(Dis)Assembling Rights of Women Workers Along the Global Assembly Line: Human Rights and the Garment Industry Symposium: Political Lawyering: Conversations on Progressive Social Change

Some observers would like to explain away sweatshops as immigrants exploiting other immigrants, as cultural, or as the importation of a form of exploitation that normally does not happen here but occurs elsewhere, in the Third World. While the public was shocked by the discovery at El Monte, garment workers and garment worker advocates have for years been describing abuses in the garment industry and have ascribed responsibility for such abuses to manufacturers and retailers who control the industry. Sweatshops, like the one in El Monte, are a home-grown problem with peculiarly American roots. Since the inception of the garment industry, U.S. retailers and manufacturers have scoured the United States and the rest of the globe for the cheapest and most malleable labor-predominantly female, low-skilled, and disempowered-in order to squeeze out as much profit as possible for themselves. Along with this globalization, the process of subcontracting, whereby manufacturers contract out cutting and sewing to contractors to avoid being considered the employer of the workers, has made it extremely difficult for garment workers in the United States to assert their rights under domestic law. This Article examines the challenges garment workers in the United States face in asserting their rights in the global economy and investigates how transnational advocacy can be deployed to compensate for the inability of U.S. labor laws to respond to problems with international dimensions. Using a purely domestic U.S. legal framework, advocates can attack the problem of transnational corporations\u27 (TNCs) subcontracting in the United States. Such efforts, however, will have limited effect because of the global nature of the garment industry. Most efforts to change the structure of the garment industry have occurred within the limitations of U.S. law, even while there has been a predominant failure of the U.S. legal system effectively to utilize a human rights framework. While the nation-state has traditionally been viewed as the locus for the development and enforcement of rights-creating norms, it cannot adequately respond to all of the dynamics that now arise from markets that cut across borders. Violation of workers\u27 rights on the global assembly line calls for strategies that are transnational, and this Article highlights past successes and suggestions in this vein. Because of the difficulty of restraining TNCs in a global economy, no strategy used in isolation will be successful. We present here alternative strategies that can be used in multiple and flexible ways in the struggle for human rights

Short-term and Long-term Racial Disparities in VA and non-VA Hospital Outcomes

This research used VA and Medicare data to examine racial patterns in short- and long-term mortality outcomes for elderly male black and white patients hospitalized for heart attack, stroke, hip fracture, congestive heart failure, gastrointestinal bleeding, and pneumonia from 1998 to 2002. The researchers found that at 30 days after admission for five of the six conditions, racial patterns in mortality outcomes were similar in VA and non-VA settings, with black patients having a survival advantage. Among Medicare patients, relative to the mortality outcomes for whites, mortality outcomes for black patients deteriorated over time until black Medicare patients had worse 2-year mortality for all conditions except congestive heart failure. In contrast, among VA patients, the relative decline in mortality for blacks was less marked and statistically significant only for hip fracture and stroke. These findings suggest that factors unrelated to hospital care play important roles in longer term mortality rates for the examined conditions. The findings also suggest that the integrated health care delivery system of the VA may attenuate racial disparities in health by mitigating the environmental factors that contribute to mortality for up to two years after hospitalization

Trajectory-Based Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently get stuck in local optima. This work addresses these weaknesses by combining recent improvements in the reuse of off-policy data and exploration in parameter space with deterministic behavioral policies. The resulting objective is amenable to standard neural network optimization strategies like stochastic gradient descent or stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Incorporation of previous rollouts via importance sampling greatly improves data-efficiency, whilst stochastic optimization schemes facilitate the escape from local optima. We evaluate the proposed approach on a series of continuous control benchmark tasks. The results show that the proposed algorithm is able to successfully and reliably learn solutions using fewer system interactions than standard policy gradient methods.Comment: Includes appendix. Accepted for ICML 201

(Dis)Assembling Rights of Women Workers Along the Global Assembly Line: Human Rights and the Garment Industry Symposium: Political Lawyering: Conversations on Progressive Social Change

Some observers would like to explain away sweatshops as immigrants exploiting other immigrants, as cultural, or as the importation of a form of exploitation that normally does not happen here but occurs elsewhere, in the Third World. While the public was shocked by the discovery at El Monte, garment workers and garment worker advocates have for years been describing abuses in the garment industry and have ascribed responsibility for such abuses to manufacturers and retailers who control the industry. Sweatshops, like the one in El Monte, are a home-grown problem with peculiarly American roots. Since the inception of the garment industry, U.S. retailers and manufacturers have scoured the United States and the rest of the globe for the cheapest and most malleable labor-predominantly female, low-skilled, and disempowered-in order to squeeze out as much profit as possible for themselves. Along with this globalization, the process of subcontracting, whereby manufacturers contract out cutting and sewing to contractors to avoid being considered the employer of the workers, has made it extremely difficult for garment workers in the United States to assert their rights under domestic law. This Article examines the challenges garment workers in the United States face in asserting their rights in the global economy and investigates how transnational advocacy can be deployed to compensate for the inability of U.S. labor laws to respond to problems with international dimensions. Using a purely domestic U.S. legal framework, advocates can attack the problem of transnational corporations\u27 (TNCs) subcontracting in the United States. Such efforts, however, will have limited effect because of the global nature of the garment industry. Most efforts to change the structure of the garment industry have occurred within the limitations of U.S. law, even while there has been a predominant failure of the U.S. legal system effectively to utilize a human rights framework. While the nation-state has traditionally been viewed as the locus for the development and enforcement of rights-creating norms, it cannot adequately respond to all of the dynamics that now arise from markets that cut across borders. Violation of workers\u27 rights on the global assembly line calls for strategies that are transnational, and this Article highlights past successes and suggestions in this vein. Because of the difficulty of restraining TNCs in a global economy, no strategy used in isolation will be successful. We present here alternative strategies that can be used in multiple and flexible ways in the struggle for human rights

The Impact of Increased Cost-Sharing on Utilization of Low Value Services: Evidence from the State of Oregon

In this study we examine the impact of a value-based insurance design (V-BID) program implemented between 2010 and 2013 at a large public employer in the state of Oregon. The program substantially increased cost-sharing, specifically copayments and coinsurance, for several healthcare services believed to be of low value and overused (sleep studies, endoscopies, advanced imaging, and surgeries). Using a differences-in-differences design coupled with granular, administrative health insurance claims data, we estimate the change in low value healthcare service utilization among beneficiaries before and after program implementation relative to a comparison group of beneficiaries who were not exposed to the V-BID. Our findings suggest that the V-BID significantly reduced utilization of targeted services. These findings have important implications for both public and private healthcare policies as V-BID principles are rapidly proliferating in healthcare markets

Cash transfers for HIV prevention: considering their potential.

INTRODUCTION: Cash payments to vulnerable households and/or individuals have increasingly garnered attention as a means to reduce poverty, improve health and achieve other development-related outcomes. Recent evidence from Malawi and Tanzania suggests that cash transfers can impact HIV-related behaviours and outcomes and, therefore, could serve as an important addition to HIV prevention efforts. DISCUSSION: This article reviews the current evidence on cash transfers for HIV prevention and suggests unresolved questions for further research. Gaps include (1) understanding more about the mechanisms and pathways through which cash transfers affect HIV-related outcomes; (2) addressing key operational questions, including the potential feasibility and the costs and benefits of different models of transfers and conditionality; and (3) evaluating and enhancing the wider impacts of cash transfers on health and development. CONCLUSIONS: Ongoing and future studies should build on current findings to unpack unresolved questions and to collect additional evidence on the multiple impacts of transfers in different settings. Furthermore, in order to address questions on sustainability, cash transfer programmes need to be integrated with other sectors and programmes that address structural factors such as education and programming to promote gender equality and address HIV

Culture and carelessness: Constituting disability in South India

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Professional and lay explanations of disability, collected via interviews and participant-observation during fieldwork in Hyderabad, South India, identify “carelessness” and “superstition” as major impediments to good health among the general population, and education as the key solution. In that such findings suggest a valorization of personal responsibility for self-care, the Foucauldian concept of biopower appeared a salient framework for analysis. Although illuminating, however, biopower was ultimately inadequate for explaining what emerged, on closer analysis, as significant discrepancies between assumptions about how disabled people engaged with healthcare services and their actual beliefs and practices; and between the moral interpretations different stakeholders made of “carelessness” in describing perceived causes of disability. My data also suggested that education was not in itself a key determinant in people's healthcare decisions. This article explores these differences between official and demotic discourses concerning the causes of disability and attempts to account for them ethnographically.The British Academ

Regression modeling of longitudinal binary outcomes with outcome-dependent observation times

Conventional longitudinal data analysis methods assume that outcomes are independent of the data-collection schedule. However, the independence assumption may be violated, for example, when adverse events trigger additional physician visits in between prescheduled follow-ups. Observation times may therefore be associated with outcome values, which may introduce bias when estimating the eect of covariates on outcomes using standard longitudinal regression methods. Existing semi-parametric methods that accommodate outcome-dependent observation times are limited to the analysis of continuous outcomes. We develop new methods for the analysis of binary outcomes, while retaining the exibility of semi-parametric models. Our methods are based on counting process approaches, rather than relying on possibly intractable likelihood-based or pseudo-likelihood-based approaches, and provide marginal, population-level inference. In simulations, we evaluate the statistical properties of our proposed methods. Comparisons are made to \u27naive\u27 GEE approaches that either do not account for outcome-dependent observation times or incorporate weights based on the observation-time process. We illustrate the utility of our proposed methods using data from a randomized controlled trial of interventions designed to improve adherence to warfarin therapy. We show that our method performs well in the presence of outcome-dependent observation times, and provide identical inference to \u27naive\u27 approaches when observation times are not associated with outcomes