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Building Power from Below: Chilean Workers take on Walmart
Get PDF[Excerpt] A story that involves as its main players workers and Walmart does not usually have a happy ending for labor, so the counternarrative offered by Building Power from Below is must reading for activists and union personnel as well as scholars. In 2008 Walmart acquired a controlling share in a large supermarket chain in Santiago, Chile. As part of the deal Walmart had to accept the unions that were already in place. Since then, Chilean retail and warehouse workers have done something that has seemed impossible for labor in the United States: they have organized even more successful unions and negotiated unprecedented contracts with Walmart.
In Building Power from Below, Carolina Bank Muñoz attributes Chilean workers’ success in challenging the world’s largest corporation to their organizations’ commitment to union democracy and building strategic capacity. Chilean workers have spent years building grassroots organizations committed to principles of union democracy. Retail workers’ unions have less structural power, but have significant associational and symbolic power. Their most notable successes have been in fighting for respect and dignity on the job. Warehouse workers by contrast have substantial structural power and have achieved significant economic gains. While the model in Chile cannot necessarily be reproduced in different countries, we can gain insights from the Chilean workers’ approaches, tactics, and strategies
2016 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor
Get PDF[Excerpt] This month, we release the 16th edition of the annual Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor, a report born from the idea that trade should be fairer for all. Mandated by the Trade and Development Act of 2000 (TDA), which expanded eligibility criteria for the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program, this report shines a spotlight on specific sectors in which child labor, including forced labor and trafficking, persists, and describes the progress some countries have made in upholding their international commitments to eliminate these practices. The report offers recommendations to address these injustices and protect children through improved laws, policies, and practices. Unfortunately, the report also demonstrates how much work is needed to end child labor.
This report provides specific, actionable information to the governments of GSP-beneficiary countries regarding how best to combat labor abuses. Companies also use the report as a critical input into risk assessments, to conduct due diligence on their supply chains, and to develop strategies to address the problem. Our own federal government agencies use the report to safeguard federal procurement by informing procurement officers of risks in sourcing products and services. DOL uses this report to reveal hidden exploitation and partner with countries working to end labor abuses. Through these partnerships, we have rescued and provided educational opportunities to nearly two million children, helped almost 170,000 families meet their basic needs without relying on child labor, and contributed to reducing child labor by more than 94 million worldwide. This month, we are releasing an updated version of our Sweat & Toil app, which puts more than 1,000 pages of this report and other DOL research on child labor and forced labor in the palm of your hand
Argyle, Town of and Town of Argyle Highway Department Unit, International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), AFL-CIO, Local 294 (2017)
Get PDF2014 Reporting of Sexual Assault: Institutional Comparisons
Get PDFInstitutions of higher education are required to submit annual reports of sexual assault crimes to the Department of Education under the Clery Act. The Department of Education makes this data publicly available. Two primary measures are used to assess reporting of assault on campus: the Assault Reporting Ratio (ARR) and the Reporting Rate per 10,000 students (R10K). These measures are easily calculated and can be used to assess practices and policies that impact the reporting of sexual assault on campus.
The ARR and R10K are rate comparisons, a method widely used in public health. These rate comparisons measure how close the institution is to reporting the anticipated number of assaults occurring on campus. Use of these measures allows comparisons between institutions and between years in the same institution. They serve as benchmarks to identify best practices and the impact of legal changes.
The Assault Reporting Ratio compares the reported number of assaults to an estimate of the expected number of assaults. The expected estimate is based on gender-specific assault rates, and college-level (undergraduate or graduate) enrollment based on anonymous survey data. The ARR is expressed as a percentage. An ARR of 100% indicates that the school is counting all of the assaults predicted by national surveys. The R10K is the reported number of assaults per 10,000 students, calculated from the data provided by the institution.
During 2014, 10,607,238 students were enrolled at 1,332 institutions, 82% undergraduates and 18% graduates. A total of 6,429 sexual assaults were reported for all institutions combined. A quarter of institutions (25.7% or 343 colleges) reported no sexual assaults. The summary statistics include all schools with zero reports.
Overall, in 2014, there were 6 reports of sexual assault per 10,000 students (R10K measure). At individual colleges, the range of assault reports was from zero to 215 reports per 10,000 students with a median of 4 (10 IQR). The mean R10K was 9.5 (16.9 SD).
The expected number of assaults in the same population was 282,399. The overall ARR for the country is the reported assaults (6,429) divided by the expected number of assaults (282,399). This figure, 2.3%, indicates that 97.7% of the expected assaults are not reported to the colleges. The median ARR was 1.6% and the mean ARR was 3.5%.
The standardized measures can be used to evaluate institutional policies, changes in programs, and procedures for reports. Attachments include ranking of all institutions in analysis by each measure and Excel, and csv delimited data files
Utility Cost of Formal Privacy for Releasing National Employer-Employee Statistics
Get PDFNational statistical agencies around the world publish tabular summaries based on combined employer-employee (ER-EE) data. The privacy of both individuals and business establishments that feature in these data are protected by law in most countries. These data are currently released using a variety of statistical disclosure limitation (SDL) techniques that do not reveal the exact characteristics of particular employers and employees, but lack provable privacy guarantees limiting inferential disclosures. In this work, we present novel algorithms for releasing tabular summaries of linked ER-EE data with formal, provable guarantees of privacy. We show that state-of-the-art differentially private algorithms add too much noise for the output to be useful. Instead, we identify the privacy requirements mandated by current interpretations of the relevant laws, and formalize them using the Pufferfish framework. We then develop new privacy definitions that are customized to ER-EE data and satisfy the statutory privacy requirements. We implement the experiments in this paper on production data gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau. An empirical evaluation of utility for these data shows that for reasonable values of the privacy-loss parameter ϵ≥1, the additive error introduced by our provably private algorithms is comparable, and in some cases better, than the error introduced by existing SDL techniques that have no provable privacy guarantees. For some complex queries currently published, however, our algorithms do not have utility comparable to the existing traditiona
Does Migrating with Children Influence Migrants\u27 Occupation Choice and Income
Get PDFThis paper studies the impact of migrant children on their parents’ occupation choice and wage income using a dataset from a household survey conducted in 2011. We find that the heads of migrant households with school-age children earn significantly less than those who left them at their place of hukou registration. This result holds when we control for personal characteristics, migration duration, origin location, and family structure. Households migrating with school-age children have a higher probability of doing so within the prefecture/province of their hukou registration and are less likely to target coastal regions. After controlling for migration scope and destination location, the presence of children does not influence wages of migrant household heads. We also find that the presence of children below the age of six has no impact on the income of migrant household heads. Our results suggest that the hukou system still impedes labor mobility
Can Trade Help Achieve the Employment Targets of the Sustainable Development Goals
Get PDFThe paper asks whether trade can help to achieve the employment targets of the Sustainable Development Goals. The focus is on Goal 8, which is to “promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all.” The theoretical and empirical links between trade and employment are examined to suggest whether trade has a positive or negative impact on the quantity and quality of employment. At the aggregate level, trade has a positive impact on welfare, which can lead to job creation. However, freer trade causes some sectors and firms to expand and others to shrink. This adjustment process creates both a demand for labor in some sectors and job losses in others. Government policies to cushion the impact of adjustment and facilitate the movement of labor from declining to rising sectors are discussed
2016 CAHRS Partner Day Summary
Get PDF[Excerpt] Looking back upon the Fall 2016 semester, the Cornell HR Review would like to take the opportunity to reflect on some of the seminars and activities that our executive team attended. One highlight was the Center for Advanced Human Resources (CAHRS) Partner Day, with “HR Innovations” as the theme. The CAHRS partnership connects leading companies, ranging from American Express to Shell, to Cornell University, the ILR School, and intellectual leaders to advance global human resources management
Assistance to Firefighters Program: Distribution of Fire Grant Funding
Get PDF[Excerpt] Firefighting activities are traditionally the responsibility of states and local communities. As such, funding for firefighters is provided mostly by state and local governments. During the 1990s, shortfalls in state and local budgets, coupled with increased responsibilities of local fire departments, led many in the fire community to call for additional financial support from the federal government. Although federally funded training programs existed (and continue to exist) through the National Fire Academy, and although federal money was available to first responders for counterterrorism training and equipment through the Department of Justice, there did not exist a dedicated program, exclusively for firefighters, which provided federal money directly to local fire departments to help address a wide variety of equipment, training, and other firefighter-related needs
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant: Subsidized Employment Demonstration Proposal: In Brief
Get PDF[Excerpt] The proposed Accelerating Individuals into the Workforce Act (H.R. 2842) would provide 100 million cost of the proposal would be financed by reserving funds from the FY2018 appropriation for the TANF contingency fund.
Subsidized employment programs are those where public funds are used to pay all or part of the wages, benefits, and other costs of employing an individual. Career pathways are a workforce development approach that combines education, training, and other services to help individuals enter or advance within a specific occupation or occupation grouping.
The bill was ordered reported from the House Ways and Means Committee on June 15, 2017. It is scheduled for House floor consideration the week of June 19, 2017