Union-management solutions for preventing workplace injury of older workers

As the US workforce continues to age, organized labor and management will have to work creatively to redesign jobs, workflow, and work pace to accommodate older workers. Union-management cooperation in developing safety strategies have been largely unsuccessful because of mutual distrust, animosity left over from contract negotiations and administration, the absence of strong labor legislation that promotes shared governance, injury concealment, and world-wide competitive pressures to reduce labor costs at the expense of worker safety. If workplace injury prevention that focuses on cost-effective and efficient workplace modifications for older as well as for all workers is to become reality, then employers and their unions will need to develop solutions to forge new, more expansive approaches to accommodation.     

Disaster impact and recovery: what children and young people can tell us

Christchurch's earthquakes revealed children's vulnerability to disaster but also their ability to respond and play an active role in recovery. We argue that children's voices need to be heard and given priority in the recovery process because the disaster impacts on them and their families in ways that are not recognised or well understood. We report the findings of a study undertaken with 94 Christchurch children. Its aim was to give voice to children's experiences of post-earthquake Christchurch and in doing so contribute to post-disaster recovery. The experiences of these Christchurch children offer other children, parents, government and agencies valuable insights into how to manage the recovery process in ways that best meet children's needs. In the post-disaster recovery period, decision-makers need to recognise children as authentic actors in the recovery process and should commit to hearing children's voices throughout the rebuilding. Children and young people's resilience and positive commitment to Christchurch are assets that should be capitalised on in the longer-term recovery process.     

Measuring the Cost of the Fear of Unemployment: An Information Approach

A method of measuring the insecurity costs of unemployment or what might be termed the fear of unemployment effect is proposed. The approach is from an individual perspective and builds on a cost measure first suggested by Lucas. The measure is designed to abstract away from any output losses that might be incurred in a recession. The latter is the traditional Keynesian way of measuring recession costs. The paper demonstrates the intuitively sensible properties of the measure and argues that to neglect the fear of unemployment effect as is done with standard Keynesian cost measures could seriously underestimate recession costs for some individual types. The paper concludes with a multiperiod simulation of the insecurity cost measure.     

Income Inequality and Chronic Health Conditions: A Multilevel Analysis of the U.S. States

Recently, scholarly work has examined the effect of rising income inequality on health outcomes. However, this work is somewhat inconclusive. The mechanisms that could produce such an association are still being sorted out. Much of this work focuses on mortality outcomes with little attention to how this process operates for actual health conditions, including chronic health problems—arguably the main public health concerns of the developed world. In a series of multilevel binary logistic regression models using data from the 2005 and 2007 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we examine the association between state-level income inequality, poverty, and social welfare measures on spending and policy to examine the association between these factors for three chronic health outcomes: diabetes, hypertension, and coronary heart disease. We find that income inequality is conditionally positively related only to the diagnosis of diabetes and hypertension, and only in 2007. However, absolute poverty is related to the outcome across all three dependent variables. Certain social welfare measures attenuate the effects of both income inequality and absolute poverty, suggesting that some policies reduce this association.     

Racial Residential Segregation,Perceived Neighborhood Conditions,and Self-Rated Health: The Case of Houston,Texas

Previous research has linked racial residential segregation to a number of poor health outcomes. Yet, the mechanisms that could account for this association remain poorly understood and have seldom been empirically tested in the literature. In an analysis of the Houston area, we test one potential mechanism—perceived neighborhood conditions, as measured by two indices for neighborhood disorder and environmental quality. Using individual-level health data from a survey of Houston residents and neighborhood-level sociodemographic data from the U.S. Census, we estimate a series of multilevel models. We find that black and Latino segregation are linked to the perceived neighborhood disorder index, but no such relationship for the environmental quality index. Moreover, we find that both indices are related to poor self-rated health in that residents who evaluate their neighborhood conditions negatively are more likely to evaluate their health as poor. We also find a direct effect of black and Latino segregation on poor self-rated health, and that perceived neighborhood disorder partially mediates this relationship. We do not find a mediation effect for environmental quality. The results suggest that in order to improve the health of these communities, both residential segregation and neighborhood conditions need to be addressed.     

Erratum to: On the Social Validity of Behavior-Analytic Communication: a Call for Research and Description of One Method

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior -     

The governance of primary mental health planning by Primary Health Networks

The establishment of Primary Health Networks (PHNs) was accompanied by assignment of responsibility for funding for primary mental healthcare. To ensure this funding is spent in line with government priorities, the Federal government developed a planning document with established priorities and guidance documents for how the planning document should be completed. This paper examines how these documents shape service delivery through enabling some activities and excluding others and identifies the assumptions that underpin these documents. Data were drawn from discourse and content analysis of completed planning documents from the PHNs and of the guidance documents and from reflection upon mental health planning from 55 interviews with key personnel from six PHNs. Service delivery is shaped by outcome measures that promote service access, cost‐effectiveness and clinical effectiveness, contributing to service options that favour self‐management for mild mental illness and clinical (but not social) services for people with severe mental illness. There is also limited scope for mental health promotion with prevention activities focused upon populations identified by the government as being at‐risk. This occurs to the detriment of other at‐risk populations.     

Hysteresis versus Persistence in Unemployment: A Sceptical Note on Unit Root Tests

ABSTRACT: Previous studies of time-series data suggest that the rate of unemployment is best described as a driftless random walk. This is a far from trivial point because the policy implications of an alternative stationary series can be very different. On the basis of simulated data, this paper demonstrates how the rate of unemployment may appear to be difference stationary, yet is actually trend stationary, and that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the low power of the standard unit root test for stationarity is significant with regard to the conduct of policy. Thus, although the series under investigation may in fact offer little scope for successful policy intervention, the null hypothesis of a unit root may be accepted along with its attendant policy implications. Finally, an alternative test based on a null hypothesis of a stationary process is assessed.