The Affordable Care Act raises the stakes on worker classification; what does this mean for the Voluntary Classification Settlement Program

This research considers worker classification and the many implications an employer must consider when classifying a worker as employee or independent contractor. One implication relates to healthcare benefits and healthcare taxes. As such, this research will evaluate the new healthcare taxes and implications resulting from the Affordable Care Act. Furthermore, this research will relate and explain worker classification with regards to the Voluntary Classification Settlement Program. This is a program offered by the Internal Revenue Service allowing employers to prospectively classify workers as employees with tax relief for past misclassification. The healthcare implications from the Affordable Care Act have raised the stakes on worker classification. This research will confirm whether this will provide greater incentive for employers to classify workers as employees or independent contractors. This research considers worker classification and the many implications an employer must consider when classifying a worker as employee or independent contractor. One implication relates to healthcare benefits and healthcare taxes. As such, this research will evaluate the new healthcare taxes and implications resulting from the Affordable Care Act. Furthermore, this research will relate and explain worker classification with regards to the Voluntary Classification Settlement Program. This is a program offered by the Internal Revenue Service allowing employers to prospectively classify workers as employees with tax relief for past misclassification. The healthcare implications from the Affordable Care Act have raised the stakes on worker classification. This research will confirm whether this will provide greater incentive for employers to classify workers as employees or independent contractors

The Employment Relationship versus Independent Contracting: On the Organizational Choice and Incentives

This paper studies a firm's choice between employing a worker and using an independent contractor to carry out a task. If the firm hires a worker, all residual rights reside with the firm. In contrast, when the firm deals with an independent contractor, it cannot interfere with the way the task is undertaken. The firm's future actions may impose non-pecuniary costs to the worker, and as a result the worker requires an ex-ante compensation. The firm can economize on the up-front cost by hiring an independent contractor. Independent contracting is a commitment device which ensures that the principal will not intervene in the future. However, when the firm has superior private information that is relevant to the execution of the task, the firm faces a trade-off between paying lower costs by hiring an independent contractor and keeping the option of value-enhancing intervention in employment relationship.

Justice for All: The Struggle for Worker Rights in Mexico

[Excerpt] The Solidarity Center is launching a new series, Justice for All: The Struggle for Worker Rights. This series follows the May 2003 publication of the Solidarity Center’s groundbreaking Justice for All: A Guide to Worker Rights in the Global Economy. Through powerful first-person narratives, the reports thoroughly examine worker rights, country by country, in today’s global economy. This first report, by renowned worker rights researcher Lance Compa, takes a hard look at Mexico’s century-long fight for independent, democratic trade unions and social justice. Compa puts Mexico’s labor law and practice to the test against international worker rights standards reflected in International Labor Organization conventions and the ILO’s 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work

Does profit sharing increase training by reducing turnover?

We test the theoretical prediction that profit sharing reduces worker separations and by doing so increases the incidence of training. Using individual level UK data, we confirm that profit sharing is a robust determinant of lower separation rates and of greater training incidence. Critically, we cannot confirm the predicted link between separations and training. Instead, the evidence supports alternative theories suggesting a direct link between profit sharing and training. Our results suggest that profit sharing changes employer-worker relations in a way that leads to greater formal and informal investment in worker skills but that this is independent of its influence on reducing separations.

Interview With Janet Saglio

[Excerpt] Janet Saglio is head of the Business Department at the Industrial Cooperative Association (ICA) based in Somerville, Mass. The ICA works with union locals that are: a) considering an employee buy-out, or b) seeking an independent study of a corporation\u27s business strategy. The primary purpose of the ICA is to assist worker-owned businesses, helping them become worker controlled through democratic systems of ownership, decision making and accountability. The ICA is therefore often called upon by union locals to assess the feasibility of employees buying a factory threatened by a shut-down...and always recommends against a buy-out if the business has been badly run down

Roadmap For Ethical Product Certification and Standard Setting Initiatives

The International Labor Rights Forum has developed a set of certification standards with the goal of addressing the root causes of factory and farm sweatshop conditions in global supply chains. As a basis to expand upon, certification programs should incorporate a living wage for workers, independent worker organizations, and fair pricing for contractors. This document is a summary of the ILRF’s main concerns and recommendations for improving certification labeling programs.Roadmap_for_Product_Certification.pdf: 77 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Missing the Story: The OECD's Analysis of Inequality

The OECD recently published a lengthy volume examining the causes of rising inequality in most wealthy countries over the last three decades. This paper examines that study, finding that the OECD misses most of the story of inequality because its primary focus is the ratio of the annual wage of the 90th percentile worker to the 10th percentile worker, while most of the benefits of rising inequality were concentrated much further up the income ladder. In contrast to the OECD, this paper finds that the impact of technology is negligible and actually trivially negative over the period examined. It also finds many errors in the use of data in the OECD's study, most importantly by exaggerating the number of independent observations when many of the data points are simply extrapolations. This causes the OECD to exaggerate the statistical significance of its findings. Finally, this paper suggests that the growth of the financial sector may have been an important factor contributing to the growth in inequality over the past 30 years

Forager bees (Apis mellifera) highly express immune and detoxification genes in tissues associated with nectar processing.

Pollinators, including honey bees, routinely encounter potentially harmful microorganisms and phytochemicals during foraging. However, the mechanisms by which honey bees manage these potential threats are poorly understood. In this study, we examine the expression of antimicrobial, immune and detoxification genes in Apis mellifera and compare between forager and nurse bees using tissue-specific RNA-seq and qPCR. Our analysis revealed extensive tissue-specific expression of antimicrobial, immune signaling, and detoxification genes. Variation in gene expression between worker stages was pronounced in the mandibular and hypopharyngeal gland (HPG), where foragers were enriched in transcripts that encode antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and immune response. Additionally, forager HPGs and mandibular glands were enriched in transcripts encoding detoxification enzymes, including some associated with xenobiotic metabolism. Using qPCR on an independent dataset, we verified differential expression of three AMP and three P450 genes between foragers and nurses. High expression of AMP genes in nectar-processing tissues suggests that these peptides may contribute to antimicrobial properties of honey or to honey bee defense against environmentally-acquired microorganisms. Together, these results suggest that worker role and tissue-specific expression of AMPs, and immune and detoxification enzymes may contribute to defense against microorganisms and xenobiotic compounds acquired while foraging

Dealing With Good Management

[Excerpt] Andy Banks\u27 and Jack Metzgar\u27s analysis of current cooperation programs is right on the mark. Their insistence on an organizing conception of unionism, union structures independent of management, and the use of worker knowledge as a critical union resource we can only echo. Under certain circumstances their proposals would help strengthen a union and avoid many of the traps that desperate unions in troubled companies often fall into. But we also suggest that applied in the wrong situations, their proposals put unions on the slippery slope to cooperationism

Interview with Bunji Fujimoto

The son of an independent sugarcane grower remembers family life, cane cutting work, and schooling. A Laupahoehoe School student, he describes the receding ocean and the tidal wave that claimed the lives of fellow students, including his younger brother, and teachers on April 1, 1946.sugar plantation field worker, agriculture laboratory worker; Japanese; maleInterview conducted in English.State, Communit