Hasil untuk "Labor policy. Labor and the state"

I. K. Koryakova, I. A. Grigoriev

Importance. The role of the United States trade unions in mobilizing the country’s workers to fight fascism and strengthen military and economic cooperation between the United States and the USSR is reflected. The purpose of the study is the attitude of American trade unions to the issue of military-economic cooperation between the USSR and the USA during the Second World War in order to defeat fascism as soon as possible.Research Methods. The research is based on a fairly wide source base – publications of periodicals of those years, notes, and transcripts of speeches by leaders of trade union movements in the United States. The research methodology is represented by both general scientific and special historical methods. In particular, comparative historical and historical-systemic methods are used.Results and Discussion. The changes that took place during the World War II in the relations of the leaders of American trade unions to the issue of military-economic cooperation between the United States and the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition are shown. The activities of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Unions have made a significant contribution to the successful implementation of the Lend-Lease program.Conclusion. The position of American trade unions in relation to the issue of military-economic cooperation with the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition and, above all, cooperation with the USSR during the World War II underwent a certain evolution, which was due to both military events and the policy of the American state. In general, the organized workers of the United States acted in the anti-fascist camp, playing an important role in mobilizing the forces of the country's workers to fight Nazism, to strengthen military and logistical cooperation between the United States and the USSR.

Kapil Madan

This paper introduces ArGen (Auto-Regulation of Generative AI systems), a framework for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with complex sets of configurable, machine-readable rules spanning ethical principles, operational safety protocols, and regulatory compliance standards. Moving beyond just preference-based alignment, ArGen is designed to ensure LLMs adhere to these multifaceted policies through a novel synthesis of principle-based automated reward scoring, Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO), and an Open Policy Agent (OPA) inspired governance layer. This approach provides the technical foundation for achieving and demonstrating compliance with diverse and nuanced governance requirements. To showcase the framework's capability to operationalize a deeply nuanced and culturally-specific value system, we present an in-depth case study: the development of a medical AI assistant guided by principles from Dharmic ethics (such as Ahimsa and Dharma), as derived from texts like the Bhagavad Gita. This challenging application demonstrates ArGen's adaptability, achieving a 70.9% improvement in domain-scope adherence over the baseline. Through our open-source repository, we show that ArGen's methodology offers a path to 'Governable Al' systems that are technically proficient, ethically robust, and verifiably compliant for safe deployment in diverse global contexts.

P. Berczik, M. Ishchenko, O. Veles et al.

Context. A dual active galactic nucleus candidate with a separation of only 500 pc was recently found in NGC 7727. According to the hierarchical merging scenario, such objects would be expected to merge on a timescale of a few hundred Myr. However, estimating the accurate merging timescales for the two nuclei is still a complex challenge. Aims. Using our numerical N-body code, we can trace the full evolution of central black holes during all phases: dynamical friction of unbound black holes, binary black hole formation, hardening of the system due to two-body scattering, and emission of gravitational waves leading to the final merger. Methods. Our model has next components: the bulge contains two dense stellar nuclei, each of which hosts a black hole. The most massive black hole in the center of the galaxy has a mass of 1.54x10^8 Msol and the least massive black hole in the offset second stripped nucleus has a mass of 6.33x10^6 Msol. We followed the dynamical evolution of the system up to a final separation of four Schwarzschild radii. The black holes were added as special relativistic particles and their equation of motion contains a full post-Newtonian approximation - 2.5 term. Results. Initially, the black holes are not gravitationally bound and, thus, the system spends more than 60 Myr in the phase of dynamical friction while tightening the orbit. The two-body scattering phase takes place from 60 Myr up to 120 Myr. In the last 10 Myr, the black hole's separation is seen to be rapidly shrinking due to the gravitational wave emission. Starting from the physical separation observed today, the total merging time in our model is 130 (10) Myr. Conclusions. These results have implications for the statistics of strong sources of gravitational waves at low frequencies, namely, systems engaged in an advanced state of are expected to be prime sources for the LISA mission to observe.

Ayal Kimhi

This article analyzes Israel’s food security in comparison to other developed countries, using multiple indicators divided into four sections: food availability, food affordability, food quality and safety, and natural resources and resilience. Overall, the state of food security in Israel is better than in most countries, but the threats to food security arising from the triple risk of climate change, international conflicts, and disruptions in global supply chains, require better preparation for the future. Israel’s population growth and the slowdown in the growth rate of its agricultural production, as well as the short-term political desire to reduce prices, are leading the country to increasingly rely on food imports. Such imports expose Israel to even greater global risks, and require the formulation of a risk-management strategy that will balance local production and imports. The global triple risk to food security is currently exacerbated for Israel by the risk of shortage of labor due to the security situation, making this risk-management strategy even more necessary. This calls for the establishment of a governmental authority to oversee the formulation of a long-term food-security strategy, to break it down into feasible objectives and policy measures, and to supervise their implementation. Most importantly, in order to maintain and perhaps even enhance the productive capacity of the agricultural sector, the government must reinstall trust between farmers and the state by establishing a stable long-term policy environment.

Xian Lin, Yangyang Xiang, Zhehao Wang et al.

Segment anything model (SAM), a foundation model with superior versatility and generalization across diverse segmentation tasks, has attracted widespread attention in medical imaging. However, it has been proved that SAM would encounter severe performance degradation due to the lack of medical knowledge in training and local feature encoding. Though several SAM-based models have been proposed for tuning SAM in medical imaging, they still suffer from insufficient feature extraction and highly rely on high-quality prompts. In this paper, we construct a large CT dataset consisting of 1.1M CT images and 5M masks from public datasets and propose a powerful foundation model SAMCT allowing labor-free prompts. Specifically, based on SAM, SAMCT is further equipped with a U-shaped CNN image encoder, a cross-branch interaction module, and a task-indicator prompt encoder. The U-shaped CNN image encoder works in parallel with the ViT image encoder in SAM to supplement local features. Cross-branch interaction enhances the feature expression capability of the CNN image encoder and the ViT image encoder by exchanging global perception and local features from one to the other. The task-indicator prompt encoder is a plug-and-play component to effortlessly encode task-related indicators into prompt embeddings. In this way, SAMCT can work in an automatic manner in addition to the semi-automatic interactive strategy in SAM. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of SAMCT against the state-of-the-art task-specific and SAM-based medical foundation models on various tasks. The code, data, and models are released at https://github.com/xianlin7/SAMCT.

Joanna F. DeFranco, Luke Biersmith

The deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) applications has accelerated rapidly. AI enabled technologies are facing the public in many ways including infrastructure, consumer products and home applications. Because many of these technologies present risks either in the form of physical injury, or bias, potentially yielding unfair outcomes, policy makers must consider the need for oversight. Most policymakers, however, lack the technical knowledge to judge whether an emerging AI technology is safe, effective, and requires oversight, therefore policy makers must depend on expert opinion. But policymakers are better served when, in addition to expert opinion, they have some general understanding of existing guidelines and regulations. This work provides an overview [the landscape] of AI legislation and directives at the international, U.S. state, city and federal levels. It also reviews relevant business standards, and technical society initiatives. Then an overlap and gap analysis are performed resulting in a reference guide that includes recommendations and guidance for future policy making.

Rodrigo Cardoso da Silva

Trata-se de uma pesquisa que tem como fenômeno social de estudo, processos educativos e saberes socioambientais que se configuram, informam e/ou orientam experiências de trabalho da coleta do açaí, no nordeste da Amazônia paraense. A referida pesquisa integra a linha de pesquisa Saberes Culturais e Educação na Amazônia, do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da Universidade do Estado do Pará (PPGED-UEPA). Trata-se de saberes socioambientais e processos educativos que sustentam relações não predatórias com a natureza e conformam modos de vida demarcados pela dualidade estrutural no processo de produção e reprodução à existência das lideranças na comunidade, que com o passar do tempo, essas práticas de trabalho realizadas pelos moradores passaram a incorporar novos processos educativos e saberes socioambientais, em decorrência as mudanças que foram ocorrendo na dinamização da produção capitalista e nas suas inovações tecnológicas. E para não concluir, os sujeitos históricos da comunidade Salento lutam e (re) existem com as vozes contra a estrutura opressora, eurocêntrica, negacionistas e colonialista, imposta pelo capital. Portanto, trata-se de um modo de vida que desafia a ciência e a educação.

This article will present a very short discussion of the importance of economics to understanding and eliminating racial hierarchy. Its examples are primarily based on the African American experience. Because of its short length, many issues, groups, histories, and experiences will not be discussed. Readers should take the principles presented in this study and apply them to their specific concerns. Racist Ideology Is Shaped by the Economy Many people think of racism as an irrational hatred of other racial groups. Although this may accurately describe the views and actions of particular individuals, it is not helpful for understanding how racial beliefs and practices help to build and maintain the structure of racial inequality in a society. Consider the fact that white racists today would not be in favor of bringing hundreds of thousands of Africans to the United States, nor smuggling them into the country if it is not legal to do so. But in antebellum America, this is exactly what white racists did. Slaveholders imported hundreds of thousands of Africans at considerable expense, and when the slave trade was made illegal, occasionally, they would smuggle Africans into the country.1 Racism as hatred would lead us to expect that white racists would bar Africans from the United States, but this is the opposite of what occurred. Racist ideas and practices help to structure American society by being in dialogue with the economy of the society. The dominant racist ideologies of a society economically reliant on racial slavery will justify and support racial slavery. The economy of American society no longer rests on racial slavery, so there are no longer ideologies justifying the importation of Africans. A key part of racism is the creation of myths to justify economic hierarchies. Racial slavery was a profitable institution for slaveholders. When slavery was challenged, the historian Peter Kolchin reports, ?Southern spokesmen responded with elaborate arguments in defense of slavery, including pseudoscientific demonstrations that blacks were unfit for freedom, reminders that the nation's economic well-being depended on slave labor, assertions that the Bible itself sanctioned the enslavement of the ?sons of Ham,? and claims that slavery produced a more humane and harmonious social order than the exploitative free-labor system.?2 The desire to profit from racial slavery encouraged the development and dispersal of ideas to justify it. Looking at the broad history of racist ideologies in America, the historian Mia Bay notes that one sees ?ever-changing intellectual rationalizations? to justify racial economic hierarchy.3 Today, we are seeing a growing concentration of wealth among the rich in the American economy. In 1982, Forbes magazine first published its list of the richest Americans. The man who topped the list was worth $5.8 billion adjusted for inflation.4 Today, that amount of money is not enough to put someone in the top 100 richest Americans. Elon Musk was recently listed as the richest man with a net worth of $219 billion.4 The rich have gotten a lot richer. The rich have gotten richer due to a host of labor, tax, trade, and finance policies that have facilitated the upward distribution of income.5 Consequently, it is harder for average Americans to maintain their standard of living and even harder for them to be upwardly mobile. The economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues find that ?more than 90% of children born in the 1940s grew up to earn more than their parents,? but ?[t]oday, only half of children grow up to earn more than their parents.?6 For the economy to continue benefitting the rich, it is important that this growing class inequality does not receive too much public attention and analysis. As the rich have gotten richer, average white Americans have been encouraged to blame their economic stress and problems on people of color as opposed to the economic elites who are actually profiting. The scholars Michael I. Norton and Samuel Sommers find that white people believe that American society has become more biased against white people over time and less biased against black people over the same period. In their research, white people now say that there is more anti-white bias in society than anti-black bias.7 Other research has found that about 40% of supposedly non-racially-biased white people believe that white people experience as much or more racial discrimination than black people.8 A recent survey found that a majority of whites believe that there is discrimination against white people in American society.9 White people believe that they are one of the primary victims of racism. The white man, Tim Hershman of Akron, Ohio, captures some of these views well. He states, ?If you apply for a job, they seem to give the blacks the first crack at it, and, basically, you know, if you want any help from the government, if you're white, you don't get it. If you're black, you get it.?9 Hershman is correct to feel that there is something wrong with the American economy. For example, from 1973 to 2021, the real average wage for white men with a high school diploma declined.10 In earlier periods of American history, the wages of white male high school graduates would have increased significantly over a similar length of time. What no one is telling people like Hershman is that the average wage for black male high school graduates is declining also.10 In addition, the average wage for white male high school graduates is still higher than the wage for black male graduates.10 Hershman's comments also seem to be referencing affirmative action in employment, which is often mischaracterized as ?racial preferences? or ?reverse discrimination? by opponents to the program. Affirmative action in employment is needed because there is a strong white preference in the American labor market. When researchers present black and white job candidates with equivalent qualifications to employers, they consistently find that employers prefer the white candidates.11 In one shocking study, white men with a criminal record had similar odds of receiving a positive response from employers as black men without a criminal record.12 Affirmative action is needed to counteract the white preference in the labor market and to help to move us to equal opportunity. Unfortunately, affirmative action in employment has been designed to be a weak program and it is weakly enforced. It is extremely rare for firms to be subject to strong sanctions for violating affirmative action guidelines.13 A recent study of 108 firms found that some firms that were supposed to be following affirmative action guidelines were among the most discriminatory firms against black people.14 Apparently, because the program and its enforcement are so weak, firms that discriminate against black job applicants can still be deemed to be in compliance with affirmative action. It is a myth that black people have any economic advantages over white people. The black unemployment rate has been roughly twice the white unemployment rate for the entirety of Hershman's working life.15 The black poverty rate has been more than twice the white rate for the entirety of his working life also.15 On every economic measure, black people are worse off than white people, yet more and more white people are convinced that black people have tremendous economic advantages that they do not. As long as white people are convinced that people of color are the source of their economic problems, they will never address the real issues, and they will never be able to stop the upward flow of income to the rich. The false racial ideas spread to people like Hershman serve to enable increasing class inequality. Much of Racial Stratification Is Class Stratification A significant part of what we understand as racial differences are or stem from class differences. If one looks at specific economic measures, it is often the case that racial hierarchies are clearly visible. For example, the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure for 2020 (which many analysts consider to be superior to the Official Poverty Measure) shows the non-Hispanic white population with the lowest poverty rate and the black population with the highest. The Latino population has the second highest rate, and the Asian American population has the third highest.16,17 Other economic measures are stratified similarly. When people refer to black neighborhoods as the ?ghetto? or the ?streets? or the ?hood,? they are referring to the class makeup of the neighborhood as much as the racial makeup. A black middle- or upper-class neighborhood far removed from the problems associated with poverty would not be considered the ?ghetto,? the ?streets,? or the ?hood.? However, because black people are so strongly and consistently disadvantaged economically, there are very few black neighborhoods that are removed from the problems associated with poverty.18,19 The black middle class is much more exposed to the black poor than the white middle class to the white poor.20 In a capitalist economy, one's ability to obtain economic resources is extremely important to one's quality of life and life opportunities. For example, one's life expectancy is positively correlated with one's socioeconomic status.21,22 American society limits black economic opportunities, and this limitation profoundly shapes black life in a wide variety of ways. Asian Americans and American Racial Economic Hierarchies Asian Americans are often misused to argue that America is post-racial. For this reason, it is useful to touch on a couple of issues regarding this population. The situation of Asian Americans is too complex for an adequate treatment in this brief document. Readers are strongly encouraged to go beyond this document and do some study of Asian American history and the sociology of Asian Americans and racial stratification if they are not already familiar with these issues. The book The Asian American Achievement Paradox by the sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou would be a good place for readers to start. As mentioned earlier, Asian Americans have a higher supplemental poverty rate than non-Hispanic whites, but they also have a higher median household income.23 The Asian American population is diverse in many respects, but they tend to be of a higher socioeconomic status. More than half of the Asian American labor force has a bachelor's or advanced degree compared with about a third for the rest of the U.S. labor force.24 Much of the apparent economic success of Asian Americans stems from this high educational attainment. The root of Asian American high educational attainment is the post-1965 bias in the U.S. immigration process in favor of Asian immigrants with college degrees.25 For example, in their analysis, Lee and Zhou found that half of Chinese immigrants had a bachelor's or higher degree, but only 4% of adults in China were similarly educated.26 The immigration process does not lead to a random sample of the Chinese population coming to the United States, it disproportionately selects Chinese immigrants with college educations. Parent's educational attainment is a powerful predictor of a child's educational attainment.26 Thus, the children of highly educated Asian immigrants are more likely to be also highly educated and, therefore, relatively economically successful. Economic Inequality Contributes to Racial Inequality Economic inequality has increased tremendously over recent decades. In 1967, the bottom 60% of households ranked by income earned only about 30% of all the income?half their population share. The richest 5% of households earned more than three times their share of the population?17.2%. There was significant income inequality in 1967, but it has gotten considerably worse today. In 2020, the bottom 60% only earned 25% of all income?less than half their population share. The richest 5% earned nearly as much as the bottom 60?23%?nearly five times their population share.27 Because the black population is disproportionately lower income, they are over-represented on the losing side of this widening income inequality. The economist Valerie Wilson conducted an analysis of black?white wage inequality that compares both the racial component and the class component. Looking at wage inequality from 1979 to 2015, she finds that eliminating the racial inequality component would increase black wages by about $5 per hour. Eliminating the class component would increase black wages by over $12 per hour.28 In other words, class inequality cost black workers more than twice as much as the racial wage inequality. Of course, the ideal situation is to address both racial and class inequality. But it is important to remember that if we ignore class inequality while pursuing racial equality, we will still leave black people significantly economically disadvantaged. Americans of All Races Prosper from Racial Equity Racial discrimination and economic inequality ultimately hurt the majority of people of all races. It only enriches economic elites. The economic policy expert Heather McGhee documents this in her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. For example, she reports that slavery underdeveloped the South. ?[C]ounties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000,? she states, and ?[w]hen slavery was abolished, Confederate states found themselves far behind northern states in the creation of the public infrastructure that supports economic mobility, and they continue to lag behind today.?29 America today is not being held back by slavery anymore, but it is being held back by a host of labor, tax, trade, and finance policies that have accelerated economic inequality.5 Income given to the rich is often less economically productive than income given to the poor.30 Imagine that a black family living in poverty receives an extra $1000. This family will likely spend all of it, and that $1000 will circulate and generate additional economic activity. For example, the convenience store near that black family's home might receive a portion of that $1000 in exchange for goods, and, in turn, the store owner would use that income to buy more goods and to help pay a staff person's wages. What happens in the American economy if Elon Musk receives an additional $1000? Absolutely nothing. There is nothing that he wants for which an additional $1000 would make a difference. Musk's $1000 is much less economically productive than the $1000 going to the poor black family. As income inequality has increased in the United States and shifted more income to the rich, it has slowed U.S. economic growth and widened racial economic inequality.30 Racial segregation has also been shown to have a negative effect on economic growth, and racial integration a positive one. After analyzing metropolitan area segregation and economic growth, the economist Huiping Li et al. conclude, ?Residential segregation is thus detrimental to the welfare of all the people, both the poor and non-poor, in central cities and suburbs.?31 Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, and his colleagues concur. Analyzing segregation at the county level, they find a positive relationship between racial integration and economic growth. They conclude that ?the more racially integrated our society, the stronger our economy.? They add, ?Indeed, if communities across the country were to more fully integrate racially so that they were comparable with the nation's most integrated communities,? it ?would be an economic game changer.?32 The racial discrimination and political divisiveness that underlies racial segregation are the likely causes behind the weaker growth from racial segregation.33,34 Racism also prevents the country from protecting itself from economic threats and crises. McGhee gives the example of the predatory subprime mortgage crisis that caused the Great Recession. She states, ?Bank regulators and federal policymakers were well aware of what was happening in communities of color, but despite pleas from local officials and community groups, they did nothing to stop the new lenders and their new tactics that left so many families without a home.?29 She continues, ?predatory practices were allowed to continue until the disaster had engulfed white communities, too?and only then, far too late, was it recognized as an emergency.?29 If racism had not blinded policymakers and smothered their compassion, people of all races could have been saved from economic harm. The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton provide us with another example in their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. ?Deaths of despair? refers to the rising death rates for the white working class. Case and Deaton argue that this crisis is rooted in the weakened labor market for individuals without college degrees. They also argue that signs of this problem first emerged in black communities 30 years earlier. They state, deaths of despair among whites would not have happened, or would not have been so severe, without the destruction of the white working class, which, in turn, would not have happened without the failure of the health care system and other problems of the capitalism we have today?particularly the upward redistribution through manipulation of markets [emphasis added].35 They add, African Americans have not escaped the crisis but rather experienced their own version first, thirty years earlier?. African Americans, long the least-favored group, were the first to suffer, but less educated whites were next in line.35 Again, if racism had not prevented policymakers from addressing labor market problems when it affected black communities 30 years earlier, the white working class would have been spared devastation. As long as we allow racial fictions to lead us to ignore the fact that we, regardless of race, live in the same nation and rely on the same economy, this pattern of preventable economic disasters that hurt all will continue. A growing number of economic analyses show that an American society committed to equity would be a more prosperous society for all. For example, the economist Lisa Cook's research shows that ?riots, lynchings and Jim Crow laws? between 1870 and 1940 cost the nation a number of African American patents for inventions and innovations equivalent to that produced by a medium-sized European country.36 Although we are beyond Jim Crow, there is still not equal opportunity to invent and innovate. Looking at America today, the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues find that ?becoming an inventor relies upon two things in America: excelling in math and science and having a rich family.?37 Children who excel in math and science from low-income or racial minority families are unlikely to become inventors, they add.37 Today, class inequality, which is intertwined with racial inequality, stifles U.S. economic innovation and growth by denying opportunity to those who are not rich. The entire country is worse off due to these ?lost Einsteins.?38 The management consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimates that closing the black?white wealth gap could grow the U.S. economy by $1 to $1.5 trillion by 2028.39 Other similar analyses produce similar very large dollar figures.40,41 If we are committed to a more equitable America, these additional dollars would benefit Americans of all races. Racism is a powerful force, but we will all gain if we are able to defeat it.

Matheus de Carvalho Barros

O objetivo deste artigo é elaborar uma sucinta comparação entre as obras do jornalista peruano José Carlos Mariátegui e do sociólogo brasileiro Florestan Fernandes.  Mariátegui e Fernandes analisaram questões similares tais como: o colonialismo enraizado na América Latina, a configuração da dependência e o caráter complementar das modalidades de dominação étnico-racial e de classes. Nesse sentido, o objetivo fundamental do trabalho é perseguir a forma como esses autores articularam raça e classe, identificando os sujeitos racializados como protagonistas das transformações radicais. Palavras-chaves: Mariátegui; Florestan Fernandes; Raça; Classe; Marxismo  

Marise Ramos

Quando o Partido dos Trabalhadores governou o Estado Brasileiro (2003-2016), as disputas pela educação implicaram a sociedade política com o propósito de superar as contrarreformas neoliberais. Intelectuais do GT 09 da ANPEd assumiram funções no poder executivo buscando atuar com base no conhecimento acumulado nesse campo. O artigo discute conteúdo, processos e contradições dessas disputas, bem como debates e dissensos no interior no próprio campo, concluindo sobre a relevância desse conhecimento para enfrentar o neoconservadorismo presente na sociedade, desafios no contexto do novo governo. Palavras-chave: GT 09; trabalho e educação; ensino médio integrado; Decreto n. 2.208/1997; Decreto n. 5.154/2004.

Eley Ng, Ziang Liu, Monroe Kennedy

Modeling multimodal human behavior has been a key barrier to increasing the level of interaction between human and robot, particularly for collaborative tasks. Our key insight is that an effective, learned robot policy used for human-robot collaborative tasks must be able to express a high degree of multimodality, predict actions in a temporally consistent manner, and recognize a wide range of frequencies of human actions in order to seamlessly integrate with a human in the control loop. We present Diffusion Co-policy, a method for planning sequences of actions that synergize well with humans during test time. The co-policy predicts joint human-robot action sequences via a Transformer-based diffusion model, which is trained on a dataset of collaborative human-human demonstrations, and directly executes the robot actions in a receding horizon control framework. We demonstrate in both simulation and real environments that the method outperforms other state-of-art learning methods on the task of human-robot table-carrying with a human in the loop. Moreover, we qualitatively highlight compelling robot behaviors that demonstrate evidence of true human-robot collaboration, including mutual adaptation, shared task understanding, leadership switching, and low levels of wasteful interaction forces arising from dissent.

Firas Al-Hafez, Guoping Zhao, Jan Peters et al.

Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for training stateful policies is Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT), which comes with significant drawbacks, such as slow training due to sequential gradient propagation and the occurrence of vanishing or exploding gradients. The gradient is often truncated to address these issues, resulting in a biased policy update. We present a novel approach for training stateful policies by decomposing the latter into a stochastic internal state kernel and a stateless policy, jointly optimized by following the stateful policy gradient. We introduce different versions of the stateful policy gradient theorem, enabling us to easily instantiate stateful variants of popular reinforcement learning and imitation learning algorithms. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical analysis of our new gradient estimator and compare it with BPTT. We evaluate our approach on complex continuous control tasks, e.g., humanoid locomotion, and demonstrate that our gradient estimator scales effectively with task complexity while offering a faster and simpler alternative to BPTT.

Laust Høgedahl, Kristine Nergaard, Kristin Alsos

The Nordic countries are known for being small open economies with large public sectors due to universal welfare states and high living standards across occupations and education levels. This combination has recently been characterized as a balanced growth model in which both exports and internal demand (private and public) contributes to economic growth. In contrast to export-led growth models – as seen in Germany – which have starved wages and thus internal demand to increase the cost competitiveness of the export sector (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016), the Nordic countries seem to be able to do both (Alsos et al. 2019). In 2013, The Economist proclaimed Nordic countries as the world’s next ‘supermodel’ due to the emphasis on market dynamics and income security rather than job tenure – a useful blueprint for labor market policy configured for the rapid technological changes foreshadowed in the twenty-first century (Wooldridge 2013). In more recent years, the OECD has linked the flexibility, high economic performance, and high living standards with independent collective bargaining conducted by strong social partners (OECD 2018, 2019). In all the Nordic countries, the industrial or employment relations systems are based on collective pattern bargaining involving strong trade unions and multi-employer organizations with a minimum of state intervention (Andersen et al. 2015). This system of collective bargaining is underpinned by strong local cooperation between employers and employees (Rasmussen & Høgedahl 2021). Hence, it is evident that the performance and success of the Nordic labor market models rely on strong collective representation through trade unions and employer organizations (Høgedahl 2020). However, although employer density levels seem stable, Nordic trade unions have all to some degree seen a membership decline since the mid- 1990s. This trend begs the question: Do trade unions within the Nordic labor market models showing signs of erosion? If so – why is the union density dropping and what are the implications for the Nordic labor market models?

Regina Bruno

Reflete sobre o processo de construção da hegemonia do patronato rural e do agronegócio no Brasil nas últimas décadas. Indica que a busca de uma coesão mais ampla se respalda em vários aspectos: a elaboração de reivindicações unificadoras; o fortalecimento dos espaços de representação de interesses; a escolha de aliados confiáveis; a construção de uma imagem de si portadora de capacidades e potencialidades necessárias ao desempenho da hegemonia; o empenho na elaboração de uma retórica de legitimidade e de poder na qual todos se identifiquem; e a ofensiva contra os adversários políticos e de classe – ações e discursos que visam sobretudo à violência física e simbólica e à desqualificação de pessoas, de grupos e de movimentos sociais que questionam as posturas do patronato rural e de seus aliados e estabelecem limites à construção da hegemonia patronal rural e do agronegócio. Palavras-chave: agronegócio; patronato rural; hegemonia.

Eleni Triantafillidou, Theodore Koutroukis

Employee involvement and participation is part of Labor Relations and Human Resource Management. This study is to identify how and to what extent employee involvement and employee participation mechanisms are used in the Greek subsidiaries of multinational companies in the pharmaceutical industry. The issues examined in this study are the design of employee involvement and participation practices, the similarities and differences of employee participation practices in the group of companies internationally, corporate employee communication and consultation mechanisms, corporate policy towards trade unions and the EWC nature and agreements. The research method is qualitative with semi-structured interviews conducted with management executives, human resource management executives and the selected organizations participating in the study are active in the pharmaceutical industry and fall within the scope of Directive 2009/38/EC/16.5.2009 on the right of employees to information and consultation at Community-scale companies and groups of companies. The findings indicate that most of the participant companies when designing employee involvement and participation practices, consider a formal model of best practices that has been codified for all multinational companies. Regarding the global company’s policy on consultation and employee involvement most of the participant companies state that they provide a little more than the institutional framework requires. Nevertheless, management receives information about the activity and meetings of the EWC systematically at the time of EWC meetings. Increasing employee participation requires both management attention and initiatives on the part of employees.

Maria Nareklishvili, Nicholas Polson, Vadim Sokolov

In this paper, we propose Forest-PLS, a feature selection method for analyzing policy effect heterogeneity in a more flexible and comprehensive manner than is typically available with conventional methods. In particular, our method is able to capture policy effect heterogeneity both within and across subgroups of the population defined by observable characteristics. To achieve this, we employ partial least squares to identify target components of the population and causal forests to estimate personalized policy effects across these components. We show that the method is consistent and leads to asymptotically normally distributed policy effects. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we apply it to the data from the Pennsylvania Reemployment Bonus Experiments, which were conducted in 1988-1989. The analysis reveals that financial incentives can motivate some young non-white individuals to enter the labor market. However, these incentives may also provide a temporary financial cushion for others, dissuading them from actively seeking employment. Our findings highlight the need for targeted, personalized measures for young non-white male participants.

Caleb Ju, Guanghui Lan

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This prevents the application of many well-studied RL methods especially those with provable convergence guarantees. In this paper, we first present a substantial generalization of the recently developed policy mirror descent method to deal with general state and action spaces. We introduce new approaches to incorporate function approximation into this method, so that we do not need to use explicit policy parameterization at all. Moreover, we present a novel policy dual averaging method for which possibly simpler function approximation techniques can be applied. We establish linear convergence rate to global optimality or sublinear convergence to stationarity for these methods applied to solve different classes of RL problems under exact policy evaluation. We then define proper notions of the approximation errors for policy evaluation and investigate their impact on the convergence of these methods applied to general-state RL problems with either finite-action or continuous-action spaces. To the best of our knowledge, the development of these algorithmic frameworks as well as their convergence analysis appear to be new in the literature. Preliminary numerical results demonstrate the robustness of the aforementioned methods and show they can be competitive with state-of-the-art RL algorithms.

Márcia Fornari, Roberto Antonio Deitos

Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir alguns aspectos da política de financiamento externo para a implementação da Reforma do Ensino Médio no Brasil no Governo Temer, e as condicionalidades expressas no contrato de empréstimo do Ministério da Educação com o Banco Internacional para Reconstrução e Desenvolvimento (BIRD)/Banco Mundial (BM). Buscamos desenvolver reflexões sobre as políticas educacionais para o Ensino Médio no Brasil, especificamente em relação à Reforma do Ensino Médio, empreendida pela Lei nº 13.415/17 e ancorada em financiamento externo, realizado junto ao Banco Mundial. Palavras-chave: Ensino médio no Brasil; Banco Mundial; Orientações e Financiamento Externo.

Maria Aires de Lima, Bruno Alysson Soares Rodrigues, Frederico Jorge Ferreira Costa

Este artigo tem como objetivo analisar a categoria da empregabilidade inserida na Educação de Jovens e Adultos de trabalhadores rurais no contexto da Educação do Campo. Diante dos percalços da conjuntura que se inaugura com o fim do PRONERA e a ofensiva do capital sobre o trabalho no complexo movimento de resistência da educação em tempos de uberização do trabalho, questionamos em que medida as propostas de educação para este público se configuram como algum tipo de avanço na luta pela terra pelo direito à educação. Palavra-chave: Educação de Jovens e Adultos; Trabalho; Educação do Campo; Empregabilidade

A. V. Noskova, D. V. Goloukhova, A. S. Proskurina et al.

The digitalization of higher education is a long-term trend that gained a new impetus for further development because of the forced transition to distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the article is to analyze the impact of digital transformation on the educational process in universities and to describe the risks through the students’ eyes. The analysis is based on the results of a survey conducted by the authors in 2020 among students of two universities - Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and the Institute of the Trade Union Movement of the General Confederation of Labor of Vietnam (IPLV).The article describes the methodology of the online survey. The attitude towards distance learning is interpreted as a three-level attitude with emotional, cognitive and behavioral aspects. It is suggested that students’ readiness to switch to distance learning is determined by a set of macro and micro factors. Among the macro factors are the national specifics of the educational system, traditions in the field of higher education, infrastructure, the national educational policy, and the mobilization potential of the population. Among the micro factors are the cognitive and other psychological characteristics of the students, the socio-psychological openness to innovation.According to the survey results, there is certain similarity in the way Russian and Vietnamese students assess their experience of distance learning. At the same time, significant differences in the perception of the outcome of the digital transformation of education have been revealed. For MGIMO students, major risks are associated with dehumanization, the severing of social ties, and the possible loss of student status. For Vietnamese students the most significant risks are mainly associated with the fears of the decreasing quality of education. It is therefore concluded that distance learning is both the field of opportunities and possible source of individual and institutional risks.