The Bureau of Labor Statistics is an agency with the Department of Labor, whose task it is to gather, analyze, and provide information on all aspects of labor, economics, and the workforce in the United States. The bureau was established by President Chester A. Arthur in 1884 as part of the Department of the Interior.
When labor is in the news media, it reveals – perhaps more than any other subject – the economic, political, and professional conflicts between the practice of journalism and the business of media. The problem of the news media’s coverage of organized labor is that the news media are both the social institutions designated to
Labor unions have been a feature on the world’s media landscape for close to two centuries. Depending on the era and the locale, they have certified the skills of content providers and production workers, bargained collectively for wages and benefits, trained and disciplined members of the craft, and fought with employers and the state over
Sweatshop labor describes work performed under conditions that violate normal standards of minimum wage, employment, worker treatment, and workplace health or safety. It is an issue of great concern to human resource professionals charged with implementing employment laws and policies. While the term is most often associated with globalization and the movement of relatively low-technology
Labor involves purposive effort, mental or physical, toward a goal. In studying labor, we should be particularly careful not to import the biases of our own economic culture. Labor is not always clearly segmented from other activities in daily life, although the wage labor system favors such segmentation; this confusion obscures unpaid labor within capitalism
Anthropologists refer to the division of labor as the different tasks that people do to provide for their physical needs and to reproduce their culture. We base these tasks on such criteria as age, gender, and skill. How this division is manifested varies across cultures and according to societal type. In the foraging, tribal, and
The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is the basic federal law that governs unionization and collective bargaining in the United States. When it was originally enacted in 1935, the NLRA was called the Wagner Act, based on the name of its main sponsor, Senator Robert Wagner of New York. The NLRA underwent major amendments in
Organizations have always been faced with the dilemma of using external or internal labor markets. Hiring and promotion practices vary depending on whether firms use internal or external labor markets. External-labor-market firms concentrate on recruiting from the outside, while internal-labor-market firms concentrate on promotions from within. Organizations that depend on an internal labor market make hiring
The distinction between exempt and nonexempt employees, a familiar dichotomy indicating exemption from certain federal labor regulations, was created through the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938. The act instituted many taken-for-granted characteristics of employment in the United States: the five-day workweek, the 40-hour workweek, and overtime pay. The written intent of the act
When employees regulate their emotions in order to display the emotions that are expected of them in workplace interactions, they are performing emotional labor. They may do this by suppressing or hiding their real feelings and, instead, expressing emotions that they do not actually feel, that is, surface acting. Surface acting involves putting on an
Labor supply has been a well-studied topic in the labor economics literature (Killingsworth, 1983; Pencavel, 1986; Killingsworth and Heckman, 1986; Blundell and MaCurdy, 1999). As the key clinical decision-makers, physicians provide an essential input into the production of health care for their patients. Understanding the determinants of physician labor supply has important implications for the
Health workers are at the center of health systems, and the health workforce plays a key role in increasing access to health services for populations in developing countries. There are numerous challenges in this critical area of health policy in developing countries. At the global level, a 2006 World Health Organization analysis found that an
Emotional labor is the regulation of felt and expressed emotions at work in the service of organizational goals. The construct of emotional labor is traced to the seminal work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who studied the work of airline flight attendants and, specifically, the strategic use of emotion by flight attendants to create a desired
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is an agency with the Department of Labor, whose task it is to gather, analyze, and provide information on all aspects of labor, economics, and the workforce in the United States. The bureau was established by President Chester A. Arthur in 1884 as part of the Department of the Interior.
Labor law refers to the body of laws, regulations, and case law that governs unionization and collective bargaining in the workplace. It is distinguished from employment law, which deals with employment contracts, workplace discrimination, and other private legal issues. Most industrialized countries have enacted labor laws, but those laws may vary across countries or even
Labor is defined as contractions that change the uterine cervix, which results eventually in the delivery of the fetus. Labor is considered one of the most intense experiences of pain widely encountered. The cause of pain might be explained by hypoxia of the contracted uterine muscle (as in myocardial infarction), stretching of the cervix during