Legislative Alert: Rokita Amendment

[Excerpt] The AFL-CIO urges you to oppose the Rokita Amendment to the Homeland Security bill that would deny basic collective bargaining rights to Transportation Security Officers (TSOs). The Rokita Amendment would single out TSOs from among the hundreds of thousand of Homeland Security Employees who currently have full collective bargaining rights, including the at Border Patrol, Federal Protective Service, the Coast Guard and U.S. Marshalls Service

For A Service Conception of Epistemic Authority: A Collective Approach

This paper attempts to provide a remedy to a surprising lacuna in the current discussion in the epistemology of expertise, namely the lack of a theory accounting for the epistemic authority of collective agents. After introducing a service conception of epistemic authority based on Alvin Goldman’s account of a cognitive expert, I argue that this service conception is well suited to account for the epistemic authority of collective bodies on a non-summativist perspective, and I show in detail how the defining requirements of an expert can apply to epistemic groups

How to enhance service quality through organizational facilitators, collective work engagement, and relational service competence

This study aims to test how collective work engagement and relational service competence, as affective and cognitive-competent collective states, mediate the relationship between organizational facilitators and customers' perceptions of service quality. In all, 107 service-oriented units were aggregated from 615 service workers and 2165 customers. Structural equation modelling confirmed that organizational facilitators are related to collective work engagement andrelational service competence, which play a mediating role between organizational facilitators and service quality. Whereas collective work engagement plays a partially mediating role between organizational facilitators and relational service competence, relational service competence plays a fully mediating role between collective work engagement and service quality. A discussion and limitations are also provided

Exploring the role of professional associations in collective learning in London and New York's advertising and law professional service firm clusters.

The value of regional economies for collective learning has been reported by numerous scholars. However often work has been criticised for lacking analytical clarity and failing to explore the architectures of collective learning and the role of the knowledge produced in making firms in a cluster economy successful. This paper engages with these problematics and investigates how collective learning is facilitated in the advertising and law professional service firm clusters in London and New York. It explores the role of professional associations and investigates how they mediate a collective learning process in each city. It argues that professional associations seed urban communities of practice that emerge outside of the formal activities of professional associations. In these communities individual with shared interests in advertising and law learn from one-another and are therefore able to adapt and evolve one-another approaches to common industry challenges. The paper suggests this is another form of the variation Marshall highlighted in relation to cluster-based collective learning. The paper also shows how the collective learning process is affected by the presence, absence and strength of an institutional thickness. It is therefore argued that a richer understanding of institutional affects is needed in relation to CL

Collective wage agreements and the adjustment of workers and hours in German service firms

There is a growing concern about collective wage agreement and employment dynamics in Germany. In this paper, evidence is provided on the way collective wage agreements affect the adjustment of working hours, employment and other production factors when firms from the service sector are faced with demand shocks. The estimation results indicate that collective wage agreements significantly influence firms' employment policies. Enrolments and the employment of free-lance collaborators are negatively affected while the probability of using short-term employment contracts as a reaction to demand shocks is positively influenced. No significant effect on the probability of dismissing workers has been found. --collective wage agreements,demand fluctuations and adjustment costs,random effects ordered probit model,business-related services

Developments in Collectively Agreed Working Time 2013

This annual report covers several issues related to the length of working time in the European Union and Norway in 2013. It is based mainly on contributions from the national correspondents to Eurofound’s European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO). This edition includes data from Croatia, which became a Member State on 1 July 2013. The report looks specifically at: average weekly working hours set by collective agreements, both economy-wide and for three specific sectors: chemicals, the retail trade and the civil service; statutory limits on weekly and daily working time; average actual weekly working hours; annual leave entitlements, as set by collective agreements and law; estimates of average collectively agreed annual working time

German Works Councils and the Anatomy of Wages

This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the effect of German works councils on wages, using matched employer-employee data from the German LIAB for 2001. In general, we find that works councils are associated with higher earnings, even after accounting for worker and establishment heterogeneity. At this level, the works council premium exceeds the collective bargaining mark-up, and is modestly higher in the presence of collective bargaining once we account for worker selection into the two institutions. More specifically, works councils do seem to benefit women relatively and to build on collective bargaining in this regard. They also seem to favor foreign, east-German, and service-sector workers although the effects of collective bargaining are not always reinforcing. The evidence from quantile regressions suggests that only in conjunction with collective bargaining is the narrowing influence of works councils really clear-cut. The above findings pertain to workers in all plants. Once we consider smaller establishments with 21-100 employees, however, each of these results is further qualified, beginning with the effect on wage levels where premia are now only observed in conjunction with collective bargaining.works councils, collective bargaining coverage, matched employer-employee data, wages, wage distribution.

Fearless Friday: Melanie Pangol

Today, we celebrate the work of Melanie Pangol ’21. Originally from Ecuador, Melanie was raised in Philly, and has been living in New York in the last few years. On campus, Melanie is part of the Brown Nipple Collective, works for the Center for Career Engagement, and acts as program coordinator for the Painted Turtle Farm through the Center for Public Service among many other activities. [excerpt

Resilience and Coping for the Healthcare Community: A Post-disaster Group Work Intervention for Healthcare and Social Service Providers

Healthcare and social service providers play a critical role in supporting children, families and communities immediately after a disaster and throughout the recovery process. These providers, who may have also experienced the disaster and related losses, are among the least likely to receive mental health or psychological support which can result in burnout, secondary traumatic stress, depression and anxiety. Accessible psychosocial interventions designed for healthcare and social service providers in the aftermath of a disaster are therefore critical to recovery and to ensure providers are available to support families after future disasters. The purpose of this article is to describe Resilience and Coping for the Healthcare Community (RCHC), a manualized group work intervention for social service and health care providers who have provided care to children, families, and communities after a natural disaster. RCHC is currently being delivered in response to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria, storms that struck the gulf coast of the United States and the island of Puerto Rico in 2017. RCHC has also been used in the areas affected by Hurricane Sandy (New York and New Jersey), in Shreveport, Louisiana following severe flooding and in Saipan after a Typhoon devastated the island. Healthcare and social service providers who have received RCHC include the staff of Federally Qualified Health Centers and other community clinics, Disaster Case Managers, Child Care Providers, Mental Health Providers and First Responders. The health and wellbeing of these providers directly impacts their ability to provide quality care to families in their communities. This article presents the theoretical foundations of the RCHC intervention, describes the intervention in detail, provides a description of early and ongoing evaluation studies, and discusses the conditions for both implementation of RCHC and training of RCHC providers. The RCHC psychoeducational intervention provides education on, and strategies for, acute, chronic and post-traumatic stress, coping, and resilience, tailored for the needs of the helping professions. Through the use of individual and collective processing, healthcare and social service providers participating in RCHC develop both individual and collective coping plans. Considering the short and long-term impacts of disasters on communities’ essential healthcare and social service workforce, interventions like RCHC stand to provide essential benefits, including retention and wellbeing of providers of family services