Retail is now the largest employer in the United States. For the most part, retail jobs are “bad jobs” characterized by low wages, unpredictable work schedules, and few opportunities for advancement. However, labor experts Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly show that these conditions are not inevitable. In Where Bad Jobs Are Better, they investigate retail work across different industries and seven countries to demonstrate that better retail jobs are not just possible, but already exist. By carefully analyzing the factors that lead to more desirable retail jobs, Where Bad Jobs Are Better charts a path to improving job quality for all low-wage jobs. In surveying retail work across the United States, Carré and Tilly find that the majority of retail workers receive low pay and nearly half work part-time, which contributes to high turnover and low productivity. Jobs staffed predominantly by women, such as grocery store cashiers, pay even less than retail jobs in male-dominated fields, such as consumer electronics. Yet, when comparing these jobs to similar positions in Western Europe, Carré and Tilly find surprising differences. In France, though supermarket cashiers perform essentially the same work as cashiers in the United States, they receive higher pay, are mostly full-time, and experience lower turnover and higher productivity. And unlike the United States, where many retail employees are subject to unpredictable schedules, in Germany, retailers are required by law to provide their employees notice of work schedules six months in advance. The authors show that disparities in job quality are largely the result of differing social norms and national institutions. For instance, weak labor regulations and the decline of unions in the United States have enabled retailers to cut labor costs aggressively in ways that depress wages and discourage full-time work. On the other hand, higher minimum wages, greater government regulation of work schedules, and stronger collective bargaining through unions and works councils have improved the quality of retail jobs in Europe. As retail and service work continue to expand, American employers and policymakers will have to decide the extent to which these jobs will be good or bad. Where Bad Jobs Are Better shows how stronger rules and regulations can improve the lives of retail workers and boost the quality of low-wage jobs across the board.
Retail is now the largest employer in the United States. For the most part, retail jobs are “bad jobs” characterized by low wages, unpredictable work schedules, and few opportunities for advancement. However, labor experts Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly show that these conditions are not inevitable. In Where Bad Jobs Are Better, they investigate retail work across different industries and seven countries to demonstrate that better retail jobs are not just possible, but already exist. By carefully analyzing the factors that lead to more desirable retail jobs, Where Bad Jobs Are Better charts a path to improving job quality for all low-wage jobs. In surveying retail work across the United States, Carré and Tilly find that the majority of retail workers receive low pay and nearly half work part-time, which contributes to high turnover and low productivity. Jobs staffed predominantly by women, such as grocery store cashiers, pay even less than retail jobs in male-dominated fields, such as consumer electronics. Yet, when comparing these jobs to similar positions in Western Europe, Carré and Tilly find surprising differences. In France, though supermarket cashiers perform essentially the same work as cashiers in the United States, they receive higher pay, are mostly full-time, and experience lower turnover and higher productivity. And unlike the United States, where many retail employees are subject to unpredictable schedules, in Germany, retailers are required by law to provide their employees notice of work schedules six months in advance. The authors show that disparities in job quality are largely the result of differing social norms and national institutions. For instance, weak labor regulations and the decline of unions in the United States have enabled retailers to cut labor costs aggressively in ways that depress wages and discourage full-time work. On the other hand, higher minimum wages, greater government regulation of work schedules, and stronger collective bargaining through unions and works councils have improved the quality of retail jobs in Europe. As retail and service work continue to expand, American employers and policymakers will have to decide the extent to which these jobs will be good or bad. Where Bad Jobs Are Better shows how stronger rules and regulations can improve the lives of retail workers and boost the quality of low-wage jobs across the board.
Pierre Lambert de la Motte was born in Normandy in 1624 into a pious noble family. After studying law, and a brief but distinguished career in civil administration, he entered the Congregation of the Assumption, a lay association. In 1657, he volunteered as a missionary in Asia, was appointed Titular Bishop of Beirut and left for Asia in 1660. Arrived in Siam, he made pastoral visits in Cochinchina (Southern Vietnam) and throughout Vietnam, educating and ordaining native priests, giving courage to dispersed communities, trying to settle the many rivalries between missionary orders and to improve tense relations with the authorities, while living the deep spiritual life of a mystic of the Cross. He died in 1679. His work is part of the considerable development of missions in the seventeenth century under the leadership of Pope Gregory XV. In France, Pierre Lambert de la Motte played a key role in the birth of the Paris Foreign Missions Society in 1658, for China and South-East Asia. They were to work tirelessly, following the Roman Instructions of 1659: refusal of secularization and politicization, respect for indigenous cultures, accession of the local Churches to autonomy and consolidation of their link with the Holy See. The author describes the work accomplished by the Paris Foreign Missions Society in this part of Asia, shows the difficulties in developing them, as well as the extraordinary tenacity of an inspired man.
The Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970 (also known as the Biafran War) has been described as a 'forgotten war'. Yet it led to the birth of the NGO Doctors without Borders / Medecins sans frontieres and equipped journalists with the intercultural skills they later used in their coverage of other African conflicts. The Biafran conflict equally ended up strengthening the special relationship between France and Nigeria. From 1970 in particular, the Nigerian education sector was taken up with a wave of francophilia, which boosted the teaching of French in Language programmes at the secondary school level. The Civil War, which ravaged the South-Eastern part of the federation, was, above all, a collective experience which inspired poets, novelists and playwrights - Achebe, Soyinka, Okigbo, Saro-Wiwa, Okpewho, Adichie and others, while bringing about a massive religious revival which affected the whole region. The war mobilised politicians and NGOs, it changed the country and brought it into the limelight. This book reveals, through the study of oral genres, radio bulletins and the impact of the conflict on literature and the Web, the human history of the war, the role played by the media and the deep scar the conflict left on the bodies and minds of survivors.
A provocative and wide-ranging conversation between two distinctive women—one American and one French—on the dilemmas, rewards, and demands of womanhood. Lisa Alther and Françoise Gilot have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Although from different backgrounds (Gilot from cosmopolitan Paris, Alther from small-town Tennessee) and different generations, they found they have a great deal in common as women who managed to support themselves with careers in the arts while simultaneously balancing the obligations of work and parenthood. About Women is their extended conversation in which they talk about everything important to them: their childhoods, the impact of war on their lives and their work, and their views on love, style, self-invention, feminism, and child rearing. They also discuss the creative impulse and the importance of art as they ponder what it means to be a woman.
High technology industries are in desperate need for adequate tools to assess the validity of simulations produced by ever faster computers for perennial unstable problems. In order to meet these industrial expectations, applied mathematicians are facing a formidable challenge summarized by these words — nonlinearity and coupling. This book is unique as it proposes truly original solutions: (1) Using hypercomputation in quadratic algebras, as opposed to the traditional use of linear vector spaces in the 20th century; (2) complementing the classical linear logic by the complex logic which expresses the creative potential of the complex plane.The book illustrates how qualitative computing has been the driving force behind the evolution of mathematics since Pythagoras presented the first incompleteness result about the irrationality of √2. The celebrated results of Gödel and Turing are but modern versions of the same idea: the classical logic of Aristotle is too limited to capture the dynamics of nonlinear computation. Mathematics provides us with the missing tool, the organic logic, which is aptly tailored to model the dynamics of nonlinearity. This logic will be the core of the “Mathematics for Life” to be developed during this century.
The study of capillarity is in the midst of a veritable explosion. What is offered here is not a comprehensive review of the latest research but rather a compendium of principles designed for the undergraduate student and for readers interested in the physics underlying these phenomena.
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