Senior Workers Research Articles

Managing Unemployment: The Role of Union Business Agents and the Use of Work Sharing

When work sharing was proposed in the United States in the early 1930s, unions rejected the idea as “misery sharing.” Forty years later, California unions overwhelmingly accepted a short-time program known as Shared Work Unemployment Insurance, in spite of its conflict with the seniority provisions of labor contracts. This paper examines the role of union business agents in the decision to use the California program. Using agents' reports of program acceptance and rejection, I conclude that workers accept work sharing because they face labor cutbacks under duress, and because agents play an important role in flexibly administering seniority rules. But workers reject the program when senior workers rely heavily upon full-time earnings or believe management to be acting in bad faith. I also find that, although agents and workers may have diverging interests, when it comes to unemployment, their interests are similar and they share a similar fate.

Wage and Employment Structure in an Economy with Internal Labor Markets

The paper discusses the economics of promotion and, in particular, studies wage and employment structure in an economy with internal labor markets. It is shown—under a wide range of assumptions—that firms will set a nondecreasing wage profile that, for reasons apparently not suggested before, both junior and senior workers may be paid more or less than their marginal product, and that firms will offer a flat wage schedule if labor hours are supplied perfectly inelastically.

Length of Service and Layoffs in Union and Nonunion Work Groups

This paper presents survey evidence from about 200 firms that protection against job loss grows with employees' length of service even after controlling for the perceived net value of employees to the firm. As would be expected, senior workers are better protected against permanent layoff in union than in nonunion firms, but even in the absence of unionism, longer service generally translates into extra protection. Among the private sector hourly work units outside of agriculture and construction represented in the authors' survey, seniority led to additional protection against job loss in 97 percent of groups covered by a union contract and in 86 percent of uncovered groups. Importantly, however, the extra protection was considerably stronger in the average union group than in the average nonunion group.

Sister chromatid exchange frequency in workers exposed to high levels of ethylene oxide, in a hospital sterilization service.

Blood samples were taken from a group of 25 subjects professionally exposed to high levels of ethylene oxide (EO) during the past two years; the samples were compared to those from 22 control subjects, using sister chromatid exchange (SCE) methodology. The quantity of ethylene oxide inhaled during the two previous years was subsequently evaluated to fall between 500 and 5800 mg. When compared with the control group, the exposed group demonstrated a significant increase in the SCE rate. For certain individuals, the rate of increase rose 100% beyond the control mean. Smoking habits significantly influenced the data observed for the control group, but no significant differences in the SCE rate were found for the exposed group, regardless of smoking habits. Senior workers had the highest SCE mean levels. This observation indicated that the effect of exposure to EO was sufficient to produce a genetic reaction, was cumulative and in some cases persistent.

Wages and Employment with Firm-Specific Seniority

We examine wages and employment for junior and senior workers when seniority is firm-specific. We show that if workers are risk averse, the firm chooses both the junior and senior wage independently of the wage offers received by its workers from other firms. Junior workers are paid less than the value of their marginal product and senior workers are paid more. If the firm can monitor its workers' outside offers, it will choose to lay off workers with good offers, but which, nevertheless, may not be so good as its own senior wage.

A place in the sun for the disabled: so that they may also live. A perspective on I.Y.D.P.

A disabled child is considered as a punishment for past errors or wrong on part of the parents in many societies. Misinformation on such matters is not limited only to poorly educated people but also among senior government officials and professional workers. Thus, persons il!served by fate have also been illserved by society. Surrounded as they are by mystery, living as they do a secluded life, the disabled experience a double loneliness. A 'brick wall', as Helen Keller so neatly termed it, cuts them off from real life and the society of 'normal' people 1

La recherche appliquée: le cas du « Katholiek Sociaal Kerkelijk Instituut (KASKI) » aux Pays-Bas

Following Vatican II changes are rapidly taking place within Dutch Catholicism — the bishops no longer make decisions in an authoritarian way: religious practice is de clining ; priests and religious are decreasing in numbers and many religious and pastoral experiments have come into being. KASKI has the responsibility of keeping pace with the Church during this process of change. In order to do this it makes use of several modes of work — the production of statistics relating to the position of religion in Society, the planning of religious and pastoral institutions and the study of new forms of the religious life in orders and congregations. For the first task it has used the same instruments for twenty- five years and the censuses thus produced yield valuable infor mation. As far as pastoral planning is concerned, it works in the field, playing the role of catalyst for those who have to make decisions and the people who have to carry out these decisions. This was the case, for instance, in the pastoral planning of the town of Eindhoven. Finally, when dealing with the new forms of communal religious life it adopts the method of studying through participation so that two of its researchers working in this sector are themselves members of religious groups. Applied research poses important problems, both from the methodological and from the political points of view. Amongst them may be noted the difficulty of determining precisely what constitutes rapid change in religious life, and the political choice of the persons for whom the research is being con ducted; the latter inevitably imposes a certain degree of conformity upon the perspectives of the work. (For example, the choice of the Dutch hierarchy which was to follow the general lines given by a large majority of Catholic opinion when it was tested particularly on questions like the liturgical and parochial changes). The fact, also, that the director of KASKI himself has a personal commitment to what may be described as the « right of centre » position in Dutch Catho licism poses problems for the work of the Institute. Political and religious radicalism is not a strong characteristic of the more senior research workers. KASKI is a rare example of a centre which brings socio logists together and uses their professional competence to accompany change in religious institutions.

Operations Research in Perspective

*MORSE, our first president, called in 1953 for increased attention to analytical techniques and their applications, to experiments in operations research, and to education for new operations research workers. [' ORINEHART, after drawing attention to the need for professional standards and for ethics in practice, warned against overenthusiastic selling of the promise of operations research.[2] *STEINHARDT spoke of the need for expansion of operations research into industry and into government outside the military departments. 3] *BROTHERS, in calling for increased educational opportunities for future operations-research workers, stressed three devices: academic leave for senior workers, interchange arrangements between universities and operations-research groups, and similar cooperative arrangements for graduate students. [3 *ACKOFF described the opportunities for operations research in national planning, particularly in underdeveloped countries, and recommended steps to seize them.15] oKoOPMAN urged operations-research work in the spirit of science (as quoted in Lathrop[71). oLATHROP called for more scientific work in the spirit of operations.I71 *HITCH discussed the difficulties of handling uncertainties in operations research and urged an increased recognition of the impact of uncertainty on operations research and system studies. 13 *ERNST discussed the difficulties we face in tackling large strategic problems and urged progress toward conquering them. [] *And FLOOD, after sketching several challenging new areas that present opportunities for operations-research workers, called for cooperation between them and other specialists who can contribute to effective work in these new areas.1101

Labor as a Quasi-Fixed Factor

T HE cyclical behavior of labor markets reveals a number of puzzling features for which there are no truly satisfying explanations. Included among these are (1) occupational differences in the stability of employment and earnings, (2) the uneven incidence of unemployment, (3) the persistence of differential labor turnover rates, and (4) discriminatory hiring and firing policies. I believe that the major impediment to rational explanations for these phenomena lies in the classical treatment of labor as a purely variable factor. In this paper I propose a short-run theory of employment which rests on the premise that labor is a quasi-fixed factor. The fixed employment costs arise from investments by firms in hiring and training activities. The theory of labor as a quasi-fixed factor is developed in Part I. In Part II, the implications of this theory are subjected to various empirical tests. Finally, Part III turns to an examination of alternative theories and an extension of my theory to a theory of occupational wage differentials. The concept of labor as a quasi-fixed factor is, in my opinion, the relevant one for a short-run theory of employment. Its implications are amenable to empirical verification and are, in the main,

Twenty Years of Seed Research at Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research

For more than twenty years workers at the Boyce Thompson Institute at Yonkers, New York, have been publishing papers on the factors influencing the germination and continued viability of seeds. Their investigations have been not only of academic interest, but also of practical significance to people who produce, market, and sow seeds ; and presumably it has been with this in mind that two of the senior workers concerned have now written a very brief summary of the Institute‘s work in this field. Farmers, gardeners and seedsmen will find this book giving, with a minimum of scientific terminology, confirmation, explanation and extension of much that they have discovered and guessed, and also some suggestive new facts. Twenty Years of Seed Research at Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research By Lela V. Barton William Crocker. Pp. 148 + 22 plates. (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1948.) 21s. net.

Research Fellowships at British Universities

THE directors of Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., have offered to provide eighty fellowships at nine universities in Great Britain, to be held by senior workers in certain sciences. The scheme is announced to operate for an initial period of seven years, and the fellowships will be of the average value of £600 a year, though the universities will have power to determine the emolument for each particular appointment. The subjects to which the fellowships are to be devoted are laid down as physics, chemistry and the sciences dependent thereon, including chemotherapy. The administration of the scheme rests wholly with the universities, which will select and appoint the fellows, subject only to such conditions as to duties and tenure as the universities themselves impose. No conditions whatever are attached by I.C.I, to the tenure of these fellowships. The fellows will be members of the university staffs, and will be concerned only with the duties laid upon them by the universities. Their primary work will lie in research; but they must also take some part in university teaching. It is intended not to relieve the universities from the cost of maintaining any part of their normal work, but to enable them to add to what they already do. The universities to which this offer has been made comprise the larger metropolitan universities and those which have a close geographical relation to the main centres of the Company's production. Twelve fellowships have been offered to the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London, eight to the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool and four to the University of Durham.

Developments in Agricultural Research

THE extended field of activity and additional financial resources which have recently been granted by the Government to the Agricultural Research Council have opened the door to new developments in this branch of applied science. A large part of the Council's activities will still be devoted to co–ordinating, and advising on, the work of the various research institutes to which the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and the Department of Agriculture for Scotland are making maintenance grants, and to furthering the interests of these institutes in every possible way; but it is the Council's intention to devote some part of the funds to be expended at its own discretion, for which it is answerable to the Lord President of the Council, to the furtherance of agricultural research in university departments, and to the enlargement of its own scientific staff. It is, in particular, the Council's desire to encourage both senior and junior research workers in the biological sciences to enter the agricultural field. In pursuance of this policy, the Council has established two new research units under its direct control, a Unit of Animal Physiology, and a Unit of Soil Enzyme Chemistry.