Organising non‐standard workers: union recruitment in the Irish care sector

In 2004, Ireland's largest union initiated its most comprehensive organising campaign to date, resulting in 12,000 care workers being organised. This article explores how unions can sustain campaigns among a dispersed workforce, and how public support and worker commitment can be leveraged to achieve structural changes in an emerging sector.     

Organising migrant workers: the living wage campaign at the University of East London

This critical case study looks at the campaign led by Citizens UK and Unison to get the University of East London (UEL) to sign up to the London living wage (LLW). UEL agreed to pay the LLW after a brief campaign in November 2010 and it was subsequently implemented in August 2011. The study charts the course of the campaign and draws on mobilisation theory and new primary research to account for its success. What our findings suggest is that community organisers and union activists were able to organise and mobilise a largely apolitical group of migrant workers. This, we suggest, can be explained by the successful mobilisation of the community and augurs well for future broad‐based campaigns.     

Public funded trade union education in Australia

Trade union education is assisted by public funds in most industrialised nations. A seemingly unique statutory training body (TUTA) has been recently established in Australia. Les Cupper gives a detailed account of TUTA's origins and history and focuses on the danger of organised labour relying upon nonunion funds to finance its training activity.     

Devolution and disabled workers: the experiences of union equality representatives in Wales

In contrast to the Coalition Government, the Welsh Assembly embraced the original objectives of the Public Sector Equality Duty and provided financial support to develop a network of union equality representatives (ERs). With reference to ER support for disabled workers, this article examines the role of devolution in equalities bargaining.     

Explaining union membership of temporary workers in Spain: the role of local representatives and workers’ participative potential

It has been widely assumed that type-of-contract segmentation represents a strong structural constraint on trade union growth. The analysis of a sample of the Spanish workforce shows, however, that the effect of contract type on union membership is not statistically significant once the availability and performance of local union representatives are introduced in the explanatory model. Additionally, the worker’s participative potential, as indicated by his/her social and political capital, is also found to be a major explanatory factor. These findings are placed in comparative perspective and discussed in relation to possible union revitalisation strategies.     

Are non‐union workers different to their union colleagues? Evidence from the public services

This article analyses workers’ attitudes to trade unions by comparing the survey responses of Unison members with public sector workers who have left or never joined a union. It examines whether differences between these groups can help to explain union‐joining behaviour and membership patterns. The findings demonstrate that there are few differences in attitudes between Unison members, ex‐unionists and never‐members on the issue of ‘union effectiveness’. However, ex‐unionists were more reluctant to re‐join unions than never‐members. The evidence concludes that if public service unions are to recruit new members, they need to adopt differentiated strategies and representatives have to target ex‐unionists and never‐members in the workplace.     

Optimal Growth with Public Capital and Public Services

We characterize optimal economic growth in an endogenous growth model in which production requires public capital (a stock) and public services (a flow) in addition to private capital and labor. We analyze the comparative static effects of changes in the fundamental technological and preference parameters of the model on the optimal values of several variables, such as the optimal rate of growth and the optimal allocation of resources among consumption, the provision of public services, and investment in public and private capital. We show that the general optimal path converges in finite time to the balanced growth optimal path. We relate our paper to important contributions to the existing literature by obtaining them as special cases of our model.     

Job insecurity and job satisfaction in the United States: the case of public sector union workers

We measure the association between perceived job insecurity and job satisfaction in the United States and focus on public sector union workers. Job satisfaction decreases with perceived job insecurity among union workers in the public sector and primarily when tenure with an employer is high.     

Government Budgets and Public Services: Some Criteria for Determining the Sources and Levels of Public Goods, including Transport Services

Instances of non-optimal consumption of public goods and services can easily arise if individual demand curves are not identical. It does not follow, however, that the best solution to the problem of too little consumption is an increase in government expenditure. Special user charges and voluntary contributions of time, goods, and money on the part of persons that value public goods more highly than the general population have long been important ways of supplementing government spending for social goods. The work trip appears to be a good example of a service area where existing cost structures and pricing methods may be biased against the voluntary associations which are needed to make the United States less dependent on foreign oil. This bias could be corrected by using an income-tax-surcharge to help finance the fixed costs associated with mass transit and other types of work trip pooling arrangements.     

Attitudes toward risk and self-employment of young workers

A high degree of risk tolerance is often regarded as one of the fundamental characteristics of entrepreneurs. Using multiple responses on risky income gambles in the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), I investigate the effect of individual risk tolerance on the probability of entry into self-employment. I construct a measure of individual level of risk tolerance that is corrected for reporting error and that varies with age and other covariates that potentially affect self-employment decision. I find that risk tolerance is an important determinant of the decision to enter self-employment. However, I find that the estimated effect of risk tolerance on the probability of entering self-employment is dramatically understated if measurement error is not taken into account. In addition, I find that that accounting for the correlation between risk tolerance and other covariates is important to correctly assess the effects of the other determinants of self-employment while it has a trivial effect on the estimated marginal effect of risk tolerance.     

我国物流业发展与商业银行金融服务研究

本文通过对我国物流业现状的研究,发现我国物流业的发展还存在一些亟待解决的问题,制约了物流业的健康发展.作者试图在遵循物流业发展规律的基础上,找到商业银行可以为物流业的发展提供金融服务切合点,详尽阐述商业银行在与物流业合作过程中能够提供的金融产品和服务,最终实现商业银行与物流企业的双赢.     

Co-Production and Value Co-Creation in Outcome-Based Contracting in Public Services

This paper contributes to theorizing and analysing different processes of co-production and value co-creation within outcome-based contracting (OBC). It investigates how different OBC mechanisms are implemented in practice, and with what implications for public service users’ experiences and outcomes. Using realist synthesis techniques, the paper analyses existing evaluations that focus on users’ experiences of OBC in welfare-to-work services and a homelessness project. It highlights how OBC can affect equality, effectiveness and innovation within public services. The paper also exemplifies the importance of analysing how the political and policy context of public services affects both service pathways and their outcomes.     

商业银行融资服务与供应链运营决策研究

论文分析了在资金约束条件下,商业银行融资服务对供应链运营决策极其价值产生的连锁影响。在单一供应链(一个供应商和一个零售商)中,当零售商受自由资金限制时,其必须通过商业银行融资服务来实现最优订货量。其中,商业银行提供融资服务是只追求风险中性的,多个商业银行之间存在一定的市场竞争。研究结果表明:当零售商出现资金约束时,商业银行融资服务可给整个供应链带来新的价值。另一方面,研究发现资本市场的竞争程度(无风险利率)将通过传递影响整个供应链效益。     

基本公共服务均等化中存在的问题及其对策分析

基本公共服务均等化是我国建设社会主义现代化国家的重要保障,对于我国民生工程的建设具有重大的现实意义.目前,我国依旧存在着政府公共服务能力有待提高、基本公共服务在地域上供给不平衡、公共服务供给模式单一等问题.为此,需要完善公共服务供给模式、强化政府的主体责任、建立政府绩效评价体系、加大群众参与公共服务决策的力度、促进公共服务信息化建设来提升政府公共服务供给效能,加快实现我国基本公共服务均等化.     

Social Marketing as Transformational Marketing in Public Services

Abstract

This article presents a case study of a social marketing intervention, developed as an innovative action research project for a Fire Service, to tackle the public service challenge of reducing the incidence of deliberate countryside fire-setting in certain communities. The case demonstrates the effectiveness of a social marketing approach to tackling an anti-social behaviour that had become a local social norm which conventional education-based campaigns had failed to change. The case also explores unexpected impacts that applying a social marketing approach had on the sponsoring Fire Service, acting to transform certain aspects of its operations and culture.     

对公共图书馆免费开放服务与管理的思考

本文拟从宁夏青铜峡市图书馆实际,谈谈对图书馆免费开放后的服务与管理谈谈自己的看法。     

Barriers to cross‐border trade union cooperation in Europe: the case of the graphical workers

This paper is concerned with exploring the barriers to cross‐border trade union cooperation among graphical workers in Europe. Highlighting the increasing globalisation of graphical multinationals, the paper illustrates that graphical unions cannot restrict their activities to developments within national boundaries. As such it highlights some of the obstacles that unions face in attempting to instigate transnational cooperation strategies. These obstacles include: the role of employers, the prevailing practices of the unions, employee reticence, the role of the law and resource constraints. It concludes by stressing the continuing need to strengthen cross‐border trade union networks with the ability to impose effective sanctions against the unbridled growth of multinational power.     

Transforming union women: the role of women trade union officials in union renewal

The article investigates the nature of the increasing involvement of women in the decision-making structures of the fifth largest UK union through a study of senior women union officials. It is argued that senior union women, operating within a feminist paradigm, balance both transformational and status quo objectives in working towards union survival and renewal.