Significant Victories: The Practice and Promise of First Contracts in the Public and Private Sectors

After decades of massive employment losses in heavily unionized sectors of the economy, and the exponential growth of the largely unorganized service sector, the American labor movement is struggling to remain relevant. Despite new organizing initiatives, the combination of US labor law and labor relations practices have made new organizing a tremendously arduous endeavor. Private sector workers, in particular, are routinely confronted with a host of aggressive legal, marginally legal, and illegal anti-union tactics from employers and their representatives

Non-traditional programs: An academic perspective

Good programming requires a firm conceptual and evaluative framework

Multi-substance species sensitivity distributions and non-interactive action: a bivariate example

The concept of Species Sensitivity Distributions (SSDs), a proxy distribution used to model inter-species variation within a biological assemblage, has been well researched in the literature. However, research has been limited to a univariate (1D) setting; i.e. species tolerance to an individually acting toxicant. We extend the SSD model to a bivariate setting (2D), i.e. modelling species sensitivity to two substances. Although the univariate SSD is usually assumed to be (log-) Normal, assumptions regarding the 2D-SSD are not as straightforward; hampered by requirements to account for association between species sensitivity to the two substances. We utilise an area of statistical modelling known as copulas to explore possible dependence structures for the 2D-SSD, and show how to estimate the SSD parameters. The key strength of copulas is that the marginal distributions can be chosen in advance; which is appealing to risk managers for consistency. When one has estimated a 2D-SSD, it practical to extend the univariate concept of the Potentially Affected Fraction (PAF), which is defined to be the proportion of species in a biological assemblage who have their toxicological endpoints violated at prescribed environmental concentration. To enable us to extend this concept, which has been called the multi-substance PAF (msPAF), we restrict ourselves to non-interactive action (a.k.a. independent action – a misnomer). We utilise the modelling of Plackett and Hewlett to show how the msPAF reduces to a class of integrals over the 2D-SSD. We critique the differences between this method and an alternative by Traas et al. (2002; In: Posthuma L, II Suter GW, Traas TP. 2002. Species Sensitivity Distributions in Ecotoxicology. Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton, USA. 315-344.)

Consistency in Patients' Health and Treatment Expectations at a Geriatric Clinic

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111146/1/j.1532-5415.1981.tb02192.x.pd

A Brief Life‐Graph Technique for Work with Geriatric Patients*

Patients aged 60 or older from the practice of a private physician (n = 32) and from a geriatric outpatient clinic (n = 132) responded to a questionnaire designed to assess perceived present and future health, treatment expectations, and general future projection. Of interest was the extent to which present health, as measured by a brief life‐graph technique, might be predictive of perceptions in these other areas. Results from the two samples were consistent in suggesting that present health ratings were related to anticipated future health, general future projection, and certain treatment expectations. However, expectations of when benefits from treatment would begin, and of the probable duration of treatment, were not predicted in either sample. The life‐graph technique seems useful for practitioners' interactions with older patients and for understanding these patients' extended views of their health.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111234/1/jgs01244.pd

GIS Applications in the Wireless Telecommunications Industry

Tom Jarnevic is an RF Engineering Manager for Sprint and Tucker Hickey is a Network Planner for Sprint. This presentation was given as part of the GIS Day@KU symposium on November 18, 2015. For more information about GIS Day@KU activities, please see http://www.gis.ku.edu/gisday/2015/.Platinum Sponsors: KU Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science; KU School of Business. Gold Sponsors: Bartlett & West; Kansas Biological Survey; KU Environmental Studies Program; KU Institute for Policy & Social Research; KU Libraries. Silver Sponsors: State of Kansas Data Access and Support Center (DASC). Bronze Sponsors: KU Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS); TREKK Design Group, LLC; Wilson & Company, Engineers and Architects

Significant Victories: An Analysis of Union First Contracts

[Excerpt] After two decades of massive employment losses in heavily unionized sectors of the economy and exponential growth of the largely unorganized service sector, the U.S. labor movement is struggling to remain relevant. Despite new organizing initiatives and practices, union organizing today remains a tremendously arduous endeavor, particularly in the private sector, as workers and their unions are routinely confronted with an arsenal of aggressive legal and illegal antiunion employer tactics. This vigorous opposition to unions in the private sector does not stop once an election is won, but continues throughout bargaining for an initial union agreement, all too often turning organizing victories into devastating first-contract defeats. Despite these overwhelming obstacles, workers still organize and win—through certification elections and voluntary recognition campaigns in both the private and public sectors. And each year unions successfully negotiate thousands of first contracts in the United States, providing union representation for the first time to hundreds of thousands of new workers. This research takes an in-depth look at what unions achieve in these initial union contracts. Why, when confronted with such powerful opposition, do unorganized workers continue to want to belong to unions and newly organized workers want to stay union? What do these first contracts provide that makes the struggle worthwhile? To explore these questions, we analyze and evaluate union first contracts along four primary dimensions. First, we inventory the basic workers’ rights provided by these contracts, which go beyond the very limited rights provided by federal and state labor law under the “employment at will” system. Second, we evaluate how first contracts provide workers and their unions with the institutional power to shape work and the labor process on a day-to-day basis. Third, we explore how first contracts codify the presence and power of unions in daily work life, and we evaluate which institutional arrangements provide a meaningful role for workers and their unions in their workplaces. Fourth, we examine the kinds of workplace benefits that are codified and supplemented in first contracts, gaining important insights into the types of human resource practices that exist in newly unionized workplaces. Finally, by examining the interactions among these four dimensions, we explore the limitations of what first contracts have been able to achieve in the current organizing environment, and what it would take for unions to improve the quality of first contracts

Judges and the political organs of state

This chapter considers the record of the Irish Supreme Court in its constitutional policing of the two political “organs of State.” It outlines the basis upon which the judicial organ enjoys the authority to determine the limits of the powers of the Oireachtas and Government. It explores the various approaches taken by judges and courts in a selection of the main cases in the period 1970-2020

Justiciability and proceedings in the Oireachtas: the case of Angela Kerins

This article considers Angela Kerins v John McGuinness, a 2019 case decided by the Irish Supreme Court concerning the justiciability of parliamentary proceedings. It is in four parts. The first two are descriptive: one presents the important facts of Kerins; the other, the relevant constitutional text and precedents. Part III assesses how, in light of the text and precedents, the judges approached the question of justiciability in the case. It gives some consideration to the approach taken to the same question in Denis O’Brien v Clerk of Dáil Éireann, a related case decided in the same period, and in tandem, by the same seven judges. The concluding part offers analysis of the coherence and implications of this jurisprudence