Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Kashmir valley, which is largely located in the Himalayan mountain range, lacks a solid industrial foundation since its geographical location presents a significant barrier to planners and administrators in terms of establishing large-scale enterprises. The absence of all-weather permanent connectivity exacerbated by the harsh winter has placed the Kashmir valley in an economically disadvantageous position. We investigated numerous aspects of the Indian Factories Act, 1948 regarding the welfare of women workers employed in the Kashmir Valley (India) textile factories, and found that these establishments lacked many welfare and safety provisions, putting women worker’s health and productivity at risk. For example, all respondents stated that they were only granted two months of maternity leave despite being entitled to 26 weeks and several employees reported being dismissed after requesting maternity leave. These enterprises also lacked internal complaints committees, special trade unions, grievance, or works committees to settle sexual harassment accusations and other disputes between employers and women workers. No health examinations or nursing facilities existed for women workers. Employers were seen as completely disinterested in appointing a welfare officer, and 91% of respondents stated that the government also ignored the authorization of inspectors to monitor and enforce workplace rules. We discovered that women workers did not engage in conciliation committees because they were unaware of their rights, less educated, and were threatened by their employers.

Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about \"American exceptionalism\" is untenable. Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar. Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.

Industrial growth in India has resulted in increased employment opportunities thereby inflating the size of the workforce engaged in both organized and unorganized sectors. This workforce is exposed to various occupational factors at workplace and hence is susceptible to occupational diseases, the control of which requires trained occupational health manpower. The present study was undertaken to map the institutions offering courses to develop industrial hygienist in India, estimate the requirement of such occupational health manpower and to design competencies and curriculum for such a course. Though there are no norms for the industrial hygienist in the Indian Factories Act, on assumption on the basis of norms provided for Safety Officer, it is estimated that for 26.92 million workforce engaged in organized sector, a total of 5407 Industrial hygienists will be required. Thus there is an estimated deficit of 51% for Industrial hygienist based on current ratio of employment. However on supply side there are only three institutes offering specialized courses on industrial hygiene out of which only one is full time residential course while rest two are offered through distance learning mode. Therefore, there is a vital need for the development of industrial hygienist not only in quantity but also in quality so that the workers in industries and communities lead socially and environmentally productive lives.

Industrial growth in India has resulted in increased employment opportunities, thereby inflating the size of the workforce engaged in both organized and unorganized sectors. This workforce is exposed to various occupational factors at workplace and hence is susceptible to occupational diseases, which requires trained occupational health manpower. The present study is undertaken to estimate the need and supply gap of occupational health manpower, based on present regulations. The total workforce in the organized sector in India is 26.92 million. There are 254,951 working registered industrial factories in India, with about 11.16 million workers. These factories have employed 6953 factory medical officers (FMOs) and 2308 safety officers (SOs). Hence, for 26.92 million of total workforce engaged in organized sector, we would require a total of 16,728 FMOs and 5619 SOs, thereby estimating the deficit of 58% for FMOs and 59% for SOs based on current ratio of employment.

Regression analysis is employed to examine the impact on productivity growth of government regulation, specifically worker health and safety regulation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The analysis concentrates on total factor productivity (TFP) measures of productivity growth, which consider the contribution of all productive inputs to output growth. Data are obtained for 450 US manufacturing industries for the period 1958-1978 from the Annual Survey of Manufacturers and the Census of Manufacturers. The results show that OSHA and EPA regulation reduced productivity growth in the average manufacturing industry by .44 percentage points per year, over 30% of the slowdown on the 1970s. The effect of OSHA is found to be quite strong, while that of the EPA is comparatively weak. There also is evidence that pollution-abatement spending only affected the measurement of productivity growth, with no real effect on productivity inputs used in production.

What difference does a written constitution make to public policy? How have women workers fared in a nation bound by constitutional principles, compared with those not covered by formal, written guarantees of fair procedure or equitable outcome? To investigate these questions, Vivien Hart traces the evolution of minimum wage policies in the United States and Britain from their common origins in women's politics around 1900 to their divergent outcomes in our day. She argues, contrary to common wisdom, that the advantage has been with the American constitutional system rather than the British. Basing her analysis on primary research, Hart reconstructs legal strategies and policy decisions that revolved around the recognition of women as workers and the public definition of gender roles. Contrasting seismic shifts and expansion in American minimum wage policy with indifference and eventual abolition in Britain, she challenges preconceptions about the constraints of American constitutionalism versus British flexibility. Though constitutional requirements did block and frustrate women's attempts to gain fair wages, they also, as Hart demonstrates, created a terrain in the United States for principled debate about women, work, and the state--and a momentum for public policy--unparalleled in Britain. Hart's book should be of interest to policy, labor, women's, and legal historians, to political scientists, and to students of gender issues, law, and social policy.

We develop a model of risk assessment that incorporates assumptions from the behavioral theory of the firm into conventional expected utility models of compliance, and test the model using data on injuries and OSHA inspections for 6842 manufacturing plants between 1979 and 1985. Four hypotheses are supported—the specific deterrence effect of an inspection, the importance of lagged effects of general deterrence, the asymmetrical effects of probability and amount of penalty on injuries, and the tendency of injury rates to self-correct over a few years. The model estimates that a 10% increase in enforcement activities will reduce injuries by about 1% for large, frequently inspected firms. Prior analyses reporting lower impacts (Smith, 1979; Viscusi, 1986a) are replicated to distinguish between sampling and modeling differences. The results suggest that further compliance theory needs more detailed models of risk-assessment processes to be tested on samples of firms most affected by enforcement.

A general econometric model, called detection controlled estimation (DCE), is presented that accounts for the nondetection in the statistical analysis of noncompliance. DCE incorporates the detection process directly into the statistical model, allowing for simultaneous control for variations in noncompliance among potential offenders and for variation in detection among monitors. The DCE is applied to safety regulation by the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) inspections of industrial plants in New England in 1985. The results suggest that OSHA has a serious problem with noncompliance, both detected and undetected. The estimates indicate that the rate of undetected violations is about 37%. The analysis also finds evidence of substantial heterogeneity among OSHA safety inspectors, a finding that may be generalized to other contexts.

It is argued that, if the competitive advantage gained through the indirect effects of Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations is sufficiently large, it can more than offset any direct costs, producing a net benefit for the regulated firm and its workers. It is documented empirically that the indirect effects produced by compliance and enforcement asymetries migrate the direct costs of regulation for many firms. In particular, large firms in the Frost Belt gain wealth at the expense of small firms in the Sun Belt. The actual effect of OSHA and EPA regulation on profits and wages is computed by letting the net import ratio, the percentage of employment in large establishments, and the Frost Belt employment share each take on, in turn, their minimum, mean, or maximum values, while the other 2 variables are set equal to their means. It is shown that predators do indeed benefit from regulation.

This article explores the effects of workers' compensation on fatality rates and wages using the 1982 Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the new occupational fatality data issued by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The fatality rate depends upon the workers' compensation benefit variables in a manner that suggests that the safety incentive effects of higher insurance premiums offset any moral hazard effects. The estimates imply that in the absence of workers' compensation, fatality rates would increase by over 20%. Premium levels substantially overstate the cost of workers' compensation, due primarily to a direct wage offset from higher benefits. An indirect wage offset resulting from the decrease in risk caused by workers' compensation augments the direct wage effects. The indirect offset is relatively small, equalling about 10% of the total.