Once a fundamental civic right, strikes are now constrained and contested. In an unusual and thought-provoking history, Josiah Bartlett Lambert shows how the ability to strike was transformed from a ...fundamental right that made the citizenship of working people possible into a conditional and commercialized function. Arguing that the executive branch, rather than the judicial branch, was initially responsible for the shift in attitudes about the necessity for strikes and that the rise of liberalism has contributed to the erosion of strikers' rights, Lambert analyzes this transformation in relation to American political thought. His narrative begins before the Civil War and takes the reader through the permanent striker replacement issue and the alienation of workplace-based collective action from community-based collective action during the 1960s. If the Workers Took a Notion maps the connections among American political development, labor politics, and citizenship to support the claim that the right to strike ought to be a citizenship right and once was regarded as such. Lambert argues throughout that the right to strike must be protected. He challenges the current law turn in labor scholarship and takes into account the role of party alliances, administrative agencies, the military, and the rise of modern presidential powers.
Labor markets and business cycles Shimer, Robert; Shimer, Robert
Princeton University Press eBooks,
2009., 20100412, 2010, 2010-04-12, 20100101
eBook
Odprti dostop
Labor Markets and Business Cycles integrates search and matching theory with the neoclassical growth model to better understand labor market outcomes. Robert Shimer shows analytically and ...quantitatively that rigid wages are important for explaining the volatile behavior of the unemployment rate in business cycles.
Using a sample of mother–child pairs from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we study the economics of cultural transmission regarding women's roles. We find that a mother's attitudes ...have a statistically significant effect on those of her children. Furthermore, we find a strong association between the attitudes of sons in their youth and their wives' labour supply as adults. For daughters, the association between their own attitudes and adult work outcomes is weaker and seems to operate through the educational channel. Our findings indicate that cultural transmission contributes to heterogeneity in the labour supply of women.
Labour market reforms increasing flexibility 'at the margin' have been recently paying out in terms of employment growth. This article argues that two-tier labour market reforms have a transitional ...'honeymoon', job creating effect. In a dynamic model of labour demand under uncertainty, the article predicts that in the aftermath of reforms, beyond an increase in employment, there should be a reduction in 'employment inaction' and in the mean and cross-sectional variance of labour productivity. Based on a variety of firm-level data on Italy in the period 1995-2000, we find evidence of our empirical implications.
Despite decades of research, the concept of normality in labour in terms of its progression and duration is not universal or standardized. However, in clinical practice, it is important to define the ...boundaries that distinguish what is normal from what is abnormal to enable women and care providers have a shared understanding of what to expect and when labour interventions are justified.
To synthesise available evidence on the duration of latent and active first stage and the second stage of spontaneous labour in women at low risk of complications with ‘normal’ perinatal outcomes.
PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, POPLINE, Global Health Library, and reference lists of eligible studies.
Observational studies and other study designs.
Four authors extracted data on: maternal characteristics; labour interventions; duration of latent first stage, active first stage, and second stage of labour; and the definitions of onset of latent and active first stage, and second stage where reported. Heterogeneity in the included studies precluded meta-analysis and data were presented descriptively.
Thirty-seven studies reporting the duration of first and/or second stages of labour for 208,000 women met our inclusion criteria. Among nulliparous women, the median duration of active first stage (when the starting reference point was 4 cm) ranged from 3.7–5.9 h (95th percentiles: 14.5–16.7 h). With active phase starting from 5 cm, the median duration was from 3.8–4.3 h (95th percentiles: 11.3–12.7 h). The median duration of second stage ranged from 14 to 66 min (95th percentiles: 65–138 min) and from 6 to 12 min (95th percentiles: 58–76 min) in nulliparous and parous women, respectively. Sensitivity analyses excluding first and second stage interventions did not significantly impact on these findings
The duration of spontaneous labour in women with good perinatal outcomes varies from one woman to another. Some women may experience labour for longer than previously thought, and still achieve a vaginal birth without adverse perinatal outcomes. Our findings question the rigid limits currently applied in clinical practice for the assessment of prolonged first or second stage that warrant obstetric intervention.
Death and redemption Barnes, Steven A
2011., 20110404, 2011, c2011., 2011-04-04, 20110101
eBook
Death and Redemption offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag--the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons--in Soviet society. Soviet ...authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. In this provocative book, Steven Barnes argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed "reeducated" through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who "failed" never got out alive.
The labor force participation rate in the United States increased almost continuously for two-and-a-half decades after the mid-1960s, pausing only briefly during economic downturns. The pace of ...growth slowed considerably during the 1990s, however, and after reaching a record high of 67.3 percent in the first quarter of 2000, participation had declined by 1.5 percentage points by 2005. This paper reviews the social and demographic trends that contributed to the movements in the labor force participation rate in the second half of the twentieth century. It also examines the manner in which developments in the 2000s reflect a break from past trends and considers implications for the future.
The Valley of South Texas is a region of puzzling contradictions. Despite a booming economy fueled by free trade and rapid population growth, the Valley typically experiences high unemployment and ...low per capita income. The region has the highest rate of drug seizures in the United States, yet its violent crime rate is well below national and state averages. The Valley’s colonias are home to the poorest residents in the nation, but their rates of home ownership and intact two-parent families are among the highest in the country for low-income residential areas. What explains these apparently irreconcilable facts? Since 1982, faculty and students associated with the Borderlife Research Project at the University of Texas–Pan American have interviewed thousands of Valley residents to investigate and describe the cultural and social life along the South Texas–Northern Mexico border. In this book, Borderlife researchers clarify why Valley culture presents so many apparent contradictions as they delve into issues that are “on the edge of the law”—traditional health care and other cultural beliefs and practices, displaced and undocumented workers, immigration enforcement, drug smuggling, property crime, criminal justice, and school dropout rates. The researchers’ findings make it plain that while these issues present major challenges for the governments of the United States and Mexico, their effects and contradictions are especially acute on the border, where residents must daily negotiate between two very different economies; health care, school, and criminal justice systems; and worldviews.
Boschma R., Eriksson R. H. and Lindgren U. Labour market externalities and regional growth in Sweden: the importance of labour mobility between skill-related industries, Regional Studies. This study ...investigates the relationship between labour market externalities and regional growth based on real labour flows. In particular, it tests for the importance of labour mobility across so-called skill-related industries between 435 four-digit industries within 72 Swedish functional regions (1998-2002). Both the fixed-effect models and generalized method of moments (GMM) estimates demonstrate that a strong intensity of intra-regional labour flows between skill-related industries impacts positively on regional productivity growth, but less so on employment growth. Labour mobility between unrelated industries tends to dampen regional unemployment growth while a high degree of intra-industry labour flows is only found to be associated with rising unemployment.
Background
The call for women‐centred approaches to reduce labour interventions, particularly primary caesarean section, has renewed an interest in gaining a better understanding of natural labour ...progression.
Objective
To synthesise available data on the cervical dilatation patterns during spontaneous labour of ‘low‐risk’ women with normal perinatal outcomes.
Search strategy
PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, POPLINE, Global Health Library, and reference lists of eligible studies.
Selection criteria
Observational studies and other study designs.
Data collection and analysis
Two authors extracted data on: maternal characteristics; labour interventions; the duration of labour centimetre by centimetre; and the duration of labour from dilatation at admission through to 10 cm. We pooled data across studies using weighted medians and employed the Bootstrap‐t method to generate the corresponding confidence bounds.
Main results
Seven observational studies describing labour patterns for 99 971 women met our inclusion criteria. The median time to advance by 1 cm in nulliparous women was longer than 1 hour until a dilatation of 5 cm was reached, with markedly rapid progress after 6 cm. Similar labour progression patterns were observed in parous women. The 95th percentiles for both parity groups suggest that it was not uncommon for some women to reach 10 cm, despite dilatation rates that were much slower than the 1‐cm/hour threshold for most part of their first stage of labours.
Conclusion
An expectation of a minimum cervical dilatation threshold of 1 cm/hour throughout the first stage of labour is unrealistic for most healthy nulliparous and parous women. Our findings call into question the universal application of clinical standards that are conceptually based on an expectation of linear labour progress in all women.
Funding
UNDP/UNFPA/UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction (HRP), Department of Reproductive Health and Research, World Health Organization, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Tweetable
Cervical dilatation threshold of 1 cm/hour throughout labour is unrealistic for most women, regardless of parity.
Tweetable
Cervical dilatation threshold of 1 cm/hour throughout labour is unrealistic for most women, regardless of parity.
PDF
