Congress to Administrative Agencies: Creator, Overseer, and Partner

Ultimately, all questions of administrative law, judicial review of agency action, and the degree of congressional oversight revolve around attempts to discover where the true congressional intent lies. All of our congressional oversight activities seek to advance an administrative agency outcome that most reflects congressional understanding of the dictates of law. In our system of government the non-legislative branches all pursue the same goal-determining and ultimately following congressional intent. The system affords each branch a great deal of leeway to pursue its own view of congressional intent, and naturally each branch seeks to assert its own perspective as much as possible. In the author\u27s opinion, from the vantage point of a congressional subcommittee chair, some views should be granted greater deference than others

Federation and Labour 1880-1914: National, State and Local Dimensions

Federation, labour

Quantified CTL: Expressiveness and Complexity

While it was defined long ago, the extension of CTL with quantification over atomic propositions has never been studied extensively. Considering two different semantics (depending whether propositional quantification refers to the Kripke structure or to its unwinding tree), we study its expressiveness (showing in particular that QCTL coincides with Monadic Second-Order Logic for both semantics) and characterise the complexity of its model-checking and satisfiability problems, depending on the number of nested propositional quantifiers (showing that the structure semantics populates the polynomial hierarchy while the tree semantics populates the exponential hierarchy)

Managers' Perceptions of Cooperation and Joint Decision-Making with Trade Unions: A Regional Case Study in the Illawarra (Australia)

This paper examines managerial perceptions of cooperation and consultation, and tests the hypothesis of some unionists that cooperation and consultation as perceived by management minimise union input into the decision-making process. The increased adoption of a strategic HRM perspective on the employment relationship has led to a growing concern with building cooperation through employee consultation and participation at the workplace level. This perspective actually embraces two broad approaches: 'hard' HRM characterised by direct forms of job-related participation; and 'soft' HRM characterised by representative forms of participation, or joint decision making, between management and unions and/or works councils (or consultative committees), as favoured in much of Europe. The choice between these is influenced, among other things, by the industrial environment in which workplaces operate, particularly the strength of traditional industrial relations structures and perspectives. This case study is based upon a survey of employment relations managers' attitudes to cooperation and joint decision making in a region characterised by a strong traditional industrial relations infrastructure, including strong unionism. It shows that whilst strategic HRM perspectives on employee participation have developed a significant presence in the region's workplaces, they have been adapted to the industrial environment. The managers overwhelmingly reported a cooperative relationship with unions, and a significant proportion believed in joint decision making with unions, albeit over a selective range of issues. Managers of public sector, tertiary sector and large workplaces were far more inclined to support joint decision making than others. The survey results also show that those respondents who perceived a cooperative relationship indicated a greater willingness on the part of management to share input with the union than those who perceived their relationship as confrontational. The perspective of a pragmatic HRM shaped by its industrial environment is confirmed by comparing these results with those from a survey of US employee relations managers conducted by Perline and Sexton (1994). The results of this comparison diverge considerably. Perline and Sexton found for the US that 'those managers who perceived their relationship with the union to be cooperative were less likely to believe that issues should be jointly determined by management and the union', thus confirming the pessimistic union hypothesis.trade unions, cooperation, consultation, perceptions

Assessing the Impact of the Workplace Relations Act From 1996 to 2004: Increasing Flexibility or Decreasing Collectivism?

This paper tests the impact of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (WRA) by looking at changes in the behaviour of a panel of workplaces in the Illawarra Region of NSW between 1996 and 2004. The results support the proposition that the major impact has been on the level of unionisation and union density in these workplaces. There was virtually no expansion in the use of enterprise bargaining or AWAs, although there was a small but significant increase in non-union agreement making. Rather than encourage the use of single jurisdictions to register awards and collective agreements, in the Illawarra at least, there was a strong trend to dual State and Federal jurisdictions. Thus the WRA has been relatively ineffective in achieving flexibility and decentralised employee relations goals but has resulted in a high level of decollectivisation.Workplace Relations Act, Illawarra region, flexibility, decollectivisation

The success of representative governance on superannuation boards

Australia’s superannuation system has transformed the way Australians think about their retirement. But as the size of the funds increase there is additional scrutiny surrounding the governance structures in place to administer the savings of members. The new Federal Government has kick-started the debate with its discussion paper: Better regulation and governance, enhanced transparency and improved competition in superannuation. It has been simultaneously welcomed and condemned, and while its motivations have been questioned there is now more than ever a focus on the governance on these massive pools of savings

ATLsc with partial observation

Alternating-time temporal logic with strategy contexts (ATLsc) is a powerful formalism for expressing properties of multi-agent systems: it extends CTL with strategy quantifiers, offering a convenient way of expressing both collaboration and antagonism between several agents. Incomplete observation of the state space is a desirable feature in such a framework, but it quickly leads to undecidable verification problems. In this paper, we prove that uniform incomplete observation (where all players have the same observation) preserves decidability of the model-checking problem, even for very expressive logics such as ATLsc.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2015, arXiv:1509.0685

An exploration of nurses' experiences of caring for people from different cultures in Ireland

This study aimed to explore the experiences of both student and qualified nurses of caring for patients from different cultures in one region of Ireland. In particular it explores the concerns and challenges experienced and how nurses dealt with them in their daily practice. Using a grounded theory approach, ten focus groups and thirty individual face-to-face interviews were conducted with student and qualified nurses. As data were collected, it was simultaneously analysed using the classic grounded theory methodological principles of coding, constant comparison and theoretical sampling. This study described the different challenges nurses face when caring for patients from different cultures and the coping strategies adopted to deal with such challenges in their daily practice. It provides a comprehensive picture of the personal, professional and organisational factors that contribute towards culturally insensitivity. Lack of knowledge leading to uncertainty was the consistent main concern that emerged for informants. Feelings of ambiguity were further influenced by an awareness of potential ethnocentric beliefs, values and stereotypes and the culture of the organisation in which informants learn and work in. The data reveals how nurses used rafts of disengagement strategies as a means of dealing with their lack of cultural knowledge. The culture within the organisation facilitated the disengagement and allowed it to go unnoticed. Accepting less than perfect care and becoming indifferent to the needs of patients who are not Irish is evident in the data. This went unchallenged and consequently culturally insensitive and sometimes even discriminatory care was perpetuated. This study has implications for nurse education and leaders and managers in clinical settings. Although this study specifically explored nurses’ experiences of caring for patients from different cultures, the findings may have wider implications for nursing practice in Ireland. It highlights the need for nurses to understand themselves and the way in which they form relationships with patients from different cultures. It reiterates the need for greater consideration into how culturally compassionate competence development is taught, learnt and perhaps more importantly applied in practice. Although acknowledging the organisational constraints and education deficiencies that were evident, this study highlights the need for greater individual and organisational commitment to culturally competent care