Quantitative noise analysis at two marble finishing plants in Olinda, Pernambuco, Brazil

In Olinda there are an estimated 50 marble quarries, 3 of which are members of the stone extraction and finishing industry's state union. The objective here is to quantitatively evaluate the noise present at the workplace in two of Olinda's unionized marble quarries. The data to be analyzed was collected during December 2010, this month representing one of the four busiest months of production. The samples were collected from Tuesdays to Fridays in order to avoid irregular outcomes. Instantaneous readings were taken with the decibel meter to identify points of Noise Pressure Level (NPL) higher than Action Level (AL). Afterwards, the full procedure for the characterization of noise level with the decibel meter in order to compare the Homogeneous Exposure Group (HEG) to those with High Risk Exposure (HRE) was initiated. The noisiest sources came from humid cutting machines, marble saws and polishing equipment. The activities of cutter and polisher became classified as follows: unsafe, in a critical situation and in need of priority control for the work environment with noise level values varying from 95.0 dB(A) to 103.3 dB(A), calling for the use of ear protection during the entire work day.     

Earning Their Keep and Keeping What They Earn: A Critique of Organizing Strategies for South Asian Women in the Informal Sector

It is now widely understood that the needs of women workers in the informal sector are not met by the conservative practices of labour organizations and trade unions. While the contribution of women to the economies of developing countries is critical, women rarely find employment in the regulated unionized sectors of these countries, and are found instead in overwhelming numbers in the sector that is variously termed ‘unorganized’, ‘unprotected’, ‘unregistered’ or ‘informal.’ This article addresses the situation of women in the informal economy in South Asia. The author explores the major challenges and opportunities facing women in their efforts to organize and mobilize for change. She also provides a critical analysis of the different types of interventions adopted by the state and civil society organizations in South Asia to empower women in the informal sector. The author concludes with an attempt to identify the mix of interventions and strategies most needed for different social, political and economic circumstances.     

Union premiums in the federal and private sectors: Alternative evidence from job queues

Although traditional wage estimates indicate a larger union-nonunion differential in the private sector compared to that in the federal sector, the role of non-wage benefits is ignored in such comparisons. A job queue approach shows that premiums to unionized employment (in terms of both wage and non-wage benefits) are lower in the federal sector than in the private sector. This approach not only overcomes the limitations of wage studies in examining the relative superiority of union over nonunion jobs in both sectors, but also strengthens their conclusions through a more appropriate alternative method. The author thanks John Heywood, Neil Garston, Richard Roseman, and Miles Finney for helpful comments. I also thank the editor and the referee for extremely useful suggestions.     

Collective Bargaining and Alcoholism:

In this project 106 collective bargaining contracts were analyzed to identify union-management responses to the problem of alcoholism in the workplace. The original contracts were collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and published on microfiche by the Microfilming Corporation of America. The contracts in this set were executed between 1977 and 1982, and cover all private sector employers with over 900 employees in Michigan. The purpose of this study was to determine the present state of collective bargaining language as a basis for identifying how employers in a unionized setting handle the problem of alcoholism at the work site. The authors discovered that alcoholism is most frequently dealt with in the disciplinary procedure. Clauses dealing with insurance benefits are the next most frequent site. There is evidence of alcoholism increasingly becoming an area for labor-management cooperation. The paper concludcs with some suggestions as to how EAP practitioners can enhance the success of programs in a unionized setting.     

Unionization and productivity in commercial banking

This paper examines the net effect of unions on productivity in the commercial banking industry. The focus of the study is on three methodological issues. First, an attempt is made to determine whether individual unions have a differential impact on banking productivity. The influence of unions on output per man-hour was initially estimated by including a union dummy variable in a Cobb-Douglas formulation of bank production. Separate binary variables were then entered into alternative specifications of the model to test the heterogeneity hypothesis. This hypothesis postulates differential productivity effects among the individual unions operating in the commercial banking sector. Second, the sample banks were paired on a case-by-case basis to assure the homogeneity of the two groupings: i.e., union and nonunion. Sample homogeneity is necessary because of the assumptions of identical production functions and output prices between the groups. Third, a complete covariance model was specified in order to estimate the impact of unionization on each parameter of the production function. In general, the unionized banks were less productive than their nonunion peers. It should be noted, however, that the standard errors were large in all the specifications. Moreover, the labor relations problems associated with one union had a large impact on the sector results.     

Has management strangled U.S. unions?

Conclusions The view that decline unionization is a disinctive U.S. development different from the experience of our structurally similar neighbour, Canada, and different from the experience of the most advancement industrial countries in Europe and the alleged distinctiveness of U.S. experience supported the search for a cause in U.S. institutions 20 years ago, what now appears as a broad social trend almost as ubiquitous as unions themselves argues for explanations that cross international borders. Structural change is an appealing candidate, for the comparatively high income elasticity of demand for products and services produced in sectors where unions are sparse render declining union density from heavily unionized to lightly unionized sectors are only a minor source of the fall in aggregate unionization rates in most countries. This project benefited from financial support from the Standford Graduate School of Business, research assistance from Vidya Reddy and Alexei Tehistyi, and comments from William Gould, Bruce Kaufman, Melvin Reder, Leo Troy, and Jelle Visser.     

Male-female differences in the potential for union growth outside traditionally unionized industries

Using recent NLS data on preferences for union representation, this paper examines whether differences by sex exist in the potential for union organizing outside of traditionally unionized industries. The methodology distinguishes between workers’ preferences for union representation and the relative supply of union jobs in explaining interindustry differences in the extent of unionization. Within the private sector, women employed in industries other than those traditionally unionized are found to have at least as strong a preference for unionization as do comparable men but a considerably lower opportunity for unionized employment given the desire for union representation. Comparing the public sector with traditionally organized industries, the greater extent of unionization in the public sector is largely explained by a stronger desire for union representation on the part of both male and female public sector employees. The helpful comments of Rodney Fort, Daniel Hamermesh, Robert Hutchens, and Jon Sonstelie on an earlier draft of the paper are gratefully acknowledged.     

European Civil Societies Compared: Typically German–Typically French?

According to the ‘social origin theory’ of civil society studies (Salamon and Anheier, Voluntas, 9(3): 213–248 (1998)), the nonprofit sector of today constitutes a ‘repository of former societal struggles and conflicts’. Correspondingly, nonprofits are embedded in administrative and organizational settings, which in many cases date as far back as the latter half of the 19th century—a time when industrialisation and urbanisation started to exert influence in the western world. France and Germany stand for very different societal traditions, political legacies and administrative structures. Traditionally, France is a highly centralized country in which local governments do not enjoy much autonomy. In contrast, Germany is a federalized country where self-government of local communities was introduced as early as at the beginning of the 19th century. Against this background, it comes as a surprise that, aside from few exceptions, the nonprofit sectors in the two countries are very similar. How does this come? We argue that the reason why the French nonprofit sector of today is very similar to the German nonprofit sector is closely linked to the growth of the welfare state in the two countries.     

Union Worker Wage Effect in the Public Sector

This study examines union wage premiums in the public sector for the 1998–2004 period. Unlike previous studies, our approach estimates union wage premiums considering differences in the rewards to education, experience, and other personal characteristics for union and non-union workers. The approach provides a larger estimated wage gap than the traditional approach, and allows for simulations of union–nonunion wage gaps for different types of workers. Moreover, we use an Oaxaca decomposition to explain the larger union–nonunion wage gap in the private sector in comparison to that in the public sector. We find that between 50% and 60% of the difference in union wage premiums between the private and public sectors is due to differences in the way unionized workers are rewarded in the private and public sectors, while the remaining portion is due to differences in personal characteristics of private and public sector workers.

Do unions always decrease wage dispersion? The case of Brazilian manufacturing

The literature on the impact of unions on wages has established that unionized workers earn a wage premium when compared to their nonunion counterparts and that the dispersion of wages within the union sector is lower than in the nonunion sector. I examine the validity of these findings in the context of a developing country labor market and show that unionism does create a positive wage differential but that wage dispersion is greater in the union sector. These findings are explained by the greater variance in the characteristics of unionized workers, the vulnerability of nonunion workers to market conditions, and the structure of wage bargaining.     

The Political and Civic Lives of Public Sector Workers: Unions and “Public Service Motivation”*

Public sector employees are highly engaged in civic and political life, from voting to volunteering. Scholars have theorized that this political activity stems from “public service motivation,” or the selection of publicly oriented individuals into public work. We build on this work by analyzing the role of public sector unions in shaping participation. Unions are central mobilizing organizations in political life, and one in three public sector workers are unionized. Special supplements of the Current Population Survey provide data on various forms of participation, sector, union membership, and union coverage. Logistic regressions find that unionized public sector workers have much higher odds of engaging in a range of activities compared to non‐union public workers, including protest, electoral politics, and political communication. Union membership impacts service work to a lesser extent, suggesting that unions are more central to political lives. These findings have implications for the consequences of union decline, including the class, race, and gender composition of who participates in democratic life.     

From Boom to Bust: How Different Has Microfinance Been from Traditional Banking?

This article presents in‐depth analysis of developments in the microfinance sector before and after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, by comparing them with developments in the traditional banking sectors of emerging markets and developing countries. Its findings indicate that microfinance has been part of the same credit boom observed in the traditional banking sector, and that the boom was also fostered by substantial inflows of foreign capital. Further, that risks associated with credit booms in the traditional sector also evolved in the microfinance sector. The article comes to the conclusion that, by becoming part of the global financial system, microfinance has lost one of the characteristics distinguishing it from traditional banking, namely, its greater resilience to crises in domestic and global financial markets.     

Arizona construction labor: A case study of union decline

Labor relations in the Arizona construction industry provide an interesting and informative case study of what occurs when unions push costs beyond what the market will bear. The industry was highly unionized, even including the homebuilding sector, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a series of strikes and major wage and benefit increases led one sector after another in the industry to turn to open-shop contractors. The construction unions and unionized contractors attempted to counter this move by agreeing to wage, benefit, and rule concessions, but the trend to open-shop work continued. Currently, the unions control only a small segment of the work with little prospect of improvement. Although special factors may have reduced union power more in the Arizona construction industry than nationally, developments in this state do indicate a probable decline in the national union share of work beyond what was found in the 1984 nationwide study. Professor Emeritus of Management; former Director, Industrial Research Unit and Chairman, Labor Relations Council. David O. Northrup processed the Dodge data and constructed the tables.     

Quo vadis public procurement of innovation?

Governments are actively looking for ways to use public procurement so that it would become more effective in facilitating innovation across public and private sectors. However, a shift towards public procurement of innovation (PPI) has proven to be difficult. Whereas the contemporary debate has mostly focused on how to reduce the barriers of PPI through re-conceptualizing the procurement process, there is a need to take into account also wider strategic factors through which governments create capacity to undertake PPI. By revisiting historic and contemporary policy initiatives, four strategies for the future can be envisioned: PPI as experimental innovation policy, from fiscal policy under austerity to PPI, mission-oriented PPI and shifts in administrative culture towards PPI. Each of the strategies demands different capacities from the entrepreneurial sector, as well as state, policy and administrative capacities from the public sector. These issues should be an inherent part of future policy-making and offer new avenues for PPI-related policy analysis and academic research.     

A structural theory of interlocking corporate directorates

A theory is proposed that explains where interlocking corporate directorates should appear between sectors of an economy, where they should not appear, and the profitability of efficient corporate interlocking. Taking the sector of an economy as the unit of analysis, interlocking directorates are cast as strategically created constraints on those sectors of the economy most “problematic” for obtaining profits in a given industry of firms. The extent to which each sector of the American economy is problematic for obtaining profits in two-digit and four-digit manufacturing industries is estimated from research linking industry profits with the form of the pattern of relations defining the industry as a position in the network of dollar flow transactions given in the 1967 Input-Output Study for the United States. A two-stage process is described for sampling firms representative of large corporations involved in American manufacturing. Measures of alternative strategies for interlocking across sectors are described. Two classes of hypotheses are derived: (1) Firms in an industry should interlock with firms in some other sector in proportion to the extent to which the sector constrains the industry's profits. (2) Controlling for production and market differences, the ability of firms in an industry to obtain unusually high profits reflects their success in creating interlocks with those sectors most problematic for their industry's profits.     

The ‘New Minimalist Approach’ to Private‐Sector Development: A Critical Assessment

Recent literature on private‐sector development emphasises the need to establish a ‘level playing field’ and tends to disregard selective supportive interventions. The most commonly highlighted elements are administrative simplification and effective property rights policies, with business services largely left to private providers ‐ what we call the ‘new minimalist approach’ (NMA). However, the NMA is based on certain unrealistic assumptions and is barely backed by empirical evidence. A range of complementary public policies is needed to create competitive sectors and overcome internal constraints, especially in small‐scale economies.     

Corporate-governmental networks in the Netherlands

Corporate networks studies have been restricted mainly to the private or business sectors. Network analyses involving both corporations and state or government agencies have been extremely rare. In this paper, the intercorporate network of interlocking directorates in the Netherlands, based on 86 large corporations and financial institutions, is studied in terms of a bipartite corporate—governmental network which arises from the interlocking memberships linking these corporations with major committees, agencies and similar centers of decision in the public sector or central state mechanisms in the Netherlands. The corporations, representing 27 industrial sectors, have been related to government and state agencies in 28 policy sectors. In this exploratory analysis the two heavy industries, metal/shipbuilding and chemicals/oil stand out clearly. With respect to the 17 central firms the results demonstrate consistent correspondence between their central position in the Dutch corporate network and the degree of their interlocks with policy sectors in the state. The results also show that the interlocks are overwhelmingly linked with the two policy sectors “economic affairs” and “education and sciences”. Hence a more detailed analysis of the interlocks with these two policy sectors is reported.     

Comparing Public and Private Sector Decision-Making Practices

Public and private sector decision making is studied with anexperiment. The study compares decision making in a tax-supportedgeneral purpose governmental agency with that done by a businessfirm selling to a market, using a simulation to capture differencesin the preferences and practices of mid-level managers workingin the two sectors. The simulation calls for participating managersto assess the risk and prospect of adopting budgets tailoredto match each sector. A cognitive culture that stresses analysis,speculation, bargaining, or networking is employed to fashiona budget appropriate for a public and a private sector organization,each with a controversial and a noncontroversial budget amount.The literature on public/private differences was consulted tomake predictions, suggesting that public sector managers wouldfavor bargaining and networking and private sector managerswould favor analysis and speculation. The cognitive style literaturesuggests that managers favor budgets constructed with an approachthat is consistent with their preferred cognitive style andsee less risk in the choice, except in a public setting whererisk would be unaffected. The study finds that private sectormanagers are more apt to support budget decisions made withanalysis and less likely to support them when bargaining isapplied. Public sector managers are less likely to support budgetdecisions backed by analysis and more likely to support thosethat are derived from bargaining with agency people.     

Formalization of grievance procedures: A multi-firm and industry study

This study examines how two aspects of formalization of grievance procedures affect grievance procedure effectiveness: written versus oral presentation of grievance and the level of union and management authorized to resolve grievances at the first step. Several demographic variables were controlled for: size of bargaining unit, percentage of organization represented, number of grievances filed, and industry. A sample of 46 firms, representing a broad cross-section of unionized companies in the private sector, was obtained with the help of the American Arbitration Association. Results indicate that more formal grievance procedures (e.g., written presentation) are positively related to resolution rates at the first step. The number of grievances field and the size of the bargaining unit were positively related to total resolution rates prior to arbitration. We thank the American Arbitration Association for making this study possible.     

Determinants of female labor force participation: a focus on Muslim countries1

This article analyses the cross-national determinants of female labor force participation and different industry sectors with a focus on Muslim countries. The study explores neo-patriarchal perspectives and its measures show a significant impact on the different sectors as well as on the share of the total labor force. The Muslim percentage of the population (% Islamic) has its largest impact on the most modern sectors (industry and service). In contrast, % Islamic has no effect on female share of agriculture. Fertility shows no impact on female share of the labor force (FSHLF), but the separate sector models suggest that higher fertility significantly reduces female employment in the modern sectors. The study also examines the effect of economic development across different sectors. Unlike the FSHLF, which shows a curvilinear effect on energy consumption per capita, the sector models show linear effects on the development measure. Therefore the curvilinearity effect is the result of one linear negative impact on female share of agriculture and one linear positive impact on female share of service.