Payment system of agricultural workers of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 1965 – 1985

The article considers the organization of the system of remuneration of agricultural workers in Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. The main role in the income of the Soviet people was played by wages. It was the main lever of material incentives for the population to work. Its changes directly affected the well-being of the region's residents, as wages were the main source of livelihood for the Donbass population. The main component of the salary was the tariff rate. The authorities systematically reviewed the system of rates and salaries, believing that this would help achieve the main goal to ensure the optimal share of the tariff part in wages. The search for the most rational ways to create an effective system of material remuneration of workers in the 1960-80s continued quite actively. In general, wages in the country were regulated mainly by the state, market mechanisms were not involved in this process. Much attention is paid to the legislative justification of the formation and changes in the system of remuneration of their labor. In particular, the relevant resolutions of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR, decisions of the Plenums of the Central Committee, local authorities, etc. are traced. On the basis of the above documents, the level of salaries of agricultural workers, the procedure for calculating various types of surcharges and bonuses, their differences in the years and main positions under study are analyzed. For almost the entire period under study, there has been a relentless search for optimization of wages in rural areas, but this search has had almost no effect on a significant improvement in the living standards of peasants. Different forms of wage distribution are also considered, salaries of management and agricultural specialists are analyzed and compared. The aspect of the existence of homesteads as a means of additional income is studied. The author gives a generalized description of the changes in the system of remuneration of rural workers during 1965 1985, following it from archival materials. The main attention is paid to the shortcomings in the system of wages in agriculture, reveals the unfair distribution of monetary expenditures on the wage fund.

Support Vector Machines for Biomarkers Detection in in vitro and in vivo Experiments of Organochlorines Exposure

Metabolomic studies generate large amounts of data, whose complexity increases if they are derived from in vivo experiments. As a result, analysis methods highly used in metabolomics, such as Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA), can have particular difficulties with this type of data. However, there is evidence that indicates that Support Vector Machines (SVMs) can better deal with complex data. On the other hand, chronic exposure to organochlorines is a public health problem. It has been associated with diseases such as cancer. Therefore, its identification is relevant to reduce their impact on human health. This study explores the performance of SVMs in classifying metabolic profiles and identifying relevant metabolites in studies of exposure to organochlorines. For this purpose, two experiments were conducted: in the first one, organochlorine exposure was evaluated in HepG2 cells; and, in the second one, it was evaluated in serum samples of agricultural workers exposed to pesticides. The performance of SVMs was compared with that of PLS-DA. Four kernel functions were assessed in SVMs, and the accuracy of both methods was evaluated using a k-fold cross-validation test. In order to identify the most relevant metabolites, Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) was used in SVMs and Variable Importance in Projection (VIP) in PLS-DA. The results show that SVMs exhibit a higher percentage of accuracy with fewer training samples and better performance in classifying the samples from the exposed agricultural workers. Finally, a workflow based on SVMs for the identification of biomarkers in samples with high biological complexity is proposed.

Survival in a Nazi Concentration Camp: The Spanish Prisoners of Mauthausen

Analysis of the extent to which higher social class (along with other demographic variables) was an advantage for Spanish prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp advances the study of the determinants of survival in contexts of indiscriminate violence. Use of Cox event-history models, based on detailed information collected by well-placed Spaniards at the camp, reveals that individuals from higher social classes who filled administrative positions at Mauthausen were prominent in support networks and had a good command of the German language were more likely to survive. The risk of death was highest among unskilled agricultural workers, followed by unskilled non-agricultural workers.

Current aspects of occupational hearing loss in agricultural workers

Introduction. Agricultural workers belong to the cohort of increased risk of developing occupational hearing loss (OHL). When studying occupational sensorineural hearing loss (SHL), researchers usually limit themselves to stating its share in the structure of occupational diseases without a comprehensive analysis of the initiating occupational factors and the relationship between the development of the disease with the age of employees and occupational experience. Materials and methods. The study is based on data on working conditions and occupational diseases by type of economic activity “Agriculture, forestry, hunting, fishing and fish farming” in the Saratov region from 2000 to 2019. The assessment of the factors of working conditions was carried out using the methods of the current hygienic classification. Generally accepted indicators were used to characterize occupational diseases. Linear regression analysis and polynomial equations were used to describe trend models of the prevalence of occupational diseases. Calculations and data analysis was carried out based on Microsoft Excel and Statistica application software packages. Results. Occupational hearing loss occupied the fourth rank after dorsopathies, vibration disease and chronic brucellosis in the nosological structure of accumulated occupational diseases. The level of primary incidence of SHL was in the range of 0.11 - 0.71 per 10000 workers. All cases of OHL were detected in agricultural machine operators whose harmful working conditions were characterized by a synergy of industrial noise (classes 3.1-3.3) and general vibration (classes 2-3.2). For the most part, SHL was diagnosed in workers aged 50 to 60 years with a work experience of 8 to 42 years in the profession and acted as the second or third concomitant occupational disease associated with dorsopathy, vibration disease or bronchopulmonary diseases. Conclusion. The absence of a statistically significant decrease in the level of PPP among agricultural workers during the observation period indicates the insufficient effectiveness of preventive measures to minimise occupational noise exposure.

Heterogeneity and Instability: Theoretical–Methodological Outcomes of Three Investigations on Land and Agrarian Movements and the State

The article presents a theoretical–methodological proposal to research movements and its connections based on the associations they establish. The first investigation focuses on the transformations of the South African Landless People’s Movement, the second on interactions between Brazilian rural movements and the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, the third focuses on the transnational ties of the Brazilian National Confederation of Agricultural Workers. We produce an ontological definition of movements and the state as collectives whose existence is defined by continuous assemblages of heterogeneous and unstable elements. Those collectives are not enclosed analytical units, but contingent and contextual. Methodologically, we suggest the observation of the processes in the long term to grasp the continuous constructions of those collectives, even before they reach public expression. Controversies are analytical categories for understanding which elements allow things to take the course we analyze.