Single Work Research Articles

Lean HRM practices in work integration social enterprises: Moving towards social lean production. Evidence from Italian case studies*

AbstractLean production human resource management (HRM) practices, which are deemed to increase firms’ competitiveness through a skilled and empowered workforce, have arisen in the context of for‐profit companies. The same attention to lean HRM practices has not been paid in non‐profit organizations. In turn, few studies have looked into the adoption of for‐profit HRM practices within such organizations or focused on single practices and ordinary workers. Within this research, dichotomous positions between advocates and opponents have emerged, but with an underlying universalistic perspective considering HRM practices as detached from context. We consider HRM practices as context dependent and conduct a new study concerning lean production HRM practices in work integration social enterprises (WISEs), a particular type of NPO and social enterprise that focuses on building employability and jobs for vulnerable workers. We rely on three case studies involving multiple actors. Our exploratory results suggest that WISEs realize social lean production. They implement lean HRM practices by adapting them to their specific context and integrating both social and economic goals.

A new approach for ergonomic risk assessment integrating KEMIRA, best–worst and MCDM methods

In this study, a new three-phase ergonomic risk assessment approach was proposed for manual lifting tasks to determine which worker has the highest ergonomic risk level considering two criteria sets as lifting-related criteria and human-related criteria. In the first phase, Modified Kemeny Median Indicator Ranks Accordance (KEMIRA-M) and a novel two-dimensional best–worst method (BWM) integration were proposed for weighting ergonomic risk criteria in two sets. In this way, weighting procedure of KEMIRA-M was advanced by the proposed two-dimensional BWM in a consistent manner and subjectivity in determining the best and the worst criteria in traditional BMW was prevented by using KEMIRA-M. Thus, the weaknesses of both methods have been developed. In the second phase, the rankings of workers were determined via utilizing multi-objective optimization on the basis of simple ratio analysis, multi-objective optimization by ratio analysis (MOORA) ratio, MOORA reference point and complex proportional assessment to see how worker rankings differ despite using the same advanced weighting approach based on KEMIRA-M and two-dimensional BWM integration. Finally, to aggregate these different ranking results, technique of precise order preference was applied. In this way, different viewpoints of each ranking approach can be reflected on a single worker’s priority. The applicability of the proposed ergonomic risk assessment approach was demonstrated with a real application in tube manufacturing.

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF LEGAL POLITICS IN RELATION TO THE GOVERNMENT'S FUNCTION IN DETERMINING WORKER'S WAGES IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE AND THE PRINCIPLE OF LEGAL CERTAINTY

Wage system need to be developed by taking into account the balance between work performance or productivity, workers needs and company capabilities. The formulations of the problem, how the implementation of the legal politics related to the functions of government in the aplication of workers wages in the perspective of the principles of justice and the principle of justice and the principle of legal certainty. Research methods using normative judicial methods and analytical descriptive approaches and analyzed qualitatively. The conclusion is the based on Law Number 13 of 2003 Concerning Emploiment, that income that meets a decent income is intended for workers and their families, whereas in The Minister of Labor and Transmigration on Regulation Number-PER- 13/MEN/VII/2012, the need for a decent living is only intended only for workers or single workers.

Highlighting the Elusive: New Findings and a Redescription of the Rare Ant Leptanilla plutonia López, Martínez Et Barandica, 1994, Presenting Morphological Novelties for the Genus

LeptanillaEmery, 1870 includes 47 species of strictly endogean ants, distributed through Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia, characterized by many peculiarities, such as their tiny size (between 1.0–2.5 mm long), lack of pigmentation, lack of eyes and very narrow elongate bodies. Queens are apterous and dichthadiigynes. Males have wings and eyes. Their lifestyles remain virtually unknown. The Western Mediterranean region hosts a high diversity, with 9 species in north Africa and 5 in the Iberian Peninsula. Recent sampling in Central Spain (Tortuero, Guadalajara province) led to the discovery of a colony of a large-sized Leptanilla species. This population can be assigned to L. plutonia, a species known from a single worker (the holotype) until now, easily distinguished from other Iberian species by its large size. These specimens allowed for a redescription of the species, also giving the first insights into its intraspecific variability and morphological structures not mentioned in the original description, such as the presence of a secondary labrum, large apodemes in the postpetiole or a promesosternal keel, among others. The distribution range of the species is also increased, being cited for the first time outside of the type locality. An identification key to the large-sized Leptanilla species from Western Mediterranean region is provided.

Tracking multiple construction workers through deep learning and the gradient based method with re-matching based on multi-object tracking accuracy

Multiple construction worker tracking is an active research area critical to the planning of the job site. Challenges in multiple construction worker tracking include miss detection and mismatch due to occlusion and identity switches. To the best knowledge of the authors, the mismatch is not reported in the literature of construction for image based single camera multiple worker tracking. As a result, the mismatch should be taken into account through a representative performance index such as the Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA). This work aims to improve the performance of the current multiple worker tracking through an approach composed of three stages: detection, matching and re-matching. In the detection stage, the deep learning detector, Mask R-CNN, is utilized. In the matching stage, we attempt to track workers between consecutive image frames through a gradient based method with feature based comparison. Several cost means and matching methods have been experimented for model selection. Trajectories of tracking objects are derived in this stage. The best cost measurements and matching methods are recommended. Trajectories of tracking objects could be interrupted because of miss detection or mismatch. We call those broken trajectories, without matched detections, orphans. In the re-matching stage, we attempt to recover unmatched detections in the current frame with previous orphans based on extracted features. A competitive MOTA of 56.7% was obtained from the proposed approach over MOTA of 55.9% from the state-of-the-art Detect-And-Track model on a human tracking benchmark dataset. On construction job sites, we have tested the approach with 4 testing videos, resulting in a total MOTA of 81.8%, average MOTA per video of 79.0% and standard deviation of 13.0%, while the maximum and minimum MOTAs are 96.0% and 69.0%, respectively. As a result, the proposed work could potentially provide better multiple worker tracking on the construction job site. Additionally, to have a better representation of the tracking errors, this work suggests to utilize the MOTA for multiple construction worker tracking.

Emergency department ‘outbreak rostering’ to meet challenges of COVID-19

The COVID-19 outbreak has posed unique challenges to the emergency department rostering. Additional infection control, the possibility of quarantine of staff and minimising contact among staff have significant impact on...

Label similarity-based weighted soft majority voting and pairing for crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing services provide an efficient and relatively inexpensive approach to obtain substantial amounts of labeled data by employing crowd workers. It is obvious that the labeling qualities of crowd workers directly affect the quality of the labeled data. However, existing label aggregation strategies seldom consider the differences in the quality of workers labeling different instances. In this paper, we argue that a single worker may even have different labeling qualities on different instances. Based on this premise, we propose four new strategies by assigning different weights to workers when labeling different instances. In our proposed strategies, we first use the similarity among worker labels to estimate the specific quality of the worker on different instances, and then we build a classifier to estimate the overall quality of the worker across all instances. Finally, we combine these two qualities to define the weight of the worker labeling a particular instance. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed strategies significantly outperform other existing state-of-the-art label aggregation strategies.

A Deep Learning-Based Model for the Automated Assessment of the Activity of a Single Worker.

Nowadays, it is necessary to verify the accuracy of servicing work, undertaken by new employees, within a manufacturing company. A gap in the research has been observed in effective methods to automatically evaluate the work of a newly employed worker. The main purpose of the study is to build a new, deep learning model, in order to automatically assess the activity of the single worker. The proposed approach integrates the methods known as CNN, CNN + SVM, CNN + R-CNN, four new algorithms and a piece of work from a selected company, using this as an own-created dataset, in order to create a solution enabling assessment of the activity of single workers. Data were collected from an operational manufacturing cell without any guided or scripted work. The results reveal that the model developed is able to accurately detect the correctness of the work process. The model’s accuracy mostly exceeds current state-of-the-art methods for detecting work activities in manufacturing. The proposed two-stage approach, firstly, assigning the appropriate graphic instruction to a given employee’s activity using CNN and then using R-CNN to isolate the object from the reference frames, yields 94.01% and 73.15% accuracy of identification, respectively.

The Influence of Peers in Worker Misconduct: Evidence from Restaurant Theft

Problem definition: Misconduct, such as theft, is a major problem in operational settings, and staffing decisions can either amplify or mitigate this problem as workers influence their peers’ behavior. Peers are known to influence coworker productivity and likely also affect counterproductive behaviors. Academic/practical relevance: Many studies have shown how mechanisms such as helping, knowledge transfer, teaching, and social pressure generate productivity peer effects in service and other settings. Yet few papers empirically examine these effects in counterproductive behaviors. We argue that while the same mechanisms driving productivity spillovers also generate peer effects in misconduct, an additional effect—strategic peer response—reflects how coworkers, under managerial monitoring, adjust misconduct in response to peers’ daily behavior. An additional contribution of this paper is to identify the effect of peers on operational performance in a firm setting. Methodology: We use transaction and theft data from 83,153 servers at 1,049 restaurants across 46 states in the United States. We employ instrumental variable (IV) models to account for both reflection problems and correlated error terms in same-day peer theft. We use Monte Carlo simulations to present how biases identified by a combination of ordinary least squares (OLS) and IV models suggest that managerial oversight might generate negative correlation in the same-day error terms of peers that reflects strategic peer responses. Results: Our results show that although servers are more likely to steal when working with high-theft peers, they steal less as peers steal more on a given day. We also show that this negative correlation in daily peer theft is higher under an information technology system that increases managerial oversight by reporting likely theft to managers. Importantly, we demonstrate how reflection effects can significantly amplify even small peer-effect coefficients to have large organizational implications. Our parameter estimates indicate that doubling a single worker’s average theft amount will increase total theft in an average restaurant by 76%. Doubling all workers’ theft amounts increases totals by 550%. Finally, we show that the positive peer effect from high-theft coworkers only exists for new workers in their first three to five months on the job, consistent with imprinting mechanisms that include knowledge transfer and norms. Managerial implications: The results show that the costs of employing unethical workers is higher than the direct cost of those workers’ misconduct because their behavior spills over into coworkers’ actions and amplifies through reflection effects. Yet our results also suggest that this contagion can be mitigated by managerial oversight. So long as there is sufficient monitoring of misconduct, workers will strategically limit such behavior in response to peers.

Modern Womanhood, the Ideology of the Housewife, and Young Female Rural–Urban Migrants in the 1960s and 1970s in South Korea

This paper attempts to clarify how young female rural–urban migrant workers were positioned within the ideology of the housewife as a form of modern womanhood, which was regulated by the developmental state as part of the modern nation-state building in the 1960s and 1970s in South Korea, by analyzing media discourses on the mobility, space and labor of single female workers. First, within the ideology of the housewife, in which women were required to settle down in the private sphere away from the main breadwinners after the Korean War, the mobility of young rural girls was depicted as ‘unsettled’ and ‘unstable’ and thus was socially deviant relative to the ‘settled’ and ‘cared for’ women in the private sphere. Second, the working space as well as the residential space for single female workers was illustrated as a loss of control of their bodies and sexuality under the normative ideology of the housewife, which led to the idealization of the institution of marriage as the final savior for single female workers. Finally, under the patriarchal system and the redefinition of women’s labor in the developmental state based upon familism, the labor by single female workers was ‘housewifized’ either as ‘filial piety’ or a ‘natural duty’ to the family as well as to the motherland.

Optimization of RSA encryption and decryption process with distributed computing method

Mathematics equation of the RSA is the complicated one between the other asymmetric encryption methods. It makes the RSA method needs more resources than the others. Most existing studies are trying to make another encryption method that need less computational resources, but it is less secure than using the RSA algorithm. In this paper, we proposed the Distributed Computing method to accommodate the limited computing resources in a single worker. We will distribute the computational process of RSA encryption and decryption to numerous workers. The test results showed that the implementation of Distributed Computing method made the encryption and decryption process finished faster. In conclusion, it increased completion time, made the encrypted data serve faster, and maximized the computational resources.

Time biases: exploring the work–life balance of single Nigerian managers and professionals

PurposeThis study investigates the overarching ideology of work–life balance (WLB) or conflict as predominantly being a work–family affair. Based on a Nigerian study, and using organisational justice as a theoretical lens, it explores perceived fairness in accessing family-friendly policies by managers and professionals who are single and do not have children – a workgroup conventionally ignored in research on WLB.Design/methodology/approachRelying on an interpretivist approach, the data set comprises of interviews with 24 bank managers and 20 medical doctors working in Nigeria.FindingsThe authors’ findings highlight employers' misconceptions concerning the non-work preferences and commitments of singles as well as an undervaluation by employers of their non-work time. Conceptualised as “time biases”, such time is routinely invaded by the organisation, with profound implications for perceptions of fairness. This fosters backlash behaviours with potential detrimental effects in terms of organisational effectiveness.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is limited to investigating the WLB of singles in high-status roles, namely banking and medical careers. Future research may examine the experiences of a more diverse range of occupations. The sample comprises heterosexual, never-married professionals, whose experiences may differ from other categories of single workers, such as childless divorced people, widows, non-heterosexual singles and partners who have no children.Practical implicationsIn order to avoid counterproductive behaviours in the workplace, WLB policies should not only focus on those with childcare concerns. Inclusive work–life policies for other household structures, such as single-persons, are necessary for improving overall organisational well-being.Originality/valueThe majority of WLB studies have been undertaken in Western and Asian contexts, to the neglect of the Sub-Saharan African experience. Additionally, research tends to focus on WLB issues on the part of working parents, overlooking the difficulties faced by singles.

Short Term Maintenance Tasks Scheduling with Pinch Methodology

Careful assets maintenance planning is crucial in ensuring minimal process interruptions in a chemical plant while fulfilling production demand. This paper aims to propose a systematic framework with easily comprehensible tools for effective and efficient maintenance optimisation. The first step is to identify the optimal maintenance time for the equipment depending on their failure time distributions, minimising the expected maintenance cost. A maintenance tasks clustering model is then formulated for grouping individual preventive maintenance actions, to save the production downtime and cost. The solutions from long-term planning are transferred to the short-term planning model for detailed manpower scheduling. In this work, Pinch Analysis is selected as the targeting tool to maximise the available manpower utilisation and target the extra working hours needed. The daily maintenance tasks are formulated as the ‘Demand/Sink’, while the workers’ shifts are the ‘Supply/Source’. This method not only provides excellent visualisation of the problem/results, it also enables tuneable workers’ daily schedules, tasks delay and the required earliest finished date of a task. A case study of a chemical plant, namely the Tennessee Eastman problem is used to elucidate the proposed approach. The results show that extra 22 h are needed for 8 h shift (5 d/week) for a single worker, but extra 13 h for 12 h shift (4 d/week).

The ghost factories: histories of automata and artificial life

Historically, automata had always relied on a trick; and they’re still playing it. Imagine a factory. On the shop floor stands a single worker – a young girl. Surrounding her are the hulking frames...

Initial Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on the Employment and Hours of Self-Employed Coupled and Single Workers by Gender and Parental Status

This study examines the initial impact of COVID-19 shutdowns on the employment and hours of unincorporated self-employed workers using data from the Current Population Survey. Although the shutdowns decreased employment and hours for all groups, differential effects by gender, couple status, and parental status exist. Coupled women were less likely to be working than coupled men, while single women were more likely to be working than single men. However, fathers of school-age children who remained employed were working reduced hours compared to men without children. Remote work mitigated some of the negative effects on employment and hours.

Efficacy of the InvictDetectTM Immunostrip® to Taxonomically Identify the Red Imported Fire Ant, Solenopsis invicta, Using a Single Worker Ant.

The early detection and identification of the red imported fire ant Solenopsis invicta are crucial to intercepting and preventing it from becoming established in new areas. Unfortunately, the visual identification of fire ants to species is difficult and ant samples must often be couriered to an expert for positive identification, which can delay control interventions. A lateral flow immunoassay that provides a rapid and portable method for the identification of S. invicta ants was developed and commercialized, and it is available from Agdia, Inc. under the trade name InvictDetectTM. While the test was 100% accurate when using the recommended minimum sample of three ant workers, InvictDetectTM was field tested for the first time while using homogenates prepared from single S. invicta workers to determine the effectiveness of the method under these non-recommended conditions. Disregarding social form, the false negative rate was 25.5% for an initial single worker ant test and 10% after a repeat test was performed. The InvictDetectTM false negative response was independent of worker weight. Though InvictDetectTM requires a minimum of three worker ants, the test improves upon current identification methods because it can be conducted in the field, be completed in 10–30 min, and requires no special training or expertise.

Reforms to Earnings Supplement Programs in British Columbia:Making Work Pay for Low-Income Workers

Some individuals work nearly full-time and most-year at low wages but remain poor. An effective way to assist the “working poor” is to supplement their earnings, which lifts them from poverty by rewarding their work. This paper explores how an earnings supplement program for British Columbia could serve this goal. Through quantitative simulations we explore alternative approaches, such as a cost-neutral reconfiguration of the federal Canada Workers Benefit and a provincial top-up to the CWB. These exercises provide insight into the trade-offs in benefits, costs, and poverty impacts of varying the structure and parameters of programs focused on B.C. We find that a cost-neutral reconfiguration of the CWB for B.C. has limited impact on poverty rates for childless singles, while increasing poverty rates for other family types. In contrast, a combination of CWB reconfiguration with a provincial CWB top-up targeted at low-earning childless single workers could significantly improve outcomes for that group. At a cost to the province of $400 million, this scheme could reduce the numbers of such workers in poverty by 18,000 while raising the incomes of many more of the working poor. Such a program could be administered simply by the Canada Revenue Agency as an add-on to the CWB.

Apache Spark Accelerated Deep Learning Inference for Large Scale Satellite Image Analytics

The shear volumes of data generated from earth observation and remote sensing technologies continue to make major impact; leaping key geospatial applications into the dual data and compute-intensive era. As a consequence, this rapid advancement poses new computational and data processing challenges. We implement a novel remote sensing data flow (RESFlow) for advancing machine learning to compute with massive amounts of remotely sensed imagery. The core contribution is partitioning massive amounts of data into homogeneous distributions for fitting simple models. RESFlow takes advantage of Apache Spark and the availability of modern computing hardware to harness the acceleration of deep learning inference on expansive remote sensing imagery. The framework incorporates a strategy to optimize resource utilization across multiple executors assigned to a single worker. We showcase its deployment in both computationally and data-intensive workloads for pixel-level labeling tasks. The pipeline invokes deep learning inference at three stages; during deep feature extraction, deep metric mapping, and deep semantic segmentation. The tasks impose compute-intensive and GPU resource sharing challenges motivating for a parallelized pipeline for all execution steps. To address the problem of hardware resource contention, our containerized workflow further incorporates a novel GPU checkout routine and the ticketing system across multiple workers. The workflow is demonstrated with NVIDIA DGX accelerated platforms and offers appreciable compute speed-ups for deep learning inference on pixel labeling workloads; processing 21 028 TB of imagery data and delivering output maps at area rate of 5.245 sq.km/s, amounting to 453 168 sq.km/day—reducing a 28 day workload to 21 h.

Real Wages of Lithuanian Construction Workers from 1913 to 1939 (Measured in Subsistence and Welfare Ratios) in a Cross-National Comparison

This article provides two comparisons: (1) a cross-time comparison of real wages of skilled and unskilled workers in Kaunas before the First World War and during the interwar period; and (2) a cross-national quantitative comparison of the wages of unskilled workers in Kaunas and the capital cities of most European countries during the same period. For the second comparison, we use the findings of researchers who applied Robert C. Allen’s methodology of real wage estimation. In this methodology, the wages of unskilled construction workers (known in interwar Lithuania as zimagoras) are used as proxies for the wages of unskilled urban workers, and those of construction site carpenters provide a sample for skilled workers’ wages. Real wages are measured in subsistence and welfare ratios, indicating the distances separating the purchasing power of wages from the subsistence level of a single worker (subsistence ratio = 1 meaning absolute poverty) or his family (welfare ratio = 1 meaning absolute poverty). Subsistence or absolute poverty levels are defined by regionally adjusted (to variations in survival needs) minimum consumption baskets. The main findings are: (1) although during the first decade of independence (in the 1920s) the real wages of unskilled construction workers in Kaunas were lower than in 1913, by 1938 they had markedly surpassed the pre-First World War level; (2) in no year with available data did the real wages of unskilled construction workers in Kaunas fall below the absolute poverty level; (3) the real wages of skilled construction workers in Kaunas had markedly surpassed the pre-First World War level even before the Great Depression in the early 1930s, and remained above this level even in the worst years of the depression; (4) the real wages of skilled and unskilled construction workers in Kaunas in 1913 were no lower than in metropolitan centres of the Russian Empire; (5) in the period 1927 to 1929, the wages of unskilled construction workers in Kaunas were lower than in Moscow, but largely surpassed Russian wages in the 1930s, when Stalin’s policy of industrialisation forced them below the subsistence level; (6) the real wages of unskilled construction workers in Kaunas in the 1930s surpassed those in Riga and Tallinn. While this finding is surprising, it concurs with earlier (2007) findings by Gediminas Vaskela, who compared the mean wages of workers and employees in the Baltic countries in the period 1938 to 1940.

More than just breadwinners: how Chinese male migrant workers’ family relationships shape their factory labour process

ABSTRACT Labour scholars have carefully examined how being daughters, wives, and mothers influences women’s labour process. In contrast, labour studies on men have rarely considered their family involvement except for being the breadwinners. Based on an ethnographic study on rural migrant workers in a Chinese factory, this article presents more complex work-family mechanisms for male workers. First, the married male migrant workers expressed deep family commitment. Shouldering family responsibilities made them more labour conservative, not only because they prioritized having a stable income but also because they empathized with the family obligations of married managers. However, the same family value could also lead to labour resistance when it was disrespected by the management. Second, the parents and relatives of single young male migrant workers played crucial roles in directing them to factories and made it difficult for them to resist unpleasant working conditions or leave. And the anticipation of future marriage further shaped the young male migrant workers’ labour practices. This article contributes to labour studies by demonstrating the indispensability of family to the analysis of male workers’ labour practices. It also challenges the gender stereotypes of male breadwinner/female caregiver and presents working-class men as being deeply embedded in family lives.