons still murky, plans went awry and the spy ring was captured; the Egyptians executed two members of the spy ring and imprisoned the remainder. Several committees attempted to locate responsibility for the fiasco, but failed to reach an explicit and unambiguous decision. In the mid-I950s, public attention to the scandal began to wane. But in the early I960s, Pinhas Lavon, the Minister of Defense at the time of the operation and the person who had borne the burden of blame for the

Divisions of Labor: The Splintered Geography of Labor Markets and Movements in Industrializing America, 1790–1930

Among the various methodological prescriptions of Anthony Giddens, perhaps the most useful for labor history are his advisories on social change, on the anxieties and tensions attending a society's transition from one geographical scale to another. Labor's experience in the United States offers a case in point. The nation's transformation from a preindustrial to an industrial society entailed, in addition to the inexorables of accelerated urbanization, industrial expansion, and market extension, certain fundamental changes in the conditions of labor. Industrialization restructured the geography of labor markets, revised principles of wage determination, fomented sectarian division in the ranks of labor, and soured the relations between labor and capital. These structural changes led, in turn, to the inevitable responses of, among others, worker combination, protest, industrial violence, and a splintering in the ranks of labor.

Planted in good soil: the history of the Issei in United States agriculture

Contents: Japanese migration. Issei emigration. Issei immigration to the U.S.. Issei in ranks of labor. Issei in agriculture on the Pacific Coast. Issei in agriculture in the Intermountain states. Issei in agriculture in the Southwest. Issei in agriculture in the Midwest. Issei in agriculture in the Southeast.

Working-Class Racism: Broaden the Focus

It seems increasingly clear that the labor for much of its youth evaded questions of race. This is especially true of works on nineteenth-century class formation in the antebellum North. Many of these monographs ignored the presence of black workers, or made light of the issue of white racism, or failed to explore how the association of blacks with servitude shaped white working-class consciousness. This evasion resulted from the strenuous, all-consuming effort to escape the strait jacket of exceptionalism. To counter those who argued that American workers lacked European labor's class consciousness and revolutionary proclivities, the new labor historians assembled arguments to show just how western European American labor was. This was an important enter prise, and it recast our understanding of American labor and American capitalism. But it came at a certain price. As Nell Painter has noted, labor historians have sometimes written as though European-American work ers lived out their destinies divorced from slavery and racism, as though, say, Chartism meant more in the history of the American working class than slavery.1 A similar r??valuation is underway regarding how labor historians have addressed questions of race in relation to the great organizing drives of the 1930s. Here, the emerging criticism is not so much that historians have ignored race but that they have exaggerated the commitment of CIO unions to racial egalitarianism. The work of Joe Trotter, Robin Kelley, Robert Norrell, Bruce Nelson, Nancy Quam-Wickham, and others has given us a grim portrait of union rank and files and leaderships infested with racial prejudice and thus unable to serve as effective vehicles for racial equality.2 This critique has been applied to industrial unions North and South and to those, like the United Mine Workers, long considered to be the most progressive in labor's ranks. The historians who are unearthing working-class racism and demonstrating the pervasiveness of its influence write with a degree of passion similar to that of the scholars who, fifteen year ago, discovered how the concept of republicanism could be deployed in the service of class consciousness. This sea change in the tone and substance of labor historiography makes Michael Goldfield's piece on race and the CIO especially timely. His purpose is neither to endorse the new line of interpretation nor to defend

The Uses and Abuses of Measuring Productivity

A year ago in this space we analyzed the spurious nature of the alarms over what has been happening to U.S. productivity ("Productivity Slowdown: A False Alarm," MR, June 1979). Since then there has been no letup in the beating of the drums. It is now widely taken for granted, even within the ranks of labor, that productivity has in fact been declining and that this supposed decline is at the root of most of our economic ills. At the same time what is becoming increasingly clear is that the incessant propaganda around this question is being used to attack labor: to justify turning the clock back on conditions in the workplace.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Disunity and Unity of the Working Class: Reply to Piven and Cloward

Our article, Mobilizing the Poor: Road to a Dead End (Social Problems, December, 1978), was an examination of the conclusions drawn by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward from their analysis of poor people's movements. They maintain that the most effective strategy available to the poor today for improving their condition' is independent mobilization and the use of disruptive tactics. We argue that (1) independent activities of poor people will fail to improve their status significantly and (2) substantial improvement in their status is most likely to be achieved as a result of certain kinds of activity within organized labor. In their response Piven and Cloward assert that our assessment of their work and our alternative strategy are merely reiterations of doctrinal injunctions by left-intellectuals who are disappointed with historical developments in the class struggle; that we ignore the gains and longrange implications of various 20th century mass movements; that the blacklash induced by several of these movements was an unavoidable by-product of necessary tactics; and that we have ignored realities in the situation of organized labor which do not augur a turn to the left. More generally, they claim that we misrepresent their work. The essential issue2 on which we are divided is what course of action, based on historical experience, can be recommended to that small number of activists who are committed to achieving progressive social change? Where should they concentrate their work, and what should they do to maximize results and to increase their strength? Mass movements for social change have not originated in the ranks of labor since the 1930s, nor has organized labor been eager to support such movements. Blacks, women, welfare clients, and other deprived people have all organized to improve their lot. One certainly can't blame them: they are among those who have the least share of the fruits of American society.3 And there is nothing in orthodox Marxist theory to suggest that such groups won't or shouldn't assert a claim on society. What Marxist theory indicates and we believe experience shows, is that these groups lack the social power possessed by organized labor to achieve the change they seek. This power is not at their disposal for a number of reasons such as: the demands of the oppressed often appear to threaten the employed working class; the oppressed write off the possibility of an alliance with organized labor; the existing institutional patterns referred to by Piven and Cloward. Whatever the reasons, the consequence is a turn to the group with the power to grant concessions-the capitalist class. Of necessity these concessions are limited in scope and duration and granted largely at the expense of the organized working class.

J. T. Lang and the Depression

In the closing months of 1929 a severe economic depression had suddenly interrupted Australia's upward spiral of prosperity, when following severe economic collapses overseas, the export price of Australia's primary products had slumped and Australia's credit in London had collapsed. Australia had been interrupted in the midst of very liberal overseas spending and as the depression increased in depth and duration, it became difficult for either Labor or its oppon ents to discern any new expansive force which would lift the economic system into renewed prosperity. One should not under-estimate the psychological aspects in volved, for the whole community reacted tensely to the alteration in its living standards, whilst the working class, possessing the least economic resistance, began a long period of distress.1 The ordinary citizen, who in normal times was apathetic towards politics, found that as his anxiety grew, he was torn between impatience for action and apprehension of the results of such action. With the economic system faltering, he was afraid of anything revolutionary, for that could lead to chaos. All he wished was for sufficient adjustment to restore the system to normal working order and free him from anxiety. Both Scullin and Theodore had realised the economic position from the inception of their ministry and this was a major reason why they wished the New South Wales dispute on the northern coalfields to end. Lang, too, as a business man, could not have failed to realise the gravity of the situation, but he was unwilling to relinquish either his personal role in Party factional conflict or his personal campaign against Theodore. For months prior to his return to office in November 1930, he was at pains to emphasize that he was opposed to Theodore's handling of the economic situation.2 Theodore was handling very tactfully a difficult political situation, for not only was the Scullin government at variance with the orthodox Sir Robert Gibson, Governor of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, but it faced a hostile Senate. There was also the conservative nature of public opinion to be considered, as the restoration of public confid ence was a major factor in recovery. The obligation was upon Lang to aid the Federal government to restore confidence, and to consult with it closely, in order that Labor might speak with one voice. This was an occasion when solidarity could have proved its worth and a united Labor could have given leadership, whilst increasing its own stature. This much Lang owed to his own supporters, but he indicated that Theodore's measures were conservative and he failed to accept the responsibility of attempting to consolidate Labor's ranks in their interests and to minimise internal factional conflict.

Politics and Religion in the Italian Labor Movement

To citizens of other democratic nations, the increasing opposition to communism by the Italian people is a heartening development. The struggle against communism in Italy is being fought in the ranks of labor as well as in the national political arena. John Norman examines the forces involved in this struggle--the Communists, Socialists, the Catholic Church, American labor leaders, the ECA program--as they have influenced the organization and character of the Italian labor movement. (Author's abstract courtesy EBSCO.)

The Legend of Joe Hill

Reports on the use of the legend of Joe Hill to boost the morale of members of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Creation of a responsive chord among the ordinary workers; Maintenance of solidarity in the ranks of labor during periods of stress; Influence of the legend on the labor relations history. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)

The Split in the CIO; Western European Economic Integration; Two Voices; Quiz Program

One week after the Cleveland phase of the civil war in the CIO was ended, a Congressional subcommittee made public a report on "Low-Income Families and Economic Stability." The tragedy of the split in the ranks of labor was underlined in the income figures: More than 8,000,000 families and single individuals in the United States received less than $1000 cash income in 1948. That's less than $20 a week.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Labor Market and Its Regulation

increasingly dependent on international economic conditions. This may be seen from Table 1, which, in showing the distribution of the population by occupational groups, demonstrates the growth in industry and handicrafts, trade and transportation, as sources for the maintenance of the people, and a corresponding relative decline of agriculture and silviculture. To the extent that industry has come to take a more prominent place in the economy, the labor market has become more and more dependent on economic fluctuations. The temporary dislocations in the economy produced by changes in seasonal demand, but primarily by the business cycle, make it necessary not only to devise means of unemployment relief, but also to organize, in the best manner possible, ways and means to place workers in available jobs. As a result of the growing complexity in economic life and a diversity and expansion of the labor market, people are in many instances unemployed because they are not acquainted with available work opportunities, and are not in a position to move to a locality where vacancies may exist. The problem does not touch only the workers who have alre dy joined the ranks of labor, but even the youth who for the first time are seeking jobs.