Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the likely impact of AI robotics technology on the labor market through the lens of comparative advantage.

The first section reviews the recent success of AI in outperforming humans in cognitive intense activities such as Go, poker and other strategic games, which portends a shift in comparative advantage in human brain power work to machines. It notes the potential for a portfolio of specialized computer algorithms to compete with human general intelligence in work. The analysis contributes to the debate between economists dubious about claims that AI robotics will disrupt work and futurists who expect many jobs to be fully automated in coming years. It advances three “laws of robo-economics” to guide thinking about the new technologies and presents evidence that growing robot intensity has begun to impact the job market.

The paper finds that the case for AI robotics substantially changing the world of work and the distribution of income is more compelling than the case that it will have similar impacts on wages and employment as past technological changes. It advances an ownership solution to spread the benefits of AI robot-driven automation widely.

To the extent that who owns the robots rules the world, it argues for a concerted social effort to widen the “who” in ownership from the few to the many. It reviews policies to expand employee ownership of their own firm and of the stream of revenue via profit-sharing and gain-sharing bonuses. But the paper notes that ensuring that growth of AI robotics benefits all through ownership will require expansion of workers’ and citizens’ stake in business broadly, through collective investment via pension funds, individual investment in mutual funds and development of sovereign wealth funds.

The author argues that we must stop and take a look at what our insistence on human labour as the basis of our society is doing to us, and begin to search for possible alternatives. We need the vision and the courage to aim for the highest level of technology attainable for the widest possible use in both industry and services. We need financial arrangements that will encourage people to invent themselves out of work. Our goal, the article argues, must be the reduction of human labour to the greatest extent possible, to free people for more enjoyable, creative, human activities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the accounting notion of “human depreciation” helped the defined benefit pension plan emerge as the dominant means of dealing with an aging workforce in the first half of twentieth century USA.

The study examines historical material to identify the intersection of several different practices and knowledges that came together in the early decades of the 1900s to permit human depreciation in 1949 to be used to formally link aging employees to their employers.

In the early part of the twentieth century, humans and machines were constructed as parts of a single productive system, human traits were studied in order to increase their machine-like capacities, in the hope of creating a more efficient industrial economy. At the same time, fatigue associated with this industrial nation was constructing the older worker as subject to decline, hence opening the door to a linkage to physical and economic depreciation.

Reveals that the language of accounting can be utilized by non-accountants and outside organizational boundaries to effect public policy and play a constitutive role. Thus, who is able to use accounting conventions is important in understanding how accounting shapes social settings.

“Human depreciation”, used by the Steel Industry Board in 1949 to assign responsibility to employers for the depreciation of their human assets, has been left unexamined despite being cited as one of the greatest contributors to the growth of industrial pensions in the USA. The study examines accounting as an interface among and between the organizational and “non-accounting” spheres.

To discuss the gender dimension of migration and human rights, and to provide an assessment of how to improve human rights protections for migrant women workers in janitorial services and night clubs across registered and unregistered migrant women workers in North Cyprus.

A survey is done to establish the employment conditions of migrant women workers in both sectors. The conditions are evaluated to assess the compliance with North Cyprus labor and immigration legislation and international human rights protocols.

Registered and unregistered segment of the janitorial services and unregistered segment of sex industry are dominated by Turkish migrant women. The registered part of sex industry is dominated by Eastern European migrant women mostly due to the legislative framework within which these two activities operate, primarily with respect to immigration requirements and also as it pertains to the remunerative potential of activity. No evidences of human rights abuses of Turkish immigrants in either segment of the cleaning services sector are founded but lack of knowledge of their conditions in unregistered sex work. Eastern European migrants working in the registered segment of the sex industry suffer human rights and basic migrant rights abuses at the hands of the state and the employer.

Lack of knowledge of Turkish migrant women workers' conditions in unregistered segment of sex work limits the findings of the research. A survey across unregistered Turkish sex workers is suggested for future research.

Legalization of commercial sex among registered konsomatrices would provide an opportunity for labor rights legislation to be fully applied to their primary income‐earning activities. Most of the human and immigrant rights violations are the result of legislation applied to nightclubs and work visas for konsomatrices. Improvements in the legislation and work visas for konsomatrices would guarantee the women to have access to assistance in case of human rights violations.

The paper provides practical suggestion for the improvement of human rights protections for migrant women workers in North Cyprus.

The main objective of this paper is to analyse the link between human capital depreciation and the educational level of Spanish salaried workers.

Wage equations are estimated by sector and occupation, following the empirical framework proposed by Neuman and Weiss. Data in this study refer to the Spanish labour market, using two cross‐sectional employee‐firm matched data.

The estimates provided in this paper suggest that human capital depreciation rates are not homogeneous for the whole sample; in contrast, they vary across educational levels, being greater as the workers' school attainment increases.

The main restriction of the paper is the limited availability of quality longitudinal data to estimate human capital depreciation.

Knowledge acquired by workers may quickly become obsolete in a context of technological change. Thus, the paper's main findings support the need for ongoing training programs to update workers' skills to changing market requirements.

The added value of this paper is two‐fold. On the one hand, returns to education and human capital depreciation for the Spanish labour force are estimated using a pseudo‐panel created from two cross‐sectional data bases. On the other hand, earnings equations are estimated by sector and occupation in order to calculate human capital depreciation rates; this procedure allows the authors to take into account the worker's occupation and their level of education as well as technological differences associated with their job.

Whether training contributes to stabilizing employment among rural migrant workers in cities remains unclear. Based on this gap in the research, the purpose of this paper is to examine how on-the-job training affects rural migrant workers’ job mobility in China.

By using randomly sampled survey data on migrant workers in Liaoning province in 2014, the authors applied a logistic model and survival analysis to explore the effect of on-the-job training on migrant workers’ job turnover and understand workers’ job change behaviour after receiving on-the-job training.

The results showed that job training provided by employers can significantly reduce migrant workers’ turnover by increasing specific human capital. By contrast, training provided by the government or migrant workers themselves focuses on increasing general human capital and thus fails to reduce job turnover. Moreover, further discussion revealed that, in the trained group, those people with a short tenure and low wage in the first job, people without any skills before migration, male migrant workers, and people that work in medium-sized and large cities have a higher probability of changing jobs. These findings suggest that to tackle the high rate of job mobility among rural migrant workers, firms should entice this labour to train by adjusting their internal training mechanisms, and local governments should subsidize firms that provide on-the-job training for rural migrant workers to help share the costs and risks of training. Moreover, for sake of reducing job changing among those trained workers, firms even should take actions to protect their labour rights of migrant workers and to ensure that they receive equal treatment to their urban counterparts.

This paper makes three contributions to the field of job mobility in China. First, it explores the mechanism between on-the-job training and rural migrant workers’ job mobility. Second, it empirically analyses the effect of on-the-job training on migrant workers’ job mobility as well as the different effects of general and specific training. Lastly, its results have important policy implications for the employment stability of rural migrant workers.

The purpose of this paper is to point to some emerging workplace issues relating to the increasing collaboration between human and robot workers. As the number of human workers shrinks and that of robots increases, how will this change the dynamics of the workplace and human worker motivation?

The approach of this paper is to examine recent academic, business and media writings on the subject of artificial intelligence and robotics in the workplace to identify gaps in our understanding of the new hybrid work environment.

What the author has found is that although there are numerous voices expressing concerns about the replacement of human workers by robots, there has not as yet been a substantive study of the impact on human workers of sharing their work life with robots in this environment.

The findings in this paper are limited by the fact that they are drawn from a review of the secondary literature rather than from primary research and are therefore speculative and anecdotal.

The practical implications of the findings are to suggest that it is time to establish a systematic and standardized method for analyzing and measuring the impact on human workers of operating in an environment increasingly populated by automated co-workers.

The author suspects that the social implications will be to suggest that as a human society we will need to establish psychologically and culturally valid means for coping with this new work environment, and the author believes some of the findings may well prove counter intuitive within the social context of work.

The author does not believe there is any substantial work addressing the social, psychological or cultural implications of humans working besides robots on a daily basis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the state-business nexus in responses to human rights violations in businesses and questions the efficacy of the UN guiding principles on human rights in businesses, in particular in the ready-made garments (RMG) industry in Bangladesh. Drawing on Cohen’s notion of “denial” and Black’s (2008) legitimacy and accountability relationships of state and non-state actors, the study seeks to explain why such “soft” global regulations remain inadequate.

The empirical work for this paper is based on the authors’ participation in two multiple-stakeholder advisory consultation meetings for the RMG sector in Bangladesh and 11 follow-up interviews. This is supplemented by documentary evidence on human rights disasters, responses of the state and non-state actors and human rights reports published in national and international newspapers.

The paper provides clear evidence that the state-business nexus perpetuates human rights disasters. The study also shows that the Bangladeshi state, ruled by family-led political parties, is more inclined to protect businesses that cause human rights disasters than to ensure human rights in businesses. The economic conditions of the RMG industry and accountability and legitimacy relationships between state and non-state actors have provided the necessary background for RMG owners to continue to violate the safety and security of the workplace and maintain inhumane working conditions.

Complex state politics, including family, kinship and wealthy supporters, and economic circumstances have serious implications for the efficacy of the UN guiding principle on human rights for business. This paper calls for broader political and economic changes, nationally and internationally.

The study highlights the perpetuation of corporate human rights abuses by the state-business nexus, and indicates that human rights issues continue to be ignored through a discourse of denial. This is explained in terms of legitimacy and accountability relationships between state and non-state actors, bounded by complex political and economic conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate which sectors are more vulnerable to human capital depreciation, with an emphasis on potential differences in skills and in ICT intensities.

The authors estimate an extended Mincerian earnings equation based on Neuman and Weiss’s (1995) model using the EU-KLEMS international database for 15 sectors for the period from 1980 to 2005. The authors also test structural ruptures in earnings and human capital depreciation in the labor market per decade controlling by technological intensity.

Human capital depreciation ranges from 1 to 6 percent. It is mainly significant in skill-intensive sectors regardless of the sector’s technological intensity. The analysis of structural breaks shows that human capital value indeed changed from decade to decade. It even appreciated in low skill-intensive sectors in the 1980s and in the high skill-intensive during the 1990s. Appreciation though, was mainly skill-biased.

Information about on-the-job-training and non-cognitive skills that can also affect human capital depreciation are not included due to lack of data.

To prevent human capital from depreciating in particular sectors and periods educational systems should provide the tools for ongoing lifelong learning at all skills levels. Education is subject to dynamic effects that should be addressed to increase the potential benefits of technological change.

First, instead of using cross-section analysis which is considered to be a pitfall in studying the depreciation of knowledge, the authors observe its dynamic on a longitudinal basis. Second, the international macro-sectoral approach goes beyond limited micro-sectoral analysis in certain countries.

The study was undertaken to determine and understand the career investment behavior of workers in late career (ages 50‐70).

The common wisdom, supported by economic theory, is that human capital investments in late career workers are of negligible value. Yet, recent evidence suggests that older workers do invest in their own careers, despite barriers. Questionnaires, collected from 450 college‐educated men from age 23 to 70, measured hours invested in professional development and in maintaining work‐relevant social networks, age, job satisfaction, and career motivation.

The study found that age was not a factor in the hours spent on professional development and business networking. Career motivation was associated with the hours invested. The association was as strong for people in late career as for younger workers.

As the factors influencing investment during late career appear to be similar to those operating at other ages, further research is needed on the job and personal circumstances that stimulate career motivation in late career workers.

Those who counsel older workers should help them assess and communicate the value of their human capital investments.

The paper identifies key variables for career continuity applying practical outcome measures not previously used.