Union Mediation and Adaptation to Reciprocal Loyalty Arrangements

This study assesses the industrial relations application of the “loyalty-exit-voice” proposition. The loyalty concept is linked to reciprocal employer-employee arrangements and examined as a job attribute in a vignette questionnaire distributed to low and medium-skilled employees. The responses provided by employees in three European countries indicate that reciprocal loyalty arrangements, which involve the exchange of higher effort for job security, are one of the most desirable job attributes. This attribute exerts a higher impact on the job evaluations provided by unionised workers, compared to their non-union counterparts. This pattern is robust to a number of methodological considerations. It appears to be an outcome of adaptation to union mediated cooperation. Overall the evidence suggests that the loyalty-job evaluation profiles of unionised workers are receptive to repeated interaction and negative shocks, such as unemployment experience. This is not the case for the non-union workers. Finally, unionised workers appear to “voice” a lower job satisfaction, but exhibit low “exit” intentions, compared to the non-unionised labour.EPICURUS, a project supported by the European Commission through the 5th Framework Programme “Improving Human Potential” (contract number: HPSE-CT-2002-00143

Purely periodic beta-expansions in the Pisot non-unit case

It is well known that real numbers with a purely periodic decimal expansion are the rationals having, when reduced, a denominator coprime with 10. The aim of this paper is to extend this result to beta-expansions with a Pisot base beta which is not necessarily a unit: we characterize real numbers having a purely periodic expansion in such a base; this characterization is given in terms of an explicit set, called generalized Rauzy fractal, which is shown to be a graph-directed self-affine compact subset of non-zero measure which belongs to the direct product of Euclidean and p-adic spaces

The Framework Directive for equal treatment in employment and occupation: an analysis from a disability rights perspective

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the recently adopted directive establishing a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation from a disability rights perspective. The adoption of this directive represents merely the first stage in the prohibition of discrimination on the grounds falling within its protective remit. The next and arguably most important stage is the implementation of this directive into national law. Of the protected grounds, disability offers what is arguably the greatest challenge for national authorities in the implementation process. It demands flexibility in the legislative approach traditionally used to combat discrimination as well as the introduction of new legal concepts into the national legal order of most Member States. Whilst European Disability Non-Governmental Organisations, together with the European Parliament, are calling on the Commission of the European Union to propose a more expansive directive prohibiting disability discrimination, it is first crucial to ensure that the core aspects of the recently adopted directive are clearly understood and correctly implemented from a disability rights perspective. These core aspects include the definition of disability, the concepts of direct and indirect discrimination, and the duty to provide reasonable accommodations. Given that these core aspects will be common to any disability non-discrimination law, no amount of coverage beyond the context of employment and occupation will compensate for the subsequent loss of opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of disabled people if they are not appropriately addressed.</p

A Recipe for State-and-Effect Triangles

In the semantics of programming languages one can view programs as state transformers, or as predicate transformers. Recently the author has introduced state-and-effect triangles which capture this situation categorically, involving an adjunction between state- and predicate-transformers. The current paper exploits a classical result in category theory, part of Jon Beck's monadicity theorem, to systematically construct such a state-and-effect triangle from an adjunction. The power of this construction is illustrated in many examples, covering many monads occurring in program semantics, including (probabilistic) power domains