Community Workforce Provisions in Project Labor Agreements: A Tool for Building Middle-Class Careers

[Excerpt] Project Labor Agreements are comprehensive contracts between a construction client and a consortium of unions. They have been used in the construction industry for over 60 years to achieve uniform labor standards, stability and high quality for large construction projects, and are currently evolving to address broader social and community issues. Community Workforce Agreements are PLAs that contain social investment or targeted hiring provisions to create employment and career path opportunities for individuals from low income communities. Pioneering examples of CWAs included the Los Angeles Community College District PLA (signed in April of 2001), providing for 30 percent of local resident workforce (20 percent of which should be individuals from economically disadvantaged and at-risk populations); and the Port of Oakland (California) PLA (implemented from 2001 to 2008), setting goals for employment of disadvantaged populations and utilization of minority-owned businesses. The first agreements on the West Coast were developed in response to communities’ demands for increased opportunities in the construction industry. To address these demands Building Trades Councils began negotiating PLAs with local hiring provisions. Other successfully implemented CWAs in the West include the Los Angeles Unified School District PLA (2003) and the City of Los Angeles Public Works construction projects (2006). Studies by the Partnership for Working Families and by UCLA found that these CWAs resulted in increased employment and retention of local workers, middle-class career paths and poverty reduction in Los Angeles communities, and that they currently constitute “the basis on which the city can monitor and assess the number of local residents working on its projects.” This report profiles the wide range of PLA/CWA provisions that have been designed and implemented during the last 15 years to establish goals and structures that assist in the creation of new standards and the implementation of new and existing laws and regulations related to the labor and employment rights of low income communities, women, and minorities

Messy Data Modelling in Health Care Contingent Valuation Studies

This study addresses the complexity in modeling contingent valuation surveys with true zeros and non-ignorable missing responses including “don’t knows†and protest responses. An endogenous switching tobit model is specified to simultaneously estimate the parameters of the latent willingness to pay (WTP) decision variable and the latent true WTP level. A Bayesian technique is developed using MCMC methods data augmentation and Metropolis Hastings algorithm with Gibbs sampling for estimating the endogenous switching tobit model. The Bayesian approach presented here is useful even for finite sample size and for models with relatively flat likelihood like sample selection models for which convergence is a problem or even if convergence is achieved correlation of the latent random errors are outside the (-1,1) range. The proposed methodology is applied to a single-bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation model using British Eurowill data on evaluating cancer health care program. Results in this study reveal that the interview interest scores for the unresolved or missing cases are substantially high and not far from scores of “yes†respondents. The pattern in the values of socio-economic and health related variables shows that these unresolved cases are not missing completely at random so that they may actually contain valuable information at least on the willingness decision process of respondents. Inclusion of these unresolved cases is essential to modelling WTP decision and true WTP level as reflected in the higher sum of log conditional predictive ordinate(SLCPO) goodness-of-fit criterion for a cross-validation sample and higher covariance between the latent random errors of the latent self-selection or WTP decision variable and the true WTP level model. The positive covariance and correlation of the latent random errors may explain why the true WTP levels in DC contingent valuation studies are oftentimes overestimated. The model presented in this paper may also be applied to double bounded dichotomous choice models with slight modification.non-ignorable missing values, single-bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation studies,Markov chain Monte Carlo methods

Wilful blindness or blissful ignorance? The United States and the successful denucelarization of Iraq

This article examines the successful denuclearization of Iraq by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the early 1990s and the apparent failure of the US Intelligence Community (IC) to rethink its assessments of Saddam’s desire for nuclear weapons despite Baghdad’s co-operation with the IAEA inspectors, and clear evidence from the Ongoing Monitoring and Verification team that this was a highly successful process. US policy towards Iraq, from the Clinton administration onwards, was hyper-politicized; it relied on a default, unchanging view of Saddam Hussein as a rogue leader bent on WMD acquisition and regional domination in an area that was of vital importance to the United States. The article also considers the impact of the fractious UNSCOM inspections process and argues that this was severely compromised by political intrusion, which was also ignored by the US IC in its assessments of Saddam’s intentions. Ultimately, US intelligence on Iraq was filtered for a decade through a hyper-politicized lens that tended to discount evidence from the IAEA that disproved pre-existing assumptions

‘Enormous Opportunities’ and ‘Hot Frontiers’: Sub-Saharan Africa in U.S. Grand Strategy, 2001-Present

This article argues that, in the 21st century, there has been a significant turnaround in the US approach to Sub-Saharan Africa. No longer is the region viewed solely as the site of human tragedy and internal wars where Washington has no tangible interests. Instead, US policymakers have increasingly viewed this part of Africa as a site of valuable commercial, geopolitical, and security interests—with particular emphasis on petroleum reserves, the market potential of its growing population, and its apparent locus as a site of transnational Islamist terrorism. Sub-Saharan Africa is now considered in grand strategic terms. Unintended consequences of US intervention are already visible, however; as it integrates the region into its global strategic calculus, the United States has begun to repeat mistakes made in other key regions of the world