Balancing Leisure and Work: Evidence from the Seasonal Home

Seasonal homes are used during leisure time for many recreational activities, yet recent technological innovations have diminished the separation between the work place and the seasonal home. In a survey of Walworth County seasonal home owners, most who work full time report they seldom work during vacations and weekends from their seasonal home. Yet there is a distinct subgroup who do mix work into weekends and vacations for a variety of reasons. The most frequent reasons given by these people for working from the seasonal home were related to the expectations of coworkers and clients. Understanding more about the habits and motivations of those who frequently work during weekends and on vacations could provide a new perspective on the obstacles everyone faces in balancing work and leisure

Seasonal Work and Employment Insurance Use

A variety of measures have been used to identify the extent of seasonal work. While some give an indication of the incidence of Employment Insurance (EI) use among seasonal workers or the seasonality of frequent claimants’ EI patterns, they do not directly measure the relationship between seasonal work and frequent EI use. Such analysis requires a longitudinal source, such as the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) which captures both work and EI use patterns over time.seasonal employment

Changes in physical and chemical variables

An article reviewing the work undertaken looking at the seasonal variation of chemical conditions in water at various depths in lakes. The laboratory tests undertaken for the research is outlined, as well as details of the sampling locations and the staff involved with the work. One figure shows the seasonal variation in the amounts of dissolved substances in the surface water of Windermere during 1936. Another figure shows seasonal varation inthe dry weight of phyto- and zooplankton in Windermere. Seasonal changes are discussed further and a table is included showing chemical conditions in winter and summer for Windermere

Labour Market Seasonality in Canada: Trends and Policy Implications

The objective of this paper is to examine labour market seasonality in Canada over the past three decades in order to shed light on what policies might be best suited to address seasonal economies. The main findings are as follows. The seasonality of the Canadian economy has declined since 1976 according to a wide range of output and labour market variables. However, since 1996 unemployment rate seasonality has increased. Seasonality ?both in employment and the unemployment rate ?is much higher for the young than for older workers and much higher for men than for women. Canada’s level of employment seasonality was more than three times higher than that in the United States in 2003. However, unemployment rate seasonality was perhaps surprisingly the same in the two countries. Relative to OECD countries, Canada has average unemployment rate seasonality, but very high employment seasonality. Atlantic Canada has higher levels of employment and unemployment rate seasonality than the other provinces reflecting a greater importance of primary industries and greater propensity of employers to hire part-year workers. Seasonal unemployment represents a much more important public policy issue than seasonal employment. The basic problem is an underlying lack of employment opportunities in rural and remote areas where seasonal unemployment is concentrated, not seasonal unemployment itself. An economic development strategy that ensures that all persons who want full year work can obtain it must be the most important element in any attempt to reduce seasonal unemployment. But such a strategy might need to be supplemented, at least in the short-to-medium term, by out-migration, particularly in very high unemployment regions, and incentives for firms to transform seasonal work into full-year work, or at least into near full-year work. Since unrestricted benefits for seasonal EI repeaters will not reduce seasonal unemployment, a strong case can be made that long-term income support for the seasonally unemployed is not in the long-run in the best interest of the beneficiaries, high unemployment regions, and the country, although reducing such benefits is politically difficult.seasonality, seasonal employment, seasonal unemployment, unemployment, Atlantic Canada, Canada

Conceptualising seasonal financial market failures and credit rationing in applied rural household models

A wide variety of farm household models have provided a valuable theoretical basis for empirical and conceptual analysis of interactions between production and consumption resource allocations of poor rural people. A weakness of common applications of many such models, and unfortunately of much analysis, is failure to routinely also recognise and adequately describe the fundamental seasonal nature of most agricultural production and the effects of pervasive seasonal finance market failures on poor rural people’s behaviour and welfare. This is despite considerable theoretical work demonstrating the importance of seasonal financial market failures as constraints on agricultural development. A general model recognising this is presented, with graphical applications showing the potential importance of seasonal finance constraints on farm households’ behaviour and welfare . Formal methods for allowing for the effects of seasonal finance constraints on household responses to policy and other change should be standard tools used by applied rural development economists

Preliminary impacts of a new seasonal work program on rural household incomes in the Pacific

Seasonal work programs are increasingly advocated by international aid agencies as a way of enabling both developed and developing countries to benefit from migration. They are argued to provide workers with new skills and allow them to send remittances home, without the receiving country having to worry about long-term assimilation and the source country worrying about permanent loss of skills. However, formal evidence as to the development impact of seasonal worker programs is non-existent. This paper provides the first such evaluation, studying New Zealand's new Recognized Seasonal Employer (RSE) program which allows Pacific Island migrants to work in horticulture and viticulture in New Zealand for up to seven months per year. We use baseline and follow-up waves of surveys we are carrying out in Tonga to form difference-in-difference and propensity score matching estimates of short-term impacts on household income and consumption

How do Pacific island households and communities cope with seasonally absent members?

Households and communities in the Pacific islands are increasingly likely to have some of their most productive members regularly absent due to growing opportunities for seasonal work abroad. If these absences are costly for the family left behind, the net development benefits of seasonal migration will be less than what they appear from remittances and repatriated foreign earnings, and there might be a role for government policies in host and source countries to mitigate some of the effects of absence. This article provides the first evidence of how Pacific island households and communities are affected by and cope with seasonal absences. We find that Tongan households have succeeded in mitigating many of the potential adverse effects associated with seasonal separation of members, whereas households from Vanuatu with members participating in the RSE appear to have suffered some shortterm costs in terms of diet and health

Guest-worker Programs and the Propensity to Emigrate: Evidence from the Work-and-travel USA program in Romania

Targeted seasonal guest-worker program replace wider scope immigration policy and are expected to formalize irregular migration flows, to recruit sufficient numbers of seasonal migrants, and to provide critical revenues of source countries following the return of migrants with their earnings. Understating temporary migrant selectivity, the experience of engaging in work-and-travel abroad programs (for instance, in contrast to the existing evidence of study-abroad programs) is important for capturing the role temporary guest-worker programs could have in the extent at which the supposed “triple win” achieved. This research found that college students that participated in the work & study abroad seasonal guest-worker programs for college students are 38% less likely to emigrate compared to those that did not participate in the program.

Optimal linear decision rules for a work force smoothing model with seasonal demand

This paper gives a procevure for the determination of the optimal linear control for a production-inventory system in steady-state with non-linear costs per period and normally distributed seasonal demand. In an example this control policy is compared with other policies

What do we mean when we say casualisation of farm work is rising?: Evidence from fruit farms in the Western Cape

Du Toit & Ally's (2003) results on the casualisation of farm work in the Western Cape confirmed the worst fears of sociologists: Globalisation and/or labour laws increased casualisation in agriculture. New labour data and a study conducted in 1976 allow one to revisit the casualisation result for the table grape industry of the Hex River Valley. This paper resolves imprecise definitions of regular versus permanent status, and of casual versus seasonal status. It also examines casualisation and job shedding. Results show a decrease in the share of seasonal work and no change in the casual component of seasonal work. The job status of most farm women in the Valley improved as a result of legislative changes implemented since 1994. Outsourcing is present but insignificant at this point. On the whole data for the table grape industry of the Hex River Valley does not support the hypothesis that globalisation and labour market reform caused dramatic increases in casualisation.Farm labour markets, horticulture, Western Cape, Crop Production/Industries, Labor and Human Capital,