Trends in Unemployment and Other Labor Market Difficulties

[Excerpt] The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has for many years published various measures of unemployment and other labor market difficulties. There are six “alternative measures of labor underutilization” published each month in the Employment Situation news release. These measures provide insights into a broad range of problems encountered by workers in today\u27s labor market. The official unemployment rate, also referred to in the list of alternative measures as U-3, is defined as the total number of unemployed persons as a percentage of the labor force, while U-1 and U-2 are more narrowly defined and U-4 through U-6 are broader in scope. The original set of alternative measures was first introduced by the BLS in 1976.5 These measures were later revised following the 1994 redesign of the Current Population Survey (CPS) to account for changes in the definitions of certain labor force measures as well as the collection of new data. Since the redesign of the CPS in 1994, the economy has experienced two recessions—in 2001 and in 2007-2009—during which the entire range of alternative measures (U-1 through U-6) increased. This issue of Beyond the Numbers examines trends in the BLS alternative measures of labor underutilization over the period from 1994 to 2014

‘We Alone are Passive.’ The Committee of Vice-chancellors and Principals and the organisation of British universities, c.1918 – 1939’

The CVCP was a leading collective body for British universities for most of the twentieth century, yet there has been very little historical study of its organisation and work. Brief references tend to be dismissive of its effectiveness, although some authors have been more favourable. This article considers a formative phase in the history of the CVCP and progenitor organisations, examining its foundations at the end of the First World War, although with roots in the late nineteenth century; its complex constitutional status that led to considerable debate about the role and nature of the committee; and some of its main activities and priorities during the inter-war period. It assesses the extent to which we should regard the CVCP as merely passive, or a quietly effective body

What shapes working conditions? Comparative historical evidence for manufacturing

The past decade has seen much discussion about the scope for national distinctiveness in employment relations in the context of the globalisation of corporations and markets. This paper employs historical data on aspects of working conditions in eleven nations’ manufacturing sectors to comment on the impact of supposedly intensifying global pressures. With no historic convergence of working conditions evident in a statistical analysis, the paper turns to a preliminary econometric analysis to afford some purchase on the conditions which underpin continuing national distinctiveness. The results suggest that cross-national variation in the exposure of employees to managerial prerogative, whilst being far from the only influence, has played a substantial role in the shaping of working conditions

Reflections On Liability of Air Carriers for Delay

This paper provides an analysis of both international and Australian law on the liability of air carriers and compensation for delay. It discusses the need for States to develop standard regulatory responses to delay in international carriage. It uses the EC Regulation and the New Zealand legislation as models for developing clearer legal principles and ensuring appropriate compensation for passengers affected by delay. It concludes that domestic regulation and guidance regarding delay and overbooking of flights is required to ensure appropriate liability of air carriers and clarity for passengers

The X-ray spectrometer and what it reveals

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

The Poststructuralist Broom of Wallace’s System: A Conversation Between Wittgenstein and Derrida

David Foster Wallace famously characterized his first novel, The Broom of the System, as ‘a conversation between [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and [Jacques] Derrida.’ This comes as little surprise, given the ubiquity of the question of language in the works of these two thinkers, and given the novel’s constant reflections on the relation between language and world. Broom’s protagonist, Lenore Beadsmen – in search of her eponymous great-grandmother – is preoccupied with the dread that ‘all that really exists of [her] life is what can be said about it,’ that is to say, that reality is entirely coextensive with language. If, as Wittgenstein says, ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,’ and, ‘I am my world,’ then it stands to reason that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of myself.’ This is the fearful hypothesis that drives The Broom of the System. Much of the scholarship surrounding the novel has interpreted Wallace’s remark as an assertion that the novel constitutes a debate between Wittgenstein and Derrida, and has, more often than not, assumed that Wittgenstein ‘wins’ that debate for Wallace. In his groundbreaking work, Understanding David Foster Wallace, Marshall Boswell writes that for Wallace, ‘the job of the post-Barth [i.e., John Barth, with whom Boswell lumps Derrida] novelist is to ‘… overturn the related insistence that texts are “closed systems” that produce their own meaning through endless self-reference.’ The ‘self-conscious meta-fictional novel,’ he writes, ‘in David Foster Wallace’s hands, becomes an open system of communication—an elaborate and entertaining game—between author and reader,’ and Boswell credits Wittgenstein as the inspiration for this thought of the open system. Alternatively, some scholars have left Derrida out of the discussion entirely. Despite the oft-cited quotation from Lipsky’s book, it remains the case, as Bradley Fest has noted, that Derrida’s ‘influence on Wallace’s work still remains largely unexplored.’ There are a number of likely explanations for this privileging of Wittgenstein. The most obvious is the fact that Wallace himself addresses Wittgenstein far more frequently and directly than he does Derrida. Wallace famously wrote a review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which includes a fair amount of broader commentary on Wittgenstein’s project. While Derrida’s name does not appear in The Broom of the System, Wittgenstein’s name is mentioned multiple times, as the ‘mad crackpot genius’ who had been the inspiration for Gramma Lenore’s philosophy, which is the source of Lenore’s aforementioned dread. Wittgenstein was the author of the Philosophical Investigations and of an apparently esoteric green book without which Gramma Lenore never left her home at the Shaker Heights nursing facility. Indeed Wittgenstein, represented by the ever-elusive Gramma Lenore herself, wafts like a specter through the entirety of the novel. However, any simple valorization of Wittgenstein in the thinking of Wallace risks overlooking what Wallace characterizes as the ‘horror’ that Wittgenstein leaves us with. In the famous interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace cites Wittgenstein as ‘the real architect of the postmodern trap,’ the worry, indoctrinated into Lenore by her great-grandmother, that ‘a life is words and nothing else,’ that there is no ‘extra-linguistic anything.’ The dread that burdens Lenore also burdens Wallace, and it is this dread for which Wallace seeks a solution in his writing, both in The Broom of the System and beyond. As Wallace says to McCaffery, ‘If the world is itself a linguistic construct, there’s nothing “outside” language for language to have to picture or refer to. This … leads right to the postmodern, poststructural dilemma of having to deny yourself an existence independent of language.’ If the novel is indeed a ‘conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida,’ and if it is Wittgenstein, and not Derrida, whose thinking points toward the ‘postmodern trap,’ then perhaps we should consider that Derrida may have been a source of hope for Wallace. In this essay, I therefore invite Derrida into this conversation, arguing that, contrary to popular intuitions, Derrida might just be the thinker who points the way in Wallace’s system beyond the ‘postmodern trap.’ As noted, Wallace grapples with the ‘horror’ of language with no ‘outside’. We can think of this ‘anxiety of the outside’ in two ways: (1) that my language belongs only to me, and so if there is no outside of language, there is no outside of myself – the problem of solipsism from the early Wittgenstein, about which Wallace worried extensively; (2) that the world itself is nothing more than language, and hence there is no outside of language that would constitute myself, nothing more to me than the language that is used to describe me – I am not truly a self at all. As Lenore’s significant other – Rick Vigorous – says of Lenore, ‘she simply felt … as if she had no real existence…’ It is Derrida – the silent interlocutor in the book – and not Wittgenstein, who disrupts this double bind, with his famous ‘non-concept’ known as différance, the differential play of force at the heart of all language (and life). Différance points toward an essential exteriority at the heart of the self, thereby avoiding the solipsistic danger of the self-enclosed world. Moreover, différance also points toward an essential outside to language, according to Derrida, and in so doing, it points toward dimensions of human life – intensity, desire, affect, force – that elude the grasp of language, precisely because they too are part of the differential play. Before addressing these characteristics of différance, I shall first discuss Wallace’s anxiety of the outside through the ‘double bind’ he sees in Wittgenstein