This book brings to life the important but neglected story of African American postal workers and the critical role they played in the U.S. labor and black freedom movements. Historian Philip Rubio, ...a former postal worker, integrates civil rights, labor, and left movement histories that too often are written as if they happened separately. Centered on New York City and Washington, D.C., the book chronicles a struggle of national significance through its examination of the post office, a workplace with facilities and unions serving every city and town in the United States.Black postal workers--often college-educated military veterans--fought their way into postal positions and unions and became a critical force for social change. They combined black labor protest and civic traditions to construct a civil rights unionism at the post office. They were a major factor in the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike, which resulted in full collective bargaining rights for the major postal unions under the newly established U.S. Postal Service in 1971. In making the fight for equality primary, African American postal workers were influential in shaping today's post office and postal unions.
We generate the first cross-city panel dataset of land-use reforms that increase or decrease allowed housing density and estimate their association with changes in housing supply and rents. To ...generate reform data, we use machine-learning algorithms to search US newspaper articles between 2000 and 2019, then manually code them to increase accuracy. We merge these data with US Postal Service information on per-city counts of addresses and Census data on demographics, rents, and units affordable to households of different incomes. We then estimate a fixed-effects model with city specific time trends to examine the relationships between land-use reforms and the supply and price of rental housing. We find that reforms that loosen restrictions are associated with a statistically significant 0.8% increase in housing supply within three to nine years of reform passage, accounting for new and existing stock. This increase occurs predominantly for units at the higher end of the rent price distribution; we find no statistically significant evidence that additional lower-cost units became available or moderated in cost in the years following reforms. However, impacts are positive across the affordability spectrum and we cannot rule out that impacts are equivalent across different income segments. Conversely, reforms that increase land-use restrictions and lower allowed densities are associated with increased median rents and a reduction in units affordable to middle-income renters.
The distribution networks of the postal service industry are organized according to the hub-and-spoke paradigm, so that parcel distribution centers play a crucial role to consolidate the parcel flows ...to full truckloads. In these terminals, inbound trucks are unloaded at gates, shipments are identified, sorted by the central sortation conveyor system, and loaded into outbound trailers, in which they are moved toward their next destination. In this context, the scheduling of inbound trucks, which assigns a gate and a processing interval to each truck, is an essential operational decision problem. We formalize the resulting optimization problem and provide suited solution procedures. Furthermore, we test the impact of truck scheduling on the sortation performance of the central conveyor system with the help of a comprehensive terminal simulation.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2016.0722
.
In the unsupervised open set domain adaptation (UOSDA), the target domain contains unknown classes that are not observed in the source domain. Researchers in this area aim to train a classifier to ...accurately: 1) recognize unknown target data (data with unknown classes) and 2) classify other target data. To achieve this aim, a previous study has proven an upper bound of the target-domain risk, and the open set difference, as an important term in the upper bound, is used to measure the risk on unknown target data. By minimizing the upper bound, a shallow classifier can be trained to achieve the aim. However, if the classifier is very flexible e.g., deep neural networks (DNNs), the open set difference will converge to a negative value when minimizing the upper bound, which causes an issue where most target data are recognized as unknown data. To address this issue, we propose a new upper bound of target-domain risk for UOSDA, which includes four terms: source-domain risk, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\epsilon </tex-math></inline-formula>-open set difference (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\Delta _\epsilon </tex-math></inline-formula>), distributional discrepancy between domains, and a constant. Compared with the open set difference, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\Delta _\epsilon </tex-math></inline-formula> is more robust against the issue when it is being minimized, and thus we are able to use very flexible classifiers (i.e., DNNs). Then, we propose a new principle-guided deep UOSDA method that trains DNNs via minimizing the new upper bound. Specifically, source-domain risk and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\Delta _\epsilon </tex-math></inline-formula> are minimized by gradient descent, and the distributional discrepancy is minimized via a novel open set conditional adversarial training strategy. Finally, compared with the existing shallow and deep UOSDA methods, our method shows the state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets, including digit recognition modified National Institute of Standards and Technology database (MNIST), the Street View House Number (SVHN), U.S. Postal Service (USPS), object recognition (Office-31, Office-Home), and face recognition pose, illumination, and expression (PIE).
This paper aims to present an innovative approach to design a Lean Service System in the India Post service industry using the Simulation method to reduce the system’s complexity. Using logic and ...systematic building blocks, simulation models have been developed from lean service elements using the arena software and verified in Siemens Tecnomatix plant simulation suite. Simulation is used to replicate the real model, guide the future production system, and determine the optimal parameter values. Simulation studies have been divided into two perspectives, “before LS” and “after LS” through Value Stream Mapping (VSM). It has been found that there is a 9.62 percent enhancement in delivering articles per person. A real case of postal service internal operational performance has been taken for the study. This study is the first to combine Value Stream Mapping - Simulation (VSM-Sim) to simulate and optimize the mailing service operations’ operational performance parameters.
The aims of this study are to examine the impacts of liberalization policy on the monopoly postal service market in developing countries like Indonesia. Liberalization policy has altered the business ...and way of State Owned Enterprise (SOE) to run its social welfare functions. Using the case of PT Pos Indonesia through quantitative methods to support qualitative analysis, this study reveals that liberalization is potential to promote the company’s financial and efficiency performance, unless the government clearly determines about its socio-economic function on SOE. Abstrak Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah menguji dampak kebijakan liberalisasi atas monopoli layanan pos di negara berkembang seperti Indonesia. Diterbitkannya kebijakan liberalisasi layanan pos berdampak pada proses bisnis dan operasi pada Badan Usaha Milik Negara (BUMN) dalam menjalankan fungsi kesejahteraan sosial. Melalui telaah kasus PT Pos Indonesia menggunakan metode kuantitatif untuk mendukung analisis kualitatif, penelitian ini mengindikasikan bahwa kebijakan liberalisasi dapat berpotensi memperbaiki kinerja keuangan dan efisiensi perusahaan, hanya jika pemerintah secara jelas menentukan fungsi sosio-ekonomi yang dijalankan oleh BUMN.
This paper aims to study the determinants of the Lean Service System (LSS) on the Operational Performance (OP) of India's mail service in the National Sorting Hub (NSH), Mangaluru, Karnataka, the ...southern part of India. Measuring the OP in mail service is a big challenge in the postal service industry. Hence, we have conducted a survey, and 150 usable data has measured the impact of Lean Service Practices (LSP), Lean Workplace Environment Practices (LWEP), and Lean Social Practices (LSoP) on the OP. The results are analyzed from the partial least square based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with the support of R programming. The analysis shows that there is positive and significant impact of LSP (
β
= 0.380,
p
< .05), followed by LWEP (
β
= 0.281,
p
< .05), and LSoP (
β
= 0.266,
p
< .05) on OP. The practical effect of the findings of LSS are effectively implemented for enhancing the OP of the business. This research addresses the appropriate empirical model to test LSS in India's postal service industry, which is scant in the existing literature. Moreover, this study helps India Post to review its policy so as to sustain the effectiveness of Lean Service (LS) implementation.
Purpose
To study the workers’ perception of the quality of work community and its association with intention to retire early, separately among women and men working in Finnish postal service.
Methods
...A questionnaire survey was sent to all Finnish postal services employees aged ≥ 50 years in 2016 and 44% (
n
= 2096) replied to the survey (mean age 56.3, 40% women). Employee’s intention to retire before statutory retirement was measured on a scale of 1–5 and dichotomized. The quality of work community was defined by four composite variables: equality at work, flexibility at work, supportive work environment and health or other reason and trichotomized by their tercile values. Odds ratio (ORs) and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for associations of quality of work community with intention to retire were calculated separately for men and women using log binomial regression models adjusted for potential confounders.
Results
About one-third of respondents intended to retire early with no significant gender difference in retirement intention. Low equality at work (women OR 2.77, 95% CI 1.60–4.81; men 2.84, 1.80–4.48) and low flexibility at work (women 3.30, 1.94–5.60; men 2.91, 1.88–4.50) was associated with higher likelihood of intention to retire. Among women intention to retire was found less likely due to low supportive work environment (0.52, 0.31–0.89) and among men due to intermediate health or other reason (0.65, 043–0.98).
Conclusion
The results highlight the importance of the quality of work community as well as the promotion of work-related health in order to encourage employees to remain at workforce for longer.
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