Digital Commons Network^™

Corporate Social Performance: Reporting Roundtable, Poonam Puri, Edward J. Waitzer, Kevin Ranney, Michael Torrance

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

The purpose of this consultation (to take place in Toronto, Canada on December 7, 2009) is to elicit the views of informed stakeholders in a review of reporting and disclosure requirements under Ontario securities legislation for corporate “social” performance. In particular, the Consultation paper considers whether existing reporting and disclosure requirements on corporate social performance are adequate. If change is advisable, the question becomes what regulatory or other measures merit consideration.

The Consultation is in response to a private member’s resolution introduced by the Honorable Laurel Broten (Etobicoke-Lakeshore), and passed unanimously by the Ontario Legislature (the “Resolution”). In part, the …

0591 Interim Committee To Study Issues Related To Pinnacol Assurance, Colorado Legislative Council

All Publications (Colorado Legislative Council)

No abstract provided.

Self-Advocacy Of Women In Sexualized Labor, 1880-1980s, Kim Marie Matthews

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study is to centralize, into women's history, the marginalized historical voices of women activists working in sexualized labor (and/or those using sexualized economic strategies). This thesis situates the work of Josie Washburn, a former madam who turned self advocate in 1907, squarely within the Progressive Era debate on prostitution, By centralizing women's voices of sexualized lahor, it provides a means to track the long-term evolution of the intersections between women's sexualized labor choices, traditional labor choices, self-advocacy, popular media, and social/political movements on behalf of women. This study asserts that a majority Progressive Era working women …

Pendekatan Integratif Terhadap Faktor Yang Mempengaruhi Intensi Buruh Untuk Mengikuti Aksi Kolektif, Silverius Yoseph Soeharso

Makara Human Behavior Studies in Asia

This research attempts to build a structural model based on an integrative approach to explain labor intention to participate in collective action. This research is relevant as most of the existing theories and approaches explain the collective action phenomena partially. The main objective of this research is to analyze the integrative approach of psychological social psychology (individual factors), sociological social psychology (inter-group relation factors) and social constructionism (societal factor) in explaining labor intention to participate in collective action, such as demonstrations and labor strikes. This integrative approach research tested a theoretically derived pattern of specific relationship between individual level of …

Gender, Reproductive Health, And Daily Life In An Experience Of Action-Research With Youth Of Maré, Rio De Janeiro, R Barbosa, K Giffin

English

Objectives: To analyze the results of applying action-research techniques on issues such as gender, sexuality and reproductive health in groups of young men and women.

Signaling The Competencies Of High School Students To Employers, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] The fundamental cause of the low effort level of American students, parents, and voters in school elections is the absence of good signals of effort and accomplishment and the consequent lack of rewards for learning. In most other advanced countries mastery of the curriculum is assessed by examinations that are set and graded at the national or regional level. Grades on these exams signal the student's achievement to employers and colleges and influence the jobs that graduates get and the universities and programs to which they are admitted. Exam results also influence school reputations and in some countries the …

Is It Wise To Try To Force Employers To Pay All The Costs Of Training At The Workplace?, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] This article explores the effects that these regulations have on: (a) the form of labor contracts and on training outcomes such as: (b) who pays for work place training of non-exempt employees, (c) whether training is obtained at schools or firms, (d) how much training non-exempt employees get? The evidence on who gets and who pays for training is consistent with the proposition that these regulations are having the effects that economists would predict for them. Many other explanations fit the data just as well, however, so causal connections between these regulations and training outcomes cannot be proved beyond …

The Incidence Of And Payoff To Employer Training: A Review Of The Literature With Recommendations For Policy, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] The theory of on-the-job training predicts that workers should pay the full costs of training that is useful at other firms. In fact, however, workers receiving training are not paid less than other similar workers and new hires who require extra training are paid only slightly less than new hires who require less than average amounts of training. Many employers offer workers the opportunity to learn general skills such as word processing and other computer applications programs on company time. Studies of the costs and benefits of apprenticeship training programs find that employers do not recoup their investment during …

Student, Staff, And Employer Incentives For Improved Student Achievement And Work Readiness, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

“This article proposes a strategy for banishing mediocrity and building in its place an excellent American system of secondary education. Before a cure can be prescribed, however, a diagnosis must be made.”

Is The Test Score Decline Responsible For The Productivity Growth Decline?, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] The test score decline between 1967 and 1980 was large (about 1.25 grade-level equivalents) and historically unprecedented. New estimates of trend in academic achievement, of the effect of academic achievement on productivity and of trend in the quality of the work force are developed. They imply that if test scores had continued to grow after 1967 at the rate that prevailed in the previous quarter century, labor quality would now be 2.9 percent higher and 1987 GNP $86 billion higher.

What's Wrong With American Secondary Schools: Can State And Federal Governments Fix It?, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] The poor performance of American students is sometimes blamed on the nation's "diversity". Many affluent parents apparently believe that their children are doing acceptably by international standards. This is not the case. In Stevenson, Lee and Stigler's (1986) study of 5th grade math achievement, the best of the 20 classrooms sampled in Minneapolis was outstripped by every single classroom studied in Sendai, Japan and by 19 of the 20 classrooms studied in Taipeh, Taiwan. The nation's top high school students rank far behind much less elite samples of students in other countries. In mathematics the gap between Japanese and …

Improving Job-Worker Matching In The Us Labor Market: What Is The Role Of The Employment Service?, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] Educational and political leaders are calling for improvements in the signalling and certification of academic and occupational skills to the labor market. The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), for example, has recommended a national system for assessing individual accomplishments and work readiness that would be "designed so that, when teachers teach and students study, both are engaged in authentic practice of valued competencies." For educational reformers, better signalling is not an end in itself but a means of inducing students, parents, teachers and school boards to place greater priority on learning and of reforming the content and …

Is Welfare Reform Succeeding?, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

Welfare Reform and the Earned Income Tax Credit have apparently caused a dramatic increase in the labor force participation rates of single parents. Between the first quarters of 1994 and 1998, labor force participation rates rose 25.4 percent for never-married women caring for children, rose 15.5 percent for mothers separated from their spouse and rose 4.9 percent for divorced single mothers. By contrast, unmarried individuals and separated and divorced women who were not caring for children lowered their rates of participation in the labor market. The rise in the labor force participation rates of single parents between 1994 and 1998 …

Improving Education: How Large Are The Benefits? How Can It Be Done Efficiently? , John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] The Problem: The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reports that 92 percent of high school seniors cannot "integrate specialized scientific information" and do not have "the capacity to apply mathematical operations in a variety of problem settings." (NAEP 1988a p. 51, 1988b p. 42) According to the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey, only 23 percent of adults are able to reliably determine correct change using information from a menu (National Center for Education Statistics, 1994 Table 1.3).

The Growth Of Female College Attendance: Causes And Prospects, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] This paper analyzes the response of female college attendance and completion rates to changes over time (and variations across labor markets) in the payoff to college and the cost of attendance and the preparation of students for college. The robustness of the main findings will be checked by analyzing two very different data sets: cross section data on individuals and time series data on awegate college enrollment and completion rates from 1949 to 1989. In Section 1, a simple model of the college attendance decision is developed which incorporates most of the factors discussed above. Section 2 presents the …

Department Of Labor Testing: Seizing An Opportunity To Increase The Competitiveness Of American Industry And To Raise The Earnings Of American Workers , John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] Greater use of tests assessing competence in verbal, mathematical, technical arenas and in specific occupations for selecting workers will have important effects on the economy. First, the rewards for developing the competencies measured by the tests will rise and this will increase the supply of workers whh these competencies. Tests like the General Aptitude Test Battery predict job performance because they measure or are correlated with a large set of developed abilities which are causa}]y related to productivity and not because they are correlated with an inherited ability to learn. Legal barriers to increased use of tests assessing verbal, …

The Impacts Of Career-Technical Education On High School Completion And Labor Market Success, John H. Bishop, Ferran Mane

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] High school career-technical education (CTE) is a massive enterprise. Last year high school students spent more than 1.5 billion hours in vocational courses of one kind or another. Of the twenty-six courses taken by the typical high school graduate, 4.2 are career-tech courses (NCES 2003a). Courses in general labor market preparation (principles of technology, industrial arts, typing, keyboarding, etc) and family and consumer sciences are offered in almost every lower and upper-secondary school. High school graduates in the year 2000 took 1.2 full-year introductory CTE courses during upper-secondary school and probably almost as many during middle school (NCES 2003a).

A Signaling/Bonding Model Of Employer Finance Of General Training, John H. Bishop, Suk Kang

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] This paper challenges the general validity of these simple predictions. It begins in section 2 by presenting empirical evidence that (1) trainees often do not have to accept lower wage jobs in order to obtain training and (2) that employers often appear to be sharing the costs of general training with employees. In section 3 we expand and generalize Hashimoto's elegant theory of the sharing of the costs and benefits of specific training and show why with our modifications firms choose to offer front loaded compensation packages in which they appear to share the costs of general training with …

Making Vocational Education More Effective For At-Risk Youth, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

"Occupationally specific vocational training pays off for disadvantaged students, but only if graduates work in the jobs they were trained for. Implication: Vocational educators must help make sure that the skills they teach are used."

Is An Oversupply Of College Graduates Coming?, John H. Bishop

John H Bishop

[Excerpt] Demand for college graduates workers was strong during the 1980s (Blackburn, Bloom and Freeman 1989; Katz and Murphy 1990; Kosters 1989; Freeman 1991). The relative wage of college graduate workers rose and college attendance rose in response. Have the demand and technology shocks that produced this result run their course? Is the supply response large enough to stop and/or reverse the 1980s escalation of the relative wages of college graduates? Read superficially, Bureau of Labor Statistics projections appear to suggest that the answers to these questions are YES. In the latest BLS report, the growing supply of college graduates …

The Equal Protection Class Of One Claim: Olech, Enquist, And The Supreme Court's Misadventure, Robert C. Farrell

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Labor Turnover In The Child-Care Industry: Voice And Exit, Lynn A. Hatch

Open Access Dissertations

What relationship exists between working conditions and teacher turnover in child-care (early care and education) programs? Research has shown high staff turnover is a major factor affecting the quality of care. Using a new survey and data set I designed of union and randomly selected non-union programs in Massachusetts, I examine factors other than compensation that might be related to lower teacher turnover. Focusing on different institutional settings, including unionization and regional unemployment, I use economist Albert Hirschman’s theory of exit, voice and loyalty to see if “voice” alternatives to quitting are an effective method of reducing exits. “Voice” alternatives …

Blue Cohosh: History, Science, Safety, And Midwife Prescribing Of A Potentially Fetotoxic Herb, Aviva Romm

Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library

Abstract: Blue Cohosh: Science, Safety, And Patterns of Midwife Prescribing Of A Potentially Fetotoxic Herb Aviva Jill Romm (Sponsored by Errol Norwitz) Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Yale University School of Medicine Background: Blue cohosh (Caulopyhyllum thalictroides) has been used traditionally and historically as an obstetric aid for labor induction, to assure a prompt delivery, to relieve childbirth pain, and to induce abortion. Officially listed in the United States Pharmacopoeia from 1882-1905 and in the National Formulary from 1916-1950 for labor induction, its use remains popular. Maternal ingestion has been implicated in acute nicotinic toxicity, neonatal heart failure, perinatal stroke, …

Trade’S Hidden Costs: Worker Rights In A Changing World Economy, John Cavanagh, Lance Compa, Allan Ebert, Bill Goold, Kathy Selvaggio, Tim Shorrock

Lance A Compa

[Excerpt] For decades, the U.S. foreign assistance program has sought with limited results to further economic development and growth in Third World countries. We have witnessed some countries making real progress toward development through industrialization, only to find more of their people trapped in hunger and poverty. Hopefully, it is apparent that for development to be effective, it must benefit the broadest sectors of the population within any society. Why are worker rights crucial to the development process? The capacity to form unions and to bargain collectively to achieve higher wages and safer working conditions is essential to the overall …

Us Foreign Trade Zones As The Secret Lover: Is Uncle Sam Faithful To Tariff Elimination?, Richard J. Smith

Social Work Faculty Publications

For centuries the nations and principalities of the world have engaged in trading schemes to boost exports. Conquest, protection of domestic supply through tariffs and eroding domestic currency are all part of the historic policy harem. The United States has a foreign trade zone program. Who knew? FTZs evoke images of women locked inside a dark sweatshop in a jungle making hoodies for football fans. While these "developing" countries have unambiguously embraced FTZs as an export strategy, Uncle Sam has played the unwilling suitor to the concept, making the FTZ a common law revealed preference while engaged with but not …

Representations Of Labor In The Slave Narrative, Agnel Natasha Barron

English Theses

This study examines the slave narratives The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself and The Bondwoman’s Narrative to determine the way in which these texts depict the economics of labor in slave society. Taking into account the specific socio-historical contexts in which these narratives were written, this study analyzes the way in which the representations of labor in these narratives interrogate slavery and address issues relating to the social relations and power dynamics of their respective societies. Emphasis is given to the way in which the …

Fulfilling Technology's Promise: Enforcing The Rights Of Women Caught In The Global High-Tech Underclass, Shruti Rana

Shruti Rana

In the early 1980s, Malaysian women working in electronics factories began to experience hallucinations and seizures. Factory bosses manipulated their employees' religious and cultural beliefs, convincing the women that their bodies were inhabited by demons. In this manner, they avoided confronting the more likely causes: the rigid, paternalistic work environment, the intense production pressures placed on the women, and the lengthy shifts and potentially hazardous conditions that the women were forced to endure. This example illustrates the use of gender, religion, and to control and exploit women's labor in the high-tech industry. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated situation. This …

Ensuring A Decent Global Workplace: Labor Rights Belong In Trade Agreements, Lance A. Compa

Lance A Compa

[Excerpt] Linking workers' rights to international trade is an idea whose time has come and stayed, despite the best efforts of free trade ideologues to chase it away. In looming congressional debates about "fast track" negotiating authority, the Bush administration and Congress confront powerful demands from workers, trade unionists and a wider public for rules protecting human rights and labor rights, not just corporate investments, in trade agreements.

Grossman’S Missing Health Threshold, Titus Galama, Arie Kapteyn

Titus Galama

We present a generalized solution to Grossman’s model of health capital (1972), relaxing the widely used assumption that individuals can adjust their health stock instantaneously to an “optimal” level without adjustment costs. The Grossman model then predicts the existence of a health threshold above which individuals do not demand medical care. Our generalized solution addresses a significant criticism: the model’s prediction that health and medical care are positively related is consistently rejected by the data. We suggest structural and reduced form equations to test our generalized solution and contrast the predictions of the model with the empirical literature.

An Assessment Of The Singapore Skills Development System: Does It Constitute A Viable Model For Other Developing Nations?, Sarosh Kuruvilla, Christopher L. Erickson, Alvin Hwang

Sarosh Kuruvilla

In this paper, we briefly describe the institutional background to Singapore’s successful national skills development model. We devise a tentative framework to evaluate national level skills development efforts, and we use it to assess the Singapore model. We argue that the model has the potential to constantly move towards higher skills equilibria, and in those terms, it is successful. However, we question the long-term sustainability of the model, and whether it is transferable to other developing nations. We outline several useful principles that other nations might use in organizing their own skills development systems.