Mending Canada's Employment Insurance Quilt: The Case for Restoring Equity

Under the current Employment Insurance (EI) system, long-lasting EI benefits are more easily accessed in regions with high unemployment rates than in regions with low unemployment rates where workers face tighter restrictions to access short-lived benefits. This complicated screening procedure, intended to better support the various circumstances facing unemployed workers across the country, creates a number of undesirable consequences: the most glaring being pockets of high, chronic unemployment. The goals and intentions of the EI regime should be simplified to better address the needs of Canada’s unemployed workers.Social Policy, Canada, employment insurance (EI), EI reforms

Construction subcontracts: for what we are about to receive

This paper is from a study on specialist and trade contracting in the construction industry. The research was commissioned by CIRIA and undertaken by the University of Reading in conjunction with Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners Ltd. The purpose of the work was to provide guidance for effective and equitable practice in the management of projects where much of the work is executed, and possibly designed, by specialist and trade contractors (STCs). As part of this study, a preliminary investigation into the nature and origins of specialist contracting was undertaken, in conjunction with a survey of the problems confronting STCs. This paper presents that phase of the project

Back to Basics: Restoring Equity and Efficiency in the EI Program - EI Reform Part II

Regionally based entry requirements and benefit durations prolong the persistence of unemployment and reduce economic incentives to adjust to labour-market conditions. Reforms aimed at equity are overdue. Regionally based criteria should be replaced by uniform, countrywide, employment insurance entrance requirements and benefit durations.employment insurance reform

Why Leave Benefits on the Table? Evidence from SNAP

Studies of take up in social insurance programs rarely distinguish between initial enrollment and retention of beneficiaries. This paper shows that retention plays a meaningful role in incomplete take up: despite knowledge of and eligibility for a near-cash public benefit, many participants exit the program rather than complete administrative requirements. Using administrative data on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for multiple states, I show that over half of entering households exit SNAP within one year of entry. Exits are concentrated in key reporting and recertification months, when participants must submit substantial paperwork in order to remain on the program. Combining administrative SNAP and Unemployment Insurance (UI) records from the state of Michigan, I provide evidence that mechanical eligibility changes cannot explain the extent of program exit. Finally, I demonstrate a substantial effect of administrative requirements on retention by studying the staggered rollout of Michigan’s online case management tool, which reduced exits for likely eligible applicants by approximately 10 percent around these key dates

24P. Does ICT hold the key to SME development?

As the European Union (EU) and its Member States face the pressures of recession, ongoing global competition and the challenges of implementing a new knowledge economy, improving the capabilities and participation of the huge small and medium enterprise (SME) sector is vital. This is particularly true of the microfirms (less than 10 employees) that account for 93 per cent of the EU’s 25 million firms and 40 per cent of its 170 million workforce but exhibit much lower participation rates than larger organisations. Regular quarterly surveys of national samples of 600-1,000 SMEs conducted since 1990 by the Open University Business School (OUBS) and other large-scale EU and UK surveys of SMEs show near saturation use of PCs, widespread access to the Internet and increased use of networked computers, mobile telephony, palmtops and so on. ICT is also seen as opening new possibilities for accessing information, supporting e-learning and developing new business opportunities for SMEs. Yet, once again, SME participation is very low, particularly among the microfirms and there is little evidence that the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) has led to an increase in innovation or the emergence of new business models among SMEs. The most common reasons given by SME owners include lack of time, inconvenient access and low relevance. Government surveys also identify a generally low level of ICT skills, especially among the microfirms. This paper examines the effects of increased ICT-adoption on SME acquisition of knowledge necessary for survival, growth and success in the new economy, the development of e-business and whether ICT mediated e-learning and knowledge transfer holds the solutions for acquiring these necessary competences and skills, and overcoming the common SME participation barriers

Sea Power: The Great Enabler

What is the strategic relationship between sea power and land power, with air power adjunct to, and very occasionally all but independent of, both? Two propositions are considered here. First, it is suggested that command of the sea yields a more absolute and extensive superiority in that environment than does command on land in its environment. Second, this article considers the idea that command at sea yields possibilities for influence on land superior to the influence at sea that can flow from command on land. Command is employed to mean a working control and not an absolute, literally exclusive—let alone ubiquitous—control. An effectively absolute control can be achieved, however

Defense, War-Fighting and Deterrence

Having been in retreat through most of the 1970s, the advocates of a mutual assured destruction approach to nuclear deterrence and force planning are staging something of a comeback

Living in Two Worlds: A Critical Ethnography of Academic and Proto-Professional Interactions in a Human-Computer Interaction Design Studio

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, School of Education, 2014Studio pedagogy has been used broadly in traditional design disciplines for over a century, functioning as a signature pedagogy. This pedagogical approach is increasingly being adopted in non-traditional design disciplines, often without an understanding of why this pedagogy is effective from an instructional design perspective, or how its theoretical structures may function in disciplines outside of the design tradition. In this dissertation, I investigated a Master's program at a large Midwestern university in human-computer interaction (HCI), one of these emergent design disciplines, capturing the occurrence and underlying structures of communication as they emerged in informal dimensions of the pedagogy as experienced and enacted by students. To produce a critical ethnography of this site, I collected data as a participant observer for two academic semesters, compiling over 450 contact hours, thousands of photographs, hundreds of hours of audio, and 30 critical interviews that were semi-structured, focused on specific topic domains. Almost two-thirds of the contact hours were located in a non-classroom studio space, where I interacted with students as they worked and socialized. The remaining contact hours were spent in classroom observations during the second semester of data collection, in order to compare and enrich my understanding of the student experience of the formal pedagogy. Through an analysis of the structures of informal communication between students, I identified system relations that allowed for the constitution of student-led interactions in the studio space and encouraged reproduction of these interactions. Beneath these system relations, I discovered that students worked within two different fields of action: one oriented towards the academic community and related typifications of classroom and professor behavior; and a second oriented towards the professional community. The structure-system relations led by students took place within the proto-professional field, indicating a relationship with the professional community, even while the pedagogy placed students in the student role. Implications of this relationship between students and the professional and academic communities are explored through the lenses of studio education in HCI and instructional design, indicating a need for more research on adaptation of the studio model in new disciplines, and the evolving identity of students in relation to the professional practice of design