Exposure and Income: Preliminary Findings on Labor Supply on High Pollution Days

We study labor supply decisions on days with high levels of air pollution in Mexico City's metropolitan area using hourly levels of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) air pollution at the locality level. We document a negative, non-linear relationship between PM 2.5 levels and daily labor supply, with strong effects on days with extremely high pollution levels. On these days, the average worker experiences a reduction of around 7.5% of working hours. Workers partially compensate for lost hours by increasing their labor supply on days that follow high pollution days. We provide evidence that income constraints may play an important role in workers labor supply decisions, as we find more moderate responses among informal and low-income workers.

The Studying the Biological Characteristics of the Stingless Bee Tetrigonilla Collina Smith 1857 (Apidae: Melipona) in Hanoi, Vietnam

Stingless bees are distributed in tropical and subtropical regions. There are over 16,000 species of stingless bees around the world, among which, 42 species are from Asia (Kerr & Maule, 1964). Sixteen species of stingless bees have been identified in Vietnam (Sakagami, 1975; Sakagami, 1978; Engel, 2000; Chinh et al., 2005; Rasmussen, 2008). In this study, the biological characteristics of Tetrigonilla collina, as a representative for Southeast Asian stingless bees, were observed and recorded. The worker cell dimensions were 5.30 ± 0.34mm in length by 4.28 ± 0.37mm in width with a volume of 45.02 ± 5.74mL (food volume: 19.05 ± 3.5mL; ratio: 42.27%). The new cells were mostly built in the morning (from 2:00 to 10:00 am) and the queen laid eggs (2.52 ± 0.81 sec per egg) and capped the cells in the afternoon (from 12:00 to 17:00 pm). The average worker-cell building period was 12.03 ± 3.78 hours. Mainly, six of first ten bees that inserted made food discharges in a cell. The food discharge occurred in a very short time, which was 1.58 ± 0.6 minutes. The new cell numbers of the colony were reduced at the end of the experimental period.

The Courts and Corporate Executive Compensation in Canada

Corporate executive compensation in Canada, as in many developed economies, has risen significantly since the 1980s relative to that of the average worker. This has posed an issue for corporate governance due to concerns that the trend may not be serving the corporation and its stakeholders well, and also an issue for society as a whole due to its impact on income inequality more generally. This has raised interest in the role played by institutions in shaping executive pay decisions and also in what role they might play in resolving these issues. This paper looks at the role played by one such institution, the courts, with two ends in mind. The first is to gain an empirical understanding of what the courts actually do with respect to executive pay disputes. It does so by examining a set of decisions by Canadian courts between 1876 and 2018 collected by the author in which the claim of a corporate executive to their pay was at issue in order to get a better picture of how the courts are accessed, who relies on them, what rules they use, how the courts respond and how trends in these have evolved over time. It finds that the litigation of executive pay disputes has varied widely over time with a variety of stakeholders using a variety of legal areas – corporate law, contract law and bankruptcy/arrangement law in particular – to dispute the entitlement of executives to their pay. In recent years however litigation has come to be dominated by oppression remedy applications, with plaintiffs being successful in challenging pay in a majority of decisions. This paints a significantly different picture of the role of the courts than that developed in the American literature which focuses almost exclusively on shareholder use of derivative actions to monitor pay decisions. The second is to examine how better use might be made of the courts in order to remedy the broader problems for corporate stakeholders and society as a whole that corporate executive pay practice presents. It suggests that an expanded role for the oppression remedy by corporate employees should be considered as a policy option which would better reflect a stakeholder model of governance and address broader inequality concerns at the same time.

What Aspects of Formality Do Workers Value? Evidence from a Choice Experiment in Bangladesh

This study uses a choice experiment among 2,000 workers in Bangladesh to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for job attributes: a contract, termination notice, working hours, paid leave, and a pension fund. Using a stated preference method allows calculation of WTP for benefits in this setting, despite the lack of data on worker transitions, and the fact that many workers are self-employed, which makes it difficult to use revealed preference methods. Workers highly value job stability: the average worker would be willing to forgo a 27 percent increase in income to obtain a one-year contract (relative to no contract), or to forgo a 12 percent increase to obtain thirty days of termination notice. There is substantial heterogeneity in WTP by type of employment and gender: women value shorter working hours more than men, while government workers place a higher value on contracts than do private-sector employees.

A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW: SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS FOR TIME-MANAGEMENT IN REMOTE WORK SETTINGS

Ever since the onset of the Internet and the rapid development in communications, a paradigm shift has been occurring between the human resources and the management systems in place. That shift has already rendered plenty of legacy management systems obsolete and ineffective. Evidently, the acceleration of data transfer speeds has produced a side effect in decreasing the location dependency of the average worker in certain industries, which in turn created a new challenge for the contemporary manager especially when dealing with remote teams and time-management of the same. This work-location decoupling meant that new systems had to be created, new studies to be introduced and plenty of modernization to the legacy control systems had to be implemented. And fast! This paper contains a systematic review of available software solutions for time management, location independency, virtual work and work teams and will provide analytic insight.

The Spanish public pension system as opposed to the alternative of private pension plans

Many countries are currently facing the problem of sustainability of public pension systems due to demographic developments and changes in the labor market. In this context, private pension plans are often presented as an alternative. This paper aims to describe the functioning of the current public pension system in Spain and the impact that abandoning the current public system and adopting a pension system based on private contributions would have on workers and pensioners. To this end, a hypothetical case study is presented, for an average worker, comparing the contributions made in each of the systems (public and private) as well as the benefits received after retirement. The results show the different nature of public pensions, which act as an insurance and have a strong redistributive component, as opposed to private pensions, which have an investment nature. For the average worker, the adoption of a private system would entail losses in the purchasing power during his working life and a very substantial reduction in the amounts received during retirement, along with greater economic instability.

Overcoming the capital investment hurdle in worker-controlled firms

Purpose Both the academic literature and practitioners have long noted the need for an equity investment mechanism for worker-controlled firms that alleviates investor anxieties without undermining internal workplace democracy. The purpose of this paper is to outline one such possible mechanism. Design/methodology/approach The proposal locks together the interests of workers and external investors, via non-voting shares with dividends set by a pre-agreed value-added sharing formula. Each worker is paid a base wage, with the average across the firm being a pre-defined multiple of the national minimum wage. Any additional surplus is split into a number of equal “slices”, with each share receiving one slice as its dividend, and the average worker receiving a pre-agreed number of slices as a bonus. Findings Workers have an incentive to maximise their own incomes, and in so doing, will also automatically maximise the dividends received by investors, obviating the need for the shares to have normal voting rights. Working on this principle of aligned interests, the authors also discuss reinvestment, worker ownership of non-voting shares and possibilities for a secondary share market. The authors show how this proposal will be a significant step in aligning the interests of investors with owner-workers in a democratic, negotiated way that shares both risk and returns, thus making worker-controlled firms more attractive to equity investment. Originality/value In light of the recognised problem of underinvestment in worker-controlled firms and the risk of their degeneration, this paper will interest both academics and practitioners in employee ownership, co-operatives and various forms of workplace democracy.