Steady Job Research Articles

Understanding Job Quality in an Era of Structural Change: What Can Economics Learn from Industrial Relations?

Several decades of economic restructuring have produced fundamental changes in the way is organized in the United States and other industrialized countries. Dramatic changes have occurred in almost every facet of the experience including hiring and firing policies, promotion, training, and labor-management relations. The notion that many labor markets bear little resemblance to those of the early postwar period comes as no surprise to many workers. New entrants to the labor force are routinely warned to prepare themselves for not just one, but a sequence of careers. A steady job with good pay, regular promotions, and extensive benefits is increasingly seen as a relic of the past. Corporate managers and business consultants herald a work revolution that involves, among other things, more temporary, part-time, or subcontracted work. The message that labor markets are changing has also reached Washington, where there is renewed interest in active labor market policies to deal with the effects of restructuring. For example, the premise of the Reemployment Act of 1994 is that has changed so radically in recent years that the entire employment system in the United States must be overhauled. Policymakers, managers, and workers are faced with two problems: understanding the nature of current changes and developing strategies to deal with them. What assistance can economics offer with either problem? Unfortunately, very little. The most important labor market phenomenon

Belief and Behavior: Does Religion Matter in Today's Marriage?

In this study the impact of changes in religiosity on marital quality and vice versa is examined. Using longitudinal data from a national sample of married persons, we assess the extent to which changes in religious involvement influence marital quality and the extent to which changes in marital quality affect religiosity. Because most prior studies of this topic have been cross-sectional, our work fills a major research gap. We address two questions: (a) Do changes in religiosity alter marital quality or vice versa, and (b) if either change occurs, what aspects of marital quality and religiosity are involved? Social scientists have a long history of research attempting to explain how religious sentiments direct social action (e.g., Davidson, 1972; Moberg, 1982; see Warner, 1993 for a careful review of early work on the topic). Ever since the 19th century, theorists--most notably Durkheim --have examined the way in which beliefs about the supernatural direct, legitimate, and support social activity (Turner, 1991; Wilson, 1982). More recently, however, scholars have questioned religion's capacity to serve as a socially integrative force in contemporary society, emphasizing that modernization has diminished the power of religious institutions to exercise social control (D'Antonio, 1983; Hargrove, 1983, p. 44). The relation between religion and families is one key area in which the question of religion's social integrative function is at issue. Noting that traditional conceptions of marital obligations based on external controls have been eroded by modernization, scholars have suggested that religious institutions might come to play a different role than that of negative social control. Rather than attempting to reinforce traditional conceptions of marital obligations, some theorists have argued that religious institutions need to provide support and nurturance for the patterns of family life as they currently exist (Aldous, 1983; D'Antonio, 1983; Hargrove, 1983). Although Aldous, D'Antonio, and Hargrove prescribed this development and did not observe it happening in any substantial way, cross-sectional studies show contemporary religion to be modestly related to marital well-being (e.g., Albrecht, 1979; Bahr & Chadwick, 1985; Ellison, 1991; Glenn & Supancic, 1984; Greeley, 1991; Pollner, 1989; Wilson & Filsinger, 1986). One of the most intriguing studies on this topic is reported in Judith Stacey's book, Brave New Families (1990), an in-depth study of two working-class women's families residing in the Silicon Valley. Both women have strong feminist views, which are reflected in their approach to finding and keeping their jobs. At the same time, both are converts to a paternalistic fundamentalist religion in which they are actively involved. While the juxtaposition of the two behaviors challenges our predilection to see consistency in attitudes and social processes, the benefits of the two streams of behavior are clear for the women studied. According to Stacey, the feminist views and the support to and from other women that they entail helped the two women get and keep jobs and deal with unemployment. The fundamentalist religion improved their marriage and family life. The rise in religious participation appeared to increase the male's (and to some extent the female's) ability to hold a steady job, drink less, and be less abusive in relations with family and spouse. Though the study has limited generalizability, it reveals religion as a source of support and strength in nontraditional family life. One of the study's further strengths is its longitudinal design. Stacey was able to track the women in her study during the course of their conversion to a fundamentalist religion. Unlike the cross-sectional researchers, however, Stacey is the first to associate a change in religiosity with improved marital quality. Parallel changes increase the probability that the observed relationship between changes in religiosity and marital quality are causal in nature. …

Unfolding event histories: Scaling of non-repeating events

The present paper discusses the use of Coombs' (1950, 1964) unfolding procedure applied to event history data. This procedure is appropriate when several stimuli are rated according to the individuals' preference, and yields scale values for stimuli and individuals, as well as a ‘best’ order of stimuli. We propose to consider the order of occurrence in time of non-repeatable events (such as first marriage, leaving home, and first job) as an indication of the subjects' preference for these stimuli. In that case unfolding may be applied to the analysis of event history-data. The statistical principles of unfolding analysis in general are briefly discussed. Subsequently an illustration is given, using data concerning the life course of 216 Dutch women of birth cohort 1961, concerning five events: first steady relationship, leaving home, first child, first job, and first occurrence of living together. It is shown that these events can be ordered at an underlying one-dimensional continuum on which individuals can be scaled. Furthermore, using regression analysis it is shown that the location of the subjects at this continuum correlates significantly with various explanatory variables, showing how unfolding may be used in practical applications.

The Day I Danced with the Gypsies

FICTION The Day I Danced with the Gypsies Barbara A. Schieve I don't go to school anymore. While Mama's at the cafeteria cashiering, I hang out in the apartment smoking forbidden cigarettes out of the carton Aunt Ruby left in her dresser drawer the morning she took off. I puff away while I sit at the window, looking down at the cars turning into the parking lot of the funeral home next door, wondering when Aunt Ruby is going to come back. Mama says probably never, because Aunt Ruby has always been crazy, doesn't have sense enough to come in out of the rain, and might even be living in a box under the bridge with the homeless people by now. I don't believe Mama. I remember the way Aunt Ruby winked at me right before she slammed the apartment door and staggered down the stairs, banging her suitcases against the wall, her hair wound up in old metal curlers she found in Grandma's trailer after Grandma died. Aunt Ruby, I tell myself, will never leave me for good. Aunt Ruby is Mama's old-maid sister and, even though back in the mountains where we came from people said she didn't always act normal , speaking out when she should have kept her mouth shut, pushing a supermarket cart around collecting bottles from roadside ditches, piling them up in the backyard like she was trying to make a glass mountain, I never believed she had anything really important missing upstairs. Mama is another story. Mama, flouncing around in jeans and spikeheeled shoes, her sunrise-red hair hanging straight down past her behind , like she's ready to burst out singing: "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue." Mama, believing one of the losers she meets at the cafeteria is going to get a steady job and enough money to buy her a house in one of those suburbs where the houses are all alike. It's Mama I worry about! Barbara A. Schieve lives "in a suburb bordering the west side of Cleveland, Ohio, an area popular with different ethnic groups, including transplanted Appalachians . " 58 I open the refrigerator and count the beer cans, wondering if, now that I'm sixteen and might even pass for eighteen, and am already an accomplished cigarette smoker, I should practice beer drinking. But, I decide, Mama isn't so dumb she won't notice missing beer, especially if one of her beer-guzzling boyfriends comes around and the supply runs out. Then I'm really in trouble. She might begin using her brains for something other than figuring out ways to get a house, and realize I'm not spending all my days at school. Instead, I look out of the window and think about how things were before Aunt Ruby left. I used to dance; it was Aunt Ruby who got me started. When I was ten, me, Mama and Aunt Ruby moved up north to this city—to better ourselves, Mama said. She found a job right away. Aunt Ruby, who never had a real job, took care of me. The two of us got in the habit of hanging out in a restaurant that used to be in the store below the apartment, owned by an old Hungarian couple. Mrs. Szabo, the old lady, had a face like a dumpling in the paprikash she made, fat, round, and always wet from looking into steaming pots. Mostly she stayed in the kitchen cooking and didn't seem to mind that Mr. Szabo payed a lot of attention to Aunt Ruby. I guess at her age she was used to his flirting ways. He was waiter, cashier, and when there weren't too many customers, fiddler. He looked like a fiddler, with a few strands of black, shoe-polish hair left on his head, and a mustache that could have been drawn with a marking pen. Aunt Ruby liked him a lot. I guess she had never met a man with old-world manners like Mr. Szabo. He was always kissing the back of her hand and pulling out chairs anytime she had a mind...

Sexuality, Power, and Social Order in Cartagena, Colombia

Now more than ever, sexuality has become an important topic in social analysis. Generated by (among other things) gays' and lesbians' increasing political and cultural visibility, the emergence of the AIDS epidemic, reassertions of puritanical sexual morality during the 1980s, and the social sciences' turn toward the study of everyday life, scholarly interest in sex has quickened. In particular, a vital literature has arisen dealing with the relationship between sexuality and social order. Analysts have examined the role of sexuality in furthering nationalist projects (Mosse 1985; Bland and Mort 1983; Parker et al. 1992), in defining colonial subjectivities and ensuring colonial domination (de Groot 1989; Stoler 1992), and in maintaining class and racial hierarchies within metropolitan and colonial societies (Martinez-Alier 1989 [1974]; Stolcke 1981; Goddard 1987; Halperin 1990). Common to this work is the view that sexuality, as representation and practice, is intimately involved in relations of power and inequality. This article examines the role of sexuality in discourse on social order among older popular-class[2] men in Santa Ana, a neighborhood of Cartagena, Colombia. These men inhabit a moment in history when their economic power is eroding, control over young people waning, and authority over women increasingly challenged. They feel that their stable, orderly way of life is under assault by the wealthy, by popular-class youth, and by popular-class women who have forsaken the obligations that once bound rich and poor, men and women, elders and juniors, in unequal but purportedly mutually satisfying relations. These groups now are said to act out of self-interest. Older men combat the forces of disorder through a discourse that appeals to the ideals that supposedly sustained that earlier, more desirable world. This discourse intertwines ideas of appropriate gender, class, and racial identities, and sexuality provides a crucial link between them. For these men, in particular, sexual misconduct threatens social order, for they perceive social order as built on age, gender, class, and race hierarchies, which in turn are modelled on male-dominated heterosexuality. Sexuality is readily used to represent unequal social relations because it enacts inequality in relationships that are purportedly natural and fixed. That is, sexuality functions this way because as an assumed common denominator of personal experience it both organizes erotic experience and endorses masculine power as a model for other social relations. The older men are respectables[3] (santaneros) - men who consider themselves solidary, respecting, and motivated by obligations, not self-interest - and constitute its most vocal and powerful core. CLASS AND GENDER IDENTITY IN SANTA ANA Santa Ana is one of Cartagena's oldest neighborhoods outside the colonial quarter. Its approximately 4,000 residents are mainly low- to lower-middle income. Most men work in construction, petty commodity production and commerce; very few have steady, well-paying, and/or unionized jobs. Most women do not work outside the home, and those that do are mainly in domestic service. There is only one paved street in the neighborhood, and water and electricity are subject to periodic outages and rationing; some dwellings lack running water altogether. Questions of class identity are particularly acute for santaneros right now. Cartagena, a city of about one million people on Colombia's Caribbean coast, has been transformed from a sleepy port into a major tourist destination (Strassmann 1982; Lemaitre 1983) that also contains a significant industrial base. The traditional commercial and cattle-ranching elite has expanded into industry and now runs its enterprises along more clearly capitalist lines. The illegal drug trade has provided capital for constructing tourist facilities as well as luxury apartments for both the old elites and the new, drug-trade class. …

Scientists Struggling To Understand And Treat Cocaine Dependency

The patient was living a conventional life two years ago. He described himself as the Ozzie Nelson of his neighborhood. He'd held a steady job for 16 years, had a solid marriage. He drank, he told psychologist Anna Rose Childress, but had no problem controlling his alcohol use. He'd never fooled around with other drugs. But when friends gave him crack cocaine as a 40th birthday present, he figured he'd give it a try. His life in the two years since that birthday party has been a disaster. He's lost his family and his job. Feeling compelled to return again and again to cocaine, he finds himself doing things he can't believe like hocking the furniture to buy crack. I would have been hard put to predict this guy would have had trouble with an addictive problem, says Childress, who is director of clinical treatment research at the Philadelphia Veterans Administration medical center's drug dependence ...

A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller , and: American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39: Equivocal Commitments , and: The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century , and: Desire and the Sign: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller, and: American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39: Equivocal Commitments, and: The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century, and: Desire and the Sign: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Allen Boyer Kenneth Scambray . A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1987. 198 pp. $24.95. Eric Homberger . American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39: Equivocal Commitments. New York: St. Martin's, 1986. 268 pp. $25.00. Walter Benn Michaels . The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. 248 pp. $25.00. Fred G. See . Desire and the Sign: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987. 183 pp. $27.50. Nineteenth-century realism, and the naturalist fiction that succeeded it, call out to be measured against the real world. The simplest interpretative relation may be biographical, whether one relates the work to a single writer or a school of writers with common concerns. It may be more productive (although more difficult) to treat a text as a cultural artifact, a product of the era in which it was written. Moving further into the abstract, one can couch one's criticism in terms of structures operating somewhere behind the human subconscious and outside the concrete world. The rewards of the biographical approach are illustrated by Kenneth Scambray's A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller. In 1895, Fuller seemed an up-and-coming man of letters. The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani, a travel romance with Utopian overtones, had won him a national reputation. He had already published two novels of life in Chicago, The Cliff-Dwellers and With the Procession—books for which Theodore Dreiser would hail him as the father of American realism. Yet, at the age of thirty-eight, Fuller had already done his best writing. Although he would live until 1929, his remaining books would be scattered and uneven. Scambray's biography provides a sad, credible portrait, one that goes far toward explaining Fuller's decline. Earlier discussions of Fuller, Scambray finds, have treated him "as a writer who was frustrated solely by the commercial and industrial spirit that dominated his native Chicago. Actually, he led several lives: that of the writer, the sociable club man, and the private, isolated life of a homosexual in Victorian and early twentieth-century America." Scambray argues convincingly that this isolation handicapped Fuller: "No less than the materialistic values of his era, Fuller's homosexuality held him back from full participation in his society." Describing himself as an "alien romanticist" and "studio dawdler," Fuller became a minor litterateur—someone who joined societies, attended banquets, frequented university campuses, and signed petitions. Shabbiness attended the last decades of his life, as he moved from roominghouse to roominghouse on Chicago's south side. He seldom held a steady job; his money came partly from freelance reviewing but mostly from family investments. [End Page 227] Sexual ambivalence and self-doubt may have kept Fuller from writing other outstanding novels. He had the energy—he was an indefatigable reviewer—but he settled for satires, travel romances, and uneven short stories. In terms of his work, as Scambray concludes, "caution would only breed equivocation." Fuller dealt with homosexuality twice: in "At St. Judas's," an early play, and Bertram Cope's Year, which he had privately printed in 1919. Both times, however, Fuller raised the issue obliquely. He made his protagonists' sexuality ambiguous. If they had male intimates, they also had female brides and admirers, and, at the end of each work, they seemed to have chosen marriage. Fuller may have been estranged from his milieu, but the resistance he offered was only half-hearted. (To be sure, the reviewers silently buried both play and novel.) Scambray's book is solid and well-written; he is careful to balance sympathy and objectivity. Fuller's major novels could perhaps have been discussed at greater length, but this book will be hard to better as an account of Fuller's life...

When is YTS an Alternative for Young People? Some Results from a Dutch Qualitative Research Project

ABSTRACT Data from a qualitative research project are used to examine attitudes and strategies to youth training schemes among a group of longterm unemployed youngsters in The Netherlands. The main aim of this paper is to clarify the observed contradictions in attitudes to Youth Training Schemes. Most of the time these contradictions remain unexplained because of the fact that the actual coping behaviour of youngsters with their contradictory situation is neglected. Therefore, the ‘strategic value’ of training schemes for young people remains obscure. All unemployed boys and girls want a regular (i.e. waged and steady) job and, at the same time, they all know they are underqualified and will have to invest in training and education. Therefore, they all express positive attitudes to youth training schemes. But for none of them is the government's human capital justification of youth training schemes self-evident. To them, these schemes are of little importance with regard to acquiring a regular job, becaus...

Differences in importance of and satisfaction from job characteristics by sex and occupational type among Mexican-American employees

Data obtained from Mexican-American husbands and wives in four southwestern states were analyzed to discover if sex or occupational type (blue- versus white-collar) made a significant difference in the importance attached to or satisfaction received from 11 job characteristics. The prestige, opportunity for advancement, and regularity of their jobs were significantly more important to husbands than wives. Two of these characteristics—opportunity for advancement and regular, steady job—were also significantly more satisfying to husbands. Wives were significantly more satisfied with their jobs' freedom from safety/health hazards. Six characteristics were significantly more important to white-collar than to blue-collar male workers. Of these, two—freedom from safety/health hazards and opportunity for advancement—were also more satisfying to the white-collar male employee.

Peace Activism and the Power of the Small

Two remarks sum up how I was first led to work seriously for peace. In the spring of 1977, two days after my daughter was born, a friend called from California to ask me, Is it true? Would you throw yourself in front of a train to protect That same day my sister, ten years older than I and the mother of two, called to see how I was doing. She greeted me by saying, Well, welcome to the human race. For me, giving birth was an entrance into a kind of love and sense of responsibility for the world that I had never felt before. I felt my own vulnerability acutely and knew that all that I cherished could be taken from me in an instant. A realization slowly crept into my life-that I really was responsible, and that I was about to be impelled to put myself between my child and anything that would threaten her. The most immediate threat I felt was the threat of war. Before becoming a mother, I had dabbled in the peace movement. After learning about the Trident submarine in 1975-realizing that my country was building a weapon that was clearly designed to strike first-I began to devour books about weapons and military policy and the arms race, but I didn't grasp what I could do with what I was learning. When Emily was born, all of that changed. Gazing at her face, even though I suspected that I might somehow be complicit in the arms race, I knew she had nothing to do with it. Who was going to speak for her? I really began to get my feet wet: to go to meetings, to volunteer to do things that I had never done before. I worked with the Boulder Mobilization for Survival, one of many grassroots anti-nuclear groups. Our major thrust was education, which in the late 1970's consisted mainly of bludgeoning people with facts about weapons and radiation, I'm afraid, as well as planning demonstrations to confront the powers that be. I learned to organize as I went along; it was a new world for me. I began by doing simple things, and then, as I realized that I could do more, I did more. I didn't question the nature of our activities, trusting that those I worked with, who had much more experience, knew what they were doing. Even when it was clear that the hours I was spending organizing were taking away from my income as a freelance editor, I couldn't stop. Yet sometimes it was all overwhelming, particularly given my growing doubts about our effectiveness. The phone rang constantly, I was out most nights, and it was all I could do to keep up with the diapers and the cleaning and the financial problems. One day, sitting at an intersection waiting for the light to turn green, I thought to myself, Mary, this life is crazy, and we need more money. Just go get a steady job, and give up the rest. Emily was perched in her car seat, placidly humming and looking ahead. Suddenly, she looked straight at me and said, Organize. Then she looked out the window again. I didn't even know she knew the word, so I kept going. For years, though few people outside the anti-nuclear movement seemed to hear us, we continued to believe that if we could only make people understand the peril of their situation, they would be led to do something about it. Accordingly, we studied in great detail facts about the arsenals of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and reported those

Redistribution of Denmark's manufacturing industry 1972–1982.Causes and Consequences

Like the majority of industrialized countries Denmark has experienced a decline in total employment in the manufacturing industry during the last decade. This decline is, however, strongly correlated with city size. Thus the manufacturing industry in Copenhagen has lost almost half of its employment in the period 1972–82. In the same period the rural, peripheral parts of the country showed a steady job increase in all branches of manufacturing industry. The resulting rapid relocation has not primarily been the result of migration but the net outcome of closings and contractions in the eastern centres, and openings/expansions in the peripheral parts of Jutland. The capability of the regions to satisfy the demands of modern industry (infrastructure, qualifications etc.) in many ways has changed in the last ten years. However, emphasis is laid on the importance of technological development and on orientation towards foreign markets following the reduction of trade barriers in the postwar period.

In the Balance

Thalia Selz is Writer-in-Residence at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines, including Partisan Review, Antaeus, and Chicago, and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and the O Henry Awards. "In the Balance" is from her novel, The Greek Garden, which takes place in the spring and early summer of 1942 in Chicago's Greek American community. A family of Greek intellectuals with an obsessive "savior complex" take a strange and wonderful assortment of characters under their wing, and the novel chronicles the adventures and sometimes misadventures that are the consequence of these adoptions. IN THE BALANCE / Thalia Selz FOR DAYS Athos Anderson had been shuffling back and forth in front of the golden balance but always edging nearer. Forth and back through the three tiny rooms of the laboratory, through pungent fumes and the shafts of April sunlight piercing dirty windows to fall upon microscope and retort, Bunsen burner and balance. He took very small steps and pursed his very small mouth while terrible thoughts flew like flak through his brain. Occasionally his fingers—gray except where the quick showed in a fine, ineradicable line of dirt—would fumble toward the glass door of the little walnut cabinet that held the analytical balance, gleaming like the Grail. Then his hand would drop and he would turn away, revolted by his own impulse. Other than his mouth and his walk—and the suit which had once belonged to his boss, Pano Rigas, and hung on the much slighter Athos like a pair of black worsted pajamas—there was nothing to notice about him. His hair, teeth, and eyes were a random assemblage of the colors possessed by any old, well-worn wooden desk. Only he was a man, not a desk, and he flinched when he thought what might happen to him if he were ever arrested again. AU during the second week of April while the radio blared in the corner of the laboratory's Big Room with news that the British were retreating in Burma and 36,853 American and Filipino troops had surrendered to the Japanese on Bataan, Athos tried not to see the golden balance, Pano's—and the laboratory's—single most precious possession, an instrument so exact that it must always be protected from dust and temperature changes. For ten years now Athos had been Pano Rigas' co-worker and translator, ever since that sleet-slashing November night in 1932 when Pano and Maude and their child, Ariadne, had brought him home to their little frame house in the Chicago sticks: to Maude's cooking, a bed without bedbugs, and a job—above all, a steady job utilizing his single extraordinary skill. A dozen yards behind the shabby house stood Pano's shabbier chemical research laboratory—a long, low building full of Pano's projects and Pano's noise—and here Athos Hartford Anderson, born of an Irish mother and a German-Swedish father, named Hartford for the city of his birth and christened Athanasios at age eighteen in a Greek Orthodox church in St. Louis, here Athos—linguist and idiot savant and in 1932 one of America's fifteen million unemployed— helped with laboratory chores and translated chemical abstracts for the person he loved best in the world. Then in February of 1942, some three months after Pearl Harbor, when Pano's laboratory was embarked on a confidential government The Missouri Review · 23 research project and Athos was forty-five years old, he had met five-year-old Lois Jenks and her mother. Within two weeks he had bought Lois a dress, a playsuit, and a pair of Mary-Janes at Wieboldt's; other presents followed until, at the beginning of March, Mrs. Jenks suddenly issued an ultimatum demanding the annexation of a gold-anddiamond wrist watch as the price for continuing to play with "Loie-honey." When Athos refused, for he had nothing like the money required to buy such an expensive gift, Mrs. Jenks closed her borders, shutting the apartment door in his face. Then just as suddenly, the weekend following Easter she left a message with his landlady, asking him to...

How the other half lives?

So, according to J E Harris (Physics Bulletin April 1983 p154),'... the working classes don't care a fig (for the environment), so long as they have a steady job and good TV reception'. Is this a joke?

Equity in medical care: are the deserving poor eligible?

EQUITY IN MEDICAL CARE: ARE THE DESERVING POOR EUGIBLE? JANE M. ORIENT* Doolittle: What am I, Governors both? . . . I'm one ofthe undeserving poor: that's what I am. . . . But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that evergot money out ofsixdifferentcharities in one weekfor the death ofthe same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. . . . I'm playing straight with you. I ain't pretending to be deserving. I'm undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. ... [1] Unless infinite resources become available, any system ofmedical care, including or especially universal national health insurance, will be required to base some decisions on economics. Who should pay die taxes and who should receive benefits first when the budget is tight promise to remain topics of Uvely controversy. That the rich should pay more, and the poor receive more, has become axiomatic. The implication in the tide that some of the poor might be undeserving is certain to offend Uberai humanists, who assume that all poverty results from unequal opportunities , strokes of misfortune, and other external circumstances. However, Uberai humanists are underrepresented in pubUc emergency rooms, where the staff does not respond to all patients widi equal sympatiiy. From the descriptions of patients diat follow, die reader may guess die reaction of the doctor on duty: A hobojust offdie freight train, dirty and sweating but sober, politely requests treatment that might ease the pain ofa second-degree burn acquired many miles back. A thirty-year-old veteran does not remember how he might have been exposed to Agent Orange, but he has been unable to hold a steady job, feels nervous all die time, and is going bald. He wants a complete checkup and compensation for the effects of toxic herbicides. ?Adjunct assistant professor, Internal Medicine, University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, Arizona. Address: 1601 North Tucson Boulevard, Suite 9, Tucson, Arizona 85716.© 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/83/2603-0347$01.00 Perspectives in Biology andMediane, 26, 3 · Spring 1983 | 411 A World War I veteran can no longer afford treatment for his deforming arthritis. Unfortunately, he was too busy working to apply for a serviceconnected disability, and his old records were destroyed in a fire. A patient with chronic lung disease, packs of cigarettes stuffed in his socks, demands immediate service. The last time he was hospitalized he melted his oxygen mask, unable to refrain from smoking even when near respiratory failure. A disorderly youth is brought in restraints after attempting to assault two police officers who caught him sniffing glue in a field. A disgruntled veteran who has been inadequately compensated for his diagnosis of antisocial personality held an administrator and a nurse practitioner hostage widi a .45. Several months later he requests admission to the open psychiatric ward because he is temporarily short of money to pay his rent. A patient has the sniffles and a mild sore throat. He needs an excuse for his employer so that he can get paid for taking several days off work. A young diabetic who refuses to take her insulin is in ketoacidosis for the third time in a month. She breaks her intravenous bottle on the bathroom sink and threatens the staff with the fragments. The Fire Department paramedics respond to an emergency call at 3 a.m. from a distraught modier whose infant has diaper rash. They advise her to change die baby's diaper several times a day but, since uiis is not New York City, refuse to transport her to the hospital. A dramatic scene occurs in the receiving area as a screaming young woman arrives by ambulance. Separated from her family, and placed in an examining room, she is unable to diink up a medical complaint. Late in the evening, a patient comes to request a refill on his (narcotic) pain medications, saying diat his niece emptied the bottle into the toilet. Fortunately his bronchodilators were rescued just in time. His record shows diat he always visits late at night, and similar...

Backward Glances

My first steady job, if one leaves out four years of wartime soldiering, began at Manchester University in 1949. It was a lectureship in American Studies and followed a two-year Commonwealth (Harkness) fellowship at Yale, also in American Studies, under the benevolent guidance of Ralph Gabriel. I have been in the same line ever since. The invitation to review what has happened to me and other Americanists in Britain during that long span carries the risk of self-regarding anecdotage. To reach the point of looking forward mainly to looking backward would be dismal. Yet Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was an exercise not in nostalgia but in prophecy; and while much of this essay takes the form of reminiscence I hope it may seem relevant to colleagues younger than myself.

The Deserting, Nonsupporting Father: Scapegoat of Family Nonpolicy

Deserting fathers are often pushed out of their homes by an angry society seeking a scapegoat for its frustrations, ignorance, and failures to agree on a sound family policy for our country. Nonsupporting fathers are often picked up on their jobs (the only address some of them have), and for the following twenty years or more they are chained to a cruel and sadistic criminal system. When they re-enter society, they are less prepared for a steady job, for retraining, rebuilding family ties, and for the incentive to build self-esteem. This study of the impact of the criminal justice system on the deserting, nonsupporting father in relation to the fulfillment of his role as provider provides data for rethinking our approach in aiding the nonsupporting father to cope with his dilemma as well as our own.

Loansharking in American Cities: Historical Analysis of a Marginal Enterprise

In the recent past, two distinct types of loansharking have flourished in American cities. The first, which developed in the 1870's or 1880's and probably reached its high point from 1900 to World War I, functioned with an appearance of legality. There is no evidence that these loansharks used violence for collection of debts. Rather, their effectiveness often involved persuading the borrower that the loan represented a legal obligation. Much like a modern, legal lending institution, most such lenders operated out of an office; a prospective borrower was investigated to determine whether he had a steady job; and the borrower signed complicated forms before receiving the loan. Commonly, the loan was treated as a purchase of the borrower's future salary. In the event that a borrower failed to meet his payments, collection was attempted by threatening to inform the employer of the debt, by harassment of various sorts, or by filing a law suit. Such loansharks, so far as can be determined, had no connection with gambling syndicates or other organized crime activities. They were often referred to as salary lenders. The second type of loansharking made little or no pretense of legality. Instead, the understanding between lender and borrower was that, while the borrower would be expected to repay because he had promised to do so, the sanction of violence might ultimately be used. Although such loansharks sometimes used a legal lending institution or some other legitimate business as a front, they more often met their customers in saloons, on streetcorners, in the factory, and at other informal but regular public places. These loansharks often had prior or concurrent careers in bootlegging, gambling, labor racketeering, or other organized

The Quick And The Dead

The Quick And The Dead by OLIVIA MURRAY NICHOLS If it hadn't been for his sister Izelle, Woodrow Sullins would have married Betty Rose before he went overseas. Izelle didn't see any use in his taking on more responsibility when he might be helping his own people during off-seasons in the housepainting business or on-seasons, when their daddy drank too much to hold a steady job. She said it was better to leave a sweetheart than a wife in case something happened , and put that way, it sounded like good advice to Woodrow. Betty Rose tried every way she knew to change his mind when he had his leave after basic training but it did no good. "This is a poor people's war," Woodrow told her. "Poor people can't go to college to get a deferment—but I'll tell you one thing. Quick as I'm out, I'll go to college and it'll be at government expense." He chuckled like he was putting something over on someone. "We can be married while I go," he assured Betty Rose, "and I'll learn to be something besides a housepainter , so's I can be working whether it rains or snows or what." Betty Rose had to be content with his promise. She said while they were waiting, maybe they could save up for things they'd need which the government wouldn't furnish when they were sending Woodrow to college, bedsheets and dishes and things like that. Woodrow said that sounded fine to him, he'd be glad to chip in when he got any money ahead and he ought to save plenty from his pay with the government now giving him room and board and clothes. Betty Rose took her wages and tips from Hallie's Diner to pay her folks something on her living expenses at home and put the rest on sheets and towels at Penney 's layaway. But Izelle wrote Woodrow about the housepainting business going slack and whatever money he got ahead he sent to her. She kept the Goodwill cleaned out of high heels and silver dance sandals to wear when she sashayed around town of a Saturday night. 44 Woodrow never knew what became of his money because, four months after he went overseas, he was killed in action. Mr. Sullins and Izelle were the most sorrowful people in the world when that happened. They said Woodrow had always been a good son and brother and now he was a hero. They didn't know how they could go on living without him. Betty Rose, who had hoped to be asked to sit with the family at the funeral and was not, was a little ashamed of them anyway. It is one thing to be in grief and the Lord knew her grief was something like a rock inside of her holding her down under a darkness she couldn't see how to get out of, but bellowing to let all the church people know they were grieving was something else. At the graveyard, when the bugler blew taps, the most mournful sound this side of dying, Betty Rose chewed on her upper lip till it was raw so she could hold her head up and feel proud of Woodrow without making a big slobbery show. That was how come she saw, when the soldiers folded the flag off the casket and the head one handed it to Izelle, Izelle winked at him just as bold as if they'd been down on Main Street and it Saturday night. The day after the funeral, Betty Rose went down to Penney's and arranged with A native of Georgia, Olivia M. NichoL· has lived most of her life in New Mexico and Texas. She has published juvenile and adult fiction in national magazines and the linen department to exchange the bed sheets for another size. She met Mr. Sullins and Izelle coming out of Colgate's Car and Truck place. Mr. Sullins had on his blue funeral suit but no tie to his shirt, and his shoes were paint-speckled. Izelle wore a green and white...

Executive Redundancy

A new problem in the world of employment is that of executive redundancy. It was generally believed until a few years ago that once a person had joined the professional and managerial classes, he would be rewarded for the years of study that he had undertaken by a life‐long, well‐paid and steady job. It is now clear that this pattern of working life is changing and that the professional and managerial job must be concerned not only with being dynamic in the specialism practised, but that careers also must be dynamic. The reasons for the changing pattern of life in the top jobs are many and varied and include the relative decline of independent professionals, financial squeeze on smaller organizations and the shorter life‐span of higher technologies. The problem for the individual is not readily solved by the existing structure of the Department of Employment, a fact recognized by the restructuring of the Professional and Executive Register (PER), the remainder of the Department of Employment continuing to be concerned in filling existing vacancies. For executives, the old procedure of fitting approximately shaped pegs into well‐defined holes is not appropriate, as by definition, the executive and professional make jobs fit their personalities. In an attempt to cope with this problem, Professional and Executive Recruitment have been cooperating with the Extra Mural Department of the University of Manchester to try and find ways of resettling those who have been made redundant or are faced with a major change in career. At the outset it must be made clear that the intention of this work is not to find jobs for those participating in the scheme, but to enable them to find suitable employment for themselves which matches their qualifications, ambitions and experience. The participants are sponsored through the Training Opportunities Scheme of the Department of Employment on an eight week course held at the University and in the Manchester Business School.

Sex Differences in Compensation

Five hypotheses explaining differences in pay between men and women were examined: wage discrimination, occupational wage levels, job choice and working conditions, fringe benefits, and qualifications and productivity of women. Data were from a 1969 survey of working conditions of American workers. A difference of /$5,000 was found in mean pay between women and men working full time in 1969. The difference was only $2,500 among nonprofessional workers, aged 22-64, with a steady job and working the same number of hours. About 42 percent of the men, compared to 27 percent of the women, reported their jobs exposed them to physical dangers or unhealthy conditions. The most important reason for the difference in the average pay of men and women is the clustering of women in lower paying jobs.