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Hybrid Employees: Defining and Protecting Employees Excluded from the Coverage of the National Labor Relations Act

Any discussion of labor-management relations naturally assumes two parties: labor and management. Fundamental to both the industrial philosophy and labor legislation of the United States has been the assumption of mutually exclusive and largely adversarial camps of employers and employees. This rigid dichotomy, however, fails to recognize the existence of a third group of workers that fits neither the labor nor the management typology. These workers are best described as hybrid employees: workers who arguably deserve many of the statutory protections afforded to labor but who may be aligned too closely with the employer\u27s interests to warrant the protection of the National Labor Relations Act (the Act or-NLRA). The primary justification for excluding the hybrid group from the protections of the Act is a conflict of interest rationale. Justice Powell noted in his partial dissent in NLRB v. Hendricks County Rural Electric Membership Corp. that including these hybrid employees, whose interests are aligned with managements, in a group of rank-and-file employees necessarily hinders the functioning of the adversarial model of labor-management relations. Under this adversarial model, the conflict of interest rationale is a persuasive reason for excluding the hybrid group from the protections of the Act. This rationale, however, looses some of its persuasiveness upon consideration of a cooperative model of labor-management relations. The continuing decline in unionization and the trend toward greater cooperation between labor and management call for a reconsideration of the overall scheme of labor-management relations and increased efforts to incorporate the hybrid group into the system. Part II of this Special Project Note examines the Act itself in order to determine which workers are excluded from the statutory definition of employee. \u27 Next, Part III examines certain specific groups of hybrid employees as they have been defined and treated by the United States Supreme Court. Part IV discusses possible alternative protections for employees excluded from the coverage of the Act. Possible protections include The Age Discrimination in Employment Act( ADEA), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and employment-at-will actions. Part V concludes that United States labor legislation should be modified to accommodate the hybrid employees if labor-management relations truly are becoming more cooperative than adversarial

Connecticut's Spending Cap: It's History and An Alternative Spending Growth Rule

State spending growth rules and an alternative for Connecticutstate tax policy, spending growth rules, tax and expenditure limits, TELs

How to Create an ASCII Input Data File for UniODA and CTA Software

UniODA and CTA software require an ASCII (unformatted text) file as input data. Arguably the most difficult task an operator faces in conducting analyses is converting the original data file from (a) whatever software package was used to enter the data, into (b) an ASCII file for analysis. This article first highlights critical issues concerning missing data, variable labels, and variable types that users must address in order to convert their data into an ASCII file for analysis using ODA software. Specific steps needed to convert a data set from its original file-type into a space-delimited ASCII file are then discussed. The process of converting data into ASCII files for use as input data is illustrated for three leading statistical software packages: SPSS, SAS, and STATISTICA

Development and validation of the child post-traumatic cognitions inventory (CPTCI)

Background: Negative trauma-related cognitions have been found to be a significant factor in the maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults. Initial studies of such appraisals in trauma-exposed children and adolescents suggest that this is an important line of research in youth, yet empirically validated measures for use with younger populations are lacking. A measure of negative trauma-related cognitions for use with children and adolescents, the Child Post-Traumatic Cognitions Inventory (CPTCI), is presented. The measure was devised as an age-appropriate version of the adult Post-Traumatic Cognitions Inventory (Foa et al., 1999). Methods: The CPTCI was developed and validated within a large (n = 570) sample, comprising community and trauma-exposed samples of children and adolescents aged 6-18 years. Results: Principal components analysis suggested a two-component structure. These components were labelled 'permanent and disturbing change' and 'fragile person in a scary world', and were each found to possess good internal consistency, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, and discriminative validity. The reliability and validity of these sub-scales was present regardless of whether the measure was completed in the acute phase or several months after a trauma. Scores on these sub-scales did not vary with age. Conclusions: The CPTCI is a reliable and valid measure that is not specific to the type of trauma exposure, and shows considerable promise as a research and clinical tool. The structure of this measure suggests that appraisals concerning the more abstract consequences of a trauma, as well as physical threat and vulnerability, are pertinent factors in trauma-exposed children and adolescents, even prepubescent children

Crystallization of dense binary hard-sphere mixtures with marginal size ratio

Molecular dynamics simulations are performed for binary hard-sphere mixtures with a size ratio of γ=0.9 and a volume fraction of ϕ=0.58 over a range of compositions. We show how, at this high volume fraction, crystallization depends sensitively on the composition. Evidence is presented that crystallization in these mixtures does not proceed by the standard nucleation and growth paradigm. Rather, some crystallite forms almost immediately and then an interplay between compositional fluctuations and crystal growth is able to dramatically extend the time scale on which further crystallization occurs. This can be seen as a form of geometric frustration

The Impact of Work-Study Participation on the Career Readiness of Undergraduates

The Federal Work-Study (FWS) program is an integral part of the federal financial aid plan in the United State since 1964 providing employment opportunities, financial assistance, and opportunities to improve career readiness to over 675,000 students annually. However, little investigation has been completed into the effects of participating in FWS in terms of either program effectiveness or as an effectiveness as a career development program. Previous research lacks consistent findings and focuses on academic outcomes, ignoring development aspects as well as the potential reframing of the program as a high-impact practice. This study assesses the career readiness of FWS eligible students, utilizing a pre-post test control group design with a longitudinal t-test assessment of measured outcomes at two time points as well as an analysis of longitudinal growth. Descriptive analysis found statistically significant differences in career readiness growth for FWS participants across all demographic groups

Metals management in the fiberline

"December 1995.""Submitted to 1996 TAPPI Minimum Effluent Mill Symposium, Atlanta, Georgia, January 22-24, 1996.

Background Modeling for Double Higgs Boson Production: Density Ratios and Optimal Transport

We study the problem of data-driven background estimation, arising in the search of physics signals predicted by the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider. Our work is motivated by the search for the production of pairs of Higgs bosons decaying into four bottom quarks. A number of other physical processes, known as background, also share the same final state. The data arising in this problem is therefore a mixture of unlabeled background and signal events, and the primary aim of the analysis is to determine whether the proportion of unlabeled signal events is nonzero. A challenging but necessary first step is to estimate the distribution of background events. Past work in this area has determined regions of the space of collider events where signal is unlikely to appear, and where the background distribution is therefore identifiable. The background distribution can be estimated in these regions, and extrapolated into the region of primary interest using transfer learning of a multivariate classifier. We build upon this existing approach in two ways. On the one hand, we revisit this method by developing a powerful new classifier architecture tailored to collider data. On the other hand, we develop a new method for background estimation, based on the optimal transport problem, which relies on distinct modeling assumptions. These two methods can serve as powerful cross-checks for each other in particle physics analyses, due to the complementarity of their underlying assumptions. We compare their performance on simulated collider data

Terrapin technologies manned Mars mission proposal

A Manned Mars Mission (M3) design study is proposed. The purpose of M3 is to transport 10 personnel and a habitat with all required support systems and supplies from low Earth orbit (LEO) to the surface of Mars and, after an eight-man surface expedition of 3 months, to return the personnel safely to LEO. The proposed hardware design is based on systems and components of demonstrated high capability and reliability. The mission design builds on past mission experience, but incorporates innovative design approaches to achieve mission priorities. Those priorities, in decreasing order of importance, are safety, reliability, minimum personnel transfer time, minimum weight, and minimum cost. The design demonstrates the feasibility and flexibility of a Waverider transfer module