Group items tagged

"In low- and lower-middle-income countries - which of course make up the vast majority - obesity among women was approximately double that among men (and considerably lower overall). Combine this with the fact that UK male obesity began to catch up with and overhaul female obesity in the last 20-30 years - when many working-class and manual jobs were being automated or 'outsourced' - a strongly suggestive picture emerges of male obesity being related to not just cheap, readily available, heavily advertised, highly-profitable high-calorie food, but also the decline of traditionally "masculine" jobs. Or to put it glibly: call centres replacing pits. Offices are, after all, "obesegenic environments"."

"The many theories about negotiation may work perfectly when you're doing a deal with a company in your own country. But in today's globalized economy you could be negotiating a joint venture in China, an outsourcing agreement in India, or a supplier contract in Sweden. If so, you might find yourself working with very different norms of communication. What gets you to "yes" in one culture gets you to "no" in another. To be effective, a negotiator must have a sense of how his counterpart is reacting. Does she want to cooperate? Is she eager, frustrated, doubtful? If you take stock of subtle messages, you can adjust your own behavior accordingly. In an international negotiation, however, you may not have the contextual understanding to interpret your counterpart's communication-especially unspoken signals-accurately. In my work and research, I find that when managers from different parts of the world negotiate, they frequently misread such signals, reach erroneous conclusions, and act, as Tim Carr did, in ways that thwart their ultimate goals."

"In addition to outsourcing, there are other hypotheses that may explain the decline in the LFWP which should be investigated. If firm-specific wage premiums result from rent-sharing arrangements, then increasing focus on corporate governance and efficiency in large firms may have led them to more closely align pay with market rates. Firm-specific wage premiums may in part reflect compensating differentials for non-wage amenities. If large firms are offering more amenities relative to small firms in recent decades, for example healthcare, then we may see a decline in the LFWP."

A boom in companies trying to cut costs by contracting out janitorial and security jobs has led to large pay disparities between workers doing the same jobs, according to a UC Berkeley report. Janitors who work for California contractors earn on average $10.31 an hour, or 20% less than janitors who work directly for a company that uses their services, according to the report, prepared by the university's Center for Labor Research and Education and released Tuesday.

Contrary to AWARE's claims, in Singapore feminism has actually decreased the birth rate - and more feminism will just depress it even more. This is not to say that is necessarily a bad thing, but just that they are divorced from reality; it is one thing to say that feminism, while depressing the birth rate, is still a good thing (even if contentious depending on definitions, this is defendable). It is quite another to say that feminism boosts the birth rate. Actually, this is not the most insane of their recent flights of fancy. In the world they live in, beauty is subjective and has no connection to a woman's remarriage; the use of the keyword "normative" should set off alarm bells, and the case is splendidly demolished ("Railing against the objective definition of beauty is like saying that America's Next Top Model is bunk; it is futile and makes everyone suspect that the person doing the complaining is ugly"). Again, it is one thing to say that maintenance payments should not be linked to looks (putting aside the fact of how similar quibbles could be made about "lifetime earnings", but they are commonly used to calculate, for example, divorce settlements [SPOING!])

"Sunil Kumar wasn't told, in any detail, why he was being let go; he insists that what he did at Tech Mahindra wasn't automatable, and that he was fired as part of a drive to invigorate the bottom line. Devika Narayan, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota who is researching the subject for her doctoral thesis, thinks automation may indeed be getting too much blame for the loss of jobs like his. Companies might well be talking up automation to mask some of their own failures, or to distract from the ill effects of other factors beyond their control, she says. She points out that many IT giants are flabby and overstaffed, and that American companies are now wary, given the U.S. political climate, of sending work overseas. "The extent to which automation is being exaggerated is still unclear to me," Narayan says. She suspects that Indian IT companies "want to leverage this automation narrative to undertake structural changes, particularly downsizing.'""