A Lost Dream: Worker Control at Rath Packing

[Excerpted from Introduction by Gene Daniels] The story of Rath Packing Company of Waterloo, Iowa, is alternately a model of the American Dream and the story of a dream turned nightmare. Started in Iowa in 1891 with a work force of 22, Rath employed 8,000 people at its peak. In 1944, workers at Rath slaughtered 12,000 hogs, cattle and sheep a day. It was the largest and most modern packing house in the world. In the 1950s and early 1960s, however, Rath\u27s management failed to make several strategic moves. They failed to market Rath\u27s products to supermarkets, thinking Mom & Pop stores would remain the backbone of community grocery shopping. Little attention was paid to the growing conglomeration within the meatpacking industry itself And, management failed to re-invest in new machinery and processes and failed to build a new facility like the single-story buildings being constructed by competitors. All these factors combined to provide Rath with short-term prof its and long-term headaches. By the 1970s the company was in deep trouble

AGRICULTURAL BANKS IN THE SOUTHEAST AND NATION: A STUDY IN CONTRASTS

Agricultural Finance,

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC): An Overview

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC or EIC) began in 1975 as a temporary program to return a portion of the Social Security tax paid by lower-income taxpayers (the credit was, and remains, calculated as a percentage of earned income, with no direct link to Social Security taxes paid by the tax filer), and was made permanent in 1978. In the 1990s, the program became a major component of federal efforts to reduce poverty, and is now the largest need-tested, anti-poverty cash entitlement program. Childless adults in 2011 (the latest year for which data are available) received an average EITC of $264, families with one child received an average EITC of$2,199, families with two children received an average EITC of $3,469, and families with three or more children received an average EITC of$3,750. A low-income worker must file an annual income tax return to receive the EITC and meet certain requirements for income and age. A tax filer cannot be a dependent of another tax filer and must be a resident of the United States unless overseas because of military duty. The EITC is based on income and whether the tax filer has a qualifying child. The EITC interacts with several nonrefundable federal tax credits to the extent lower-income workers can use the credits to reduce tax liability before the EITC. Income from the credit is not used to determine eligibility or benefits for need-tested programs. The maximum earned income amounts, phase-out income levels, disqualifying investment income level, and maximum credit amounts are adjusted annually to reflect inflation. The actual amount of the credit a tax filer receives is determined by the tax filer’s earned income and number of qualifying children using these inflation adjusted parameters

There Goes the Neighborhood: The Bush-Ashcroft Plan to

The centerpiece of President Bush's crimefighting program is an initiative called Project Safe Neighborhoods. That initiative calls for the hiring of some 700 lawyers who will be dedicated to prosecuting firearm offenses, such as the unlawful possession of a gun by a drug user or a convicted felon. The basic idea is to divert firearm offenses from state court, where they would ordinarily be prosecuted, to federal court, where tougher prison sentences will be meted out. Project Safe Neighborhoods will also provide funding to escalate gun prosecutions at the state level.Praise for Project Safe Neighborhoods comes from quarters as diverse as Handgun Control, Inc. and the National Rifle Association. Unfortunately, those disparate parties have united in support of a singularly bad idea. Project Safe Neighborhoods is an affront to the constitutional principle of federalism. The initiative flouts the Tenth Amendment by relying on federal statutes that have no genuine constitutional basis. Moreover, the program will very likely lead to overenforcement of gun laws and open the door to prosecutorial mischief affecting the racial composition of juries. As the constitutional and policy implications of Project Safe Neighborhoods become more apparent, the Bush initiative looks less like a commonsense solution to crime and more like a political gimmick with pernicious unintended consequences. If the "respect for federalism" he has repeatedly professed is sincere, President Bush must reconsider his support for Project Safe Neighborhoods

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant: Responses to Frequently Asked Questions

This report provides responses to frequently asked questions about the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant. It is intended to serve as a quick reference to provide easy access to information and data. This report does not provide information on TANF program rules

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: Welfare Waivers

[Excerpt] The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it is willing to waive certain federal work participation standards under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant to permit states to experiment with “alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.” The work participation standards are numerical performance standards that each state must meet or risk being penalized through a reduction in its block grant. These are standards that apply to the states, not directly to individuals, though they may influence how states design their welfare-to-work programs. Such waivers will be the first “new” waivers to test welfare-to-work strategies in more than 15 years. The waiver initiative would permit states that undertake an alternative welfare-to-work strategy to assess their programs using measures different from those in the current standards. HHS announced this policy through the release of an Information Memorandum on July 12, 2012. State requests for waivers will have to be approved by HHS and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and meet specified criteria. Under the 1996 law that created TANF, states had the authority to operate programs created under waivers of pre-1996 welfare law until their scheduled expiration. The last such waiver expired in 2007. Additionally, the Administration of President George W. Bush made a legislative proposal to create new “superwaiver” authority that would, among other things, have allowed for the waiver of the federal TANF work participation standards. That proposal passed the House three times between 2002 and 2005. A scaled-back version of this proposal was reported from the Senate Finance Committee, but not approved by the full Senate, twice during that period. This report discusses • the current TANF work participation standards; • the HHS initiative to waive TANF work participation standards; • pre-1996 welfare waivers, including how they were treated under TANF; and • the “superwaiver” proposal. This report is not a legal analysis of the Secretary’s authority to waive TANF work participation standards. Rather, it describes and provides context for this HHS initiative

What School Principals Need to Know About Curriculum and Instruction

Looks at what school leaders need to know about instructional practices, organizing a school for greater student learning, supporting teacher development, and balancing school improvement with non-instructional issues and emergencies

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant

[Excerpt] The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant was created in the 1996 welfare reform law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, P.L. 104-193). That law was the culmination of a series of legislative changes that altered the rules for providing benefits and services to needy families with children

State Budget Challenges and the Scourge of Poverty

Performance Measurement is necessary in order to support the implementation of a Continuous Improvement approach within a company. Performance Measurement has been a subject of increasing interest for researchers and practitioners. The questions addressed in the literature especially evolved from “what” to measure to “how” to measure. The present thesis follows this evolution by exploring how companies can successfully implement Performance Measurement. The thesis follows a parallel research design including a literature review and a case study. From one side, a literature review aims at explaining the main theories behind Performance Measurement, such as the concept of Performance Measurement System, as well as giving some recommendation for its implementation. On the other side, an empirical case study, conducted in a construction industry company, presents a practical implementation of Performance Measurement including some of the indicators dashboards built in several factories and departments of the company. The results of this case study are also supported by several interviews conducted at different steps of the implementation with the different actors involved. Then a theoretical verification is conducted by comparing the theory from the literature review with the empirical results from the case study. It especially allows to verify some recommendations as well as to identify a few gaps. The results of this study can be seen as a set of verified recommendations in order to successfully implement Performance Measurement within a company. These recommendations come from the comparison between theory and practice and they are divided in three main parts: the Key Performance Indicators identification, the Performance Measurement System design, and the practical implementation of Performance Measurement. Regarding this last part, five key success factors (e.g. perceived benefits of performance measurement, top management commitment) and five barriers (e.g. time and effort required, human behaviour) have been verified. Moreover, some Performance Measurement issues are discussed, such as the reduction of the complexity, the potential gaps between local approaches and global consistency, as well as the concept of organisational learning. Finally, the thesis identifies three kinds of trade-offs (e.g. accuracy of the data and cost of collection) that need to be considered when implementing Performance Measurement