Coal mining directly employs over 7 million workers and benefits millions more through indirect jobs. However, to meet the 1.5 °C global climate target, coal's share in global energy supply should ...decline between 73% and 97% by 2050. But what will happen to coal miners as coal jobs disappear ?Answering this question is necessary to ensure a just transition and to ensure that politically powerful coal mining interests do not impede energy transitions. Some suggest that coal miners can transition to renewable jobs. However, prior research has not investigated the potential for renewable jobs to replace 'local' coal mining jobs. Historic analyses of coal industry declines show that coal miners do not migrate when they lose their jobs. By focusing on China, India, the US, and Australia, which represent 70% of global coal production, we investigate: (1) the local solar and wind capacity required in each coal mining area to enable all coal miners to transition to solar/wind jobs; (2) whether there are suitable solar and wind power resources in coal mining areas in order to install solar/wind plants and create those jobs; and (3) the scale of renewables deployment required to transition coal miners in areas suitable for solar/wind power. We find that with the exception of the US, several GWs of solar or wind capacity would be required in each coal mining area to transition all coal miners to solar/wind jobs. Moreover, while solar has more resource suitability than wind in coal mining areas, these resources are not available everywhere. In China, the country with the largest coal mining workforce, only 29% of coal mining areas are suitable for solar power. In all four countries, less than 7% of coal mining areas have suitable wind resources. Further, countries would have to scale-up their current solar capacity significantly to transition coal miners who work in areas suitable for solar development.
We study changes in employment by occupations characterized by different degree of exposure to routinization in the six largest Latin American economies over the last two decades. We combine our own ...indicators of routine task content based on information from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIACC) with labor market microdata from harmonized national household surveys. We find that the increase in jobs was decreasing in the automatability of the tasks typically performed in each occupation, and increasing in the initial wage, a pattern more consistent with the traditional skill-biased technological change than with the polarization hypothesis.
Purpose
An interview with Zeynep Ton, a professor of practice in the operations management group at MIT Sloan School of Management, about er latest book, The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies ...Bring Dignity, Pay & Meaning to Everyone’s Work.
Design/methodology/approach
She believes that leaders can either view their employees as a cost to be minimized, invest little in them and operate with high turnover, or they can see them as drivers of profitability and growth—investing heavily in them, designing their work for high productivity and contribution and therefore operating with low turnover.-- “the good jobs strategy.”
Findings
The secret sauce of good jobs strategy is four operational choices—focus and simplify, standardize and empower, cross-train and operate with slack—that improve productivity and contribution and make that higher investment possible.
Practical implications
The competitive costs of low people investment are even higher than the poor operational execution costs.
Originality/value
By making the work better and increasing pay, companies can better attract and keep their talent and enforce high standards, which improve execution and service, uplifting revenue. Few have examined this important topic more closely than Zeynep Ton, a professor of practice in the operations management group at MIT Sloan School of Management, best-selling author of The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits.
•Minimizing the makespan of scheduling identical conflicting jobs on uniform machines.•New complexity results on complete bipartite graphs with computational illustration.•Lower bounds and three MILP ...models to solve the problem with arbitrary graphs.•Two heuristic approaches meticulously designed to deliver good quality solutions.•Computational experiments conducted to assess the performance of the given methods.
This paper addresses the problem of scheduling n identical jobs on a set of m parallel uniform machines. The jobs are subjected to conflicting constraints modelled by an undirected graph G, in which adjacent jobs are not allowed to be processed on the same machine. Minimising the maximum completion time in the schedule (makespan Cmax) is known to be NP-hard. We prove that when G is restricted to complete bipartite graphs the problem remains NP-hard for arbitrary number of machines, however, if m is fixed an optimal solution can be obtained in polynomial time. To solve the general case of the problem, we propose mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulations alongside with lower bounds and heuristic approaches. Furthermore, computational experiments are carried out to measure the performance of the proposed methods.
Over the past decade, the United States has been very successful atcreating jobs. Some other industrial countries have clearly lagged behind. But what is the reason why some countries are more ...successful than others at creating employment? Are there common factors that explainjob creation? This paper presents the findings of a new IMF study that has systematically analyzed job creation over the past two decades in theindustrial countries, focusing particularly on differences within Europe.
This study presents one scenario for a 100% renewable energy system in Europe by the year 2050. The transition from a business-as-usual situation in 2050, to a 100% renewable energy Europe is ...analysed in a series of steps. Each step reflects one major technological change. For each step, the impact is presented in terms of energy (primary energy supply), environment (carbon dioxide emissions), and economy (total annual socio-economic cost). The steps are ordered in terms of their scientific and political certainty as follows: decommissioning nuclear power, implementing a large amount of heat savings, converting the private car fleet to electricity, providing heat in rural areas with heat pumps, providing heat in urban areas with district heating, converting fuel in heavy-duty vehicles to a renewable electrofuel, and replacing natural gas with methane. The results indicate that by using the Smart Energy System approach, a 100% renewable energy system in Europe is technically possible without consuming an unsustainable amount of bioenergy. This is due to the additional flexibility that is created by connecting the electricity, heating, cooling, and transport sectors together, which enables an intermittent renewable penetration of over 80% in the electricity sector. The cost of the Smart Energy Europe scenario is approximately 10–15% higher than a business-as-usual scenario, but since the final scenario is based on local investments instead of imported fuels, it will create approximately 10 million additional direct jobs within the EU.
•We review multicriteria scheduling problems involving two or more set of jobs.•We propose an unified framework for multicriteria scheduling problems with two or more set of jobs.•We systematically ...review and classify existing contributions.•We discuss the main advances, and point out future research lines in the topic.
Most classical scheduling research assumes that the objectives sought are common to all jobs to be scheduled. However, many real-life applications can be modeled by considering different sets of jobs, each one with its own objective(s), and an increasing number of papers addressing these problems has appeared over the last few years. Since so far the area lacks a unified view, the studied problems have received different names (such as interfering jobs, multi-agent scheduling, and mixed-criteria), some authors do not seem to be aware of important contributions in related problems, and solution procedures are often developed without taking into account existing ones. Therefore, the topic is in need of a common framework that allows for a systematic recollection of existing contributions, as well as a clear definition of the main research avenues. In this paper we review multicriteria scheduling problems involving two or more sets of jobs and propose an unified framework providing a common definition, name and notation for these problems. Moreover, we systematically review and classify the existing contributions in terms of the complexity of the problems and the proposed solution procedures, discuss the main advances, and point out future research lines in the topic.
...precariousness has many dimensions, and encompasses more than "just" having a temporary contract. ...multiple-job holders are a heterogeneous group of workers (7): not all multiple-job holders ...have temporary contracts in one or more of their jobs. ...for some multiple-job holders, the combination of two precarious jobs may have benefits. ...it is important not to study multiple-job holding as a type of precarious employment and additionally to take the heterogeneity among multiple-job holders into account in future research.
Recent studies show that many workers consider their jobs socially useless. Thus, several explanations for this phenomenon have been proposed. David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’, for example, ...claims that some jobs are in fact objectively useless, and that these are found more often in certain occupations than in others. Quantitative research on Europe, however, finds little support for Graeber’s theory and claims that alienation may be better suited to explain why people consider their jobs socially useless. This study extends previous analyses by drawing on a rich, under-utilized dataset and provides new evidence for the United States specifically. Contrary to previous studies, it thus finds robust support for Graeber’s theory on bullshit jobs. At the same time, it also confirms existing evidence on the effects of various other factors, including alienation. Work perceived as socially useless is therefore a multifaceted issue that must be addressed from different angles.
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