The work Caliban and the witch is the result of a more than thirty years research project developed by the historian Silvia Federici. Its central aim is to rethink the development of capitalism from a feminist point of view with the care not to delimit and segregate the history of women in the working-class male sector. It retakes Marxist concepts, feminist critical theories and an analysis on the body and its politicization in the light of the Foucaultian theory. For Federici there are aspects that are hidden in the said theories in what concerns the discussions on domination and exploration. It also highlights how many analysis on the witch-hunting period has been neglected over the years and what this period essentially has to contribute to the analysis of the consolidation of capitalism. The concept of primitive accumulation developed by Karl Marx in his work Capital is fundamental for the unfolding and understanding of this historical process marked by violence, domination and exploitation and that redefined structures of the sexual division of labor. Federici is concerned about the contemporary context in which intensification of violence against women and the resumption of witch-hunt albeit in a “new outfit” in some countries, with a major emphasis on countries that have suffered colonization.
Abstract The paper examines the case of branch cutters, the only female workers employed in Soviet logging brigades, focusing on the marginalization of women into physically demanding yet technologically stagnant roles. Branch cutters’ primary duty was to turn felled pine trees into logs by manually chopping off boughs, branches, and knots. By the mid-1960s, this task remained the only non-mechanized job in Soviet logging. Female branch cutters worked with axes alongside male workers equipped with modern logging equipment—chainsaws, tractors, loaders, and haulers. Adding to previous studies that highlight wage disparities and occupational segregation, this paper analyzes how labor protection regulations aimed not merely at safeguarding but also at systematically excluding women from technologically complex labor, confined them to (relatively) low-paying, dangerous, and low-status jobs. The article traces in detail how Soviet labor policies of the 1930s–1980s explored the idea of women as physically weaker workers and deliberately constructed a discourse of gendered labor based on the categories of “ease” and “hardship.” Labor protection bodies, trade unions, and enterprises constantly restricted women’s access to mechanized, high-paying jobs based on this division, bolstering their exclusion from upward mobility. The study thus expands our understanding of gendered labor dynamics in Soviet industry, illustrating how technological stratification reinforced occupational and gender segregation. By centering women’s experiences in an underexplored sector of Soviet industry, the research offers new insights into the complexities of labor inequality and gendered power structures in the Soviet Union.
We consider the problem of optimal annuitization with labour income, where an agent aims to maximize utility from consumption and labour income under age-dependent force of mortality. Using a dynamic programming approach, we derive closed-form solutions for the value function and the optimal consumption, portfolio, and labor supply strategies. Our results show that before retirement, investment behavior increases with wealth until a threshold set by labor supply. After retirement, agents tend to consume a larger portion of their wealth. Two main factors influence optimal annuitization decisions as people get older. First, the agent's perspective (demand side); the agent's personal discount rate rises with age, reducing their desire to annuitize. Second, the insurer's perspective (supply side); insurers offer higher payout rates (mortality credits). Our model demonstrates that beyond a certain age, sharply declining survival probabilities make annuitization substantially optimal, as the powerful incentive of mortality credits outweighs the agent's high personal discount rate. Finally, post-retirement labor income serves as a direct substitute for annuitization by providing an alternative stable income source. It enhances the financial security of retirees.
We propose a dynamic working set method (DWS) for the problem $\min_{\mathtt{x} \in \mathbb{R}^n} \frac{1}{2}\|\mathtt{Ax}-\mathtt{b}\|^2 + η\|\mathtt{x}\|_1$ that arises from compressed sensing. DWS manages the working set while iteratively calling a regression solver to generate progressively better solutions. Our experiments show that DWS is more efficient than other state-of-the-art software in the context of compressed sensing. Scale space such that $\|b\|=1$. Let $s$ be the number of non-zeros in the unknown signal. We prove that for any given $\varepsilon > 0$, DWS reaches a solution with an additive error $\varepsilon/η^2$ such that each call of the solver uses only $O(\frac{1}{\varepsilon}s\log s \log\frac{1}{\varepsilon})$ variables, and each intermediate solution has $O(\frac{1}{\varepsilon}s\log s\log\frac{1}{\varepsilon})$ non-zero coordinates.
: Women and men share comparable levels of intergenerational social mobility in all Western economies, except for Southern European countries, where women’s life chances appear less determined by their family background. This is puzzling given Southern European’s persistent familialism, lack of institutional support for mothers, and the strong influence of social origin. We examine the role of women’s social class of origin on occupational achievements across birth cohorts in Italy, focusing on the close link between fertility dynamics and social mobility opportunities. By leveraging nationally representative retrospective data, we observed that middle-and working-class women experienced upgraded occupational achievements across birth cohorts in conjunction with educational expansion. Conversely, upper-class women exhibited consistently lower occupational achievements, especially those becoming mothers at a comparatively younger age, facing a higher risk of intergenerational downward mobility. Notably, the poorer labor market achievements of recent generations of upper-class women compared to the previous generations already emerged at labor market entry, suggesting that adverse self-selection mechanisms in early motherhood might be largely responsible for Italian women’s greater overall relative mobility. In Italy, women’s higher social mobility than men’s more likely reflects persistent traditional work–family choices among the better-off than a signal of growing equality of opportunity.
The contribution focuses on telework, arguing that its spread is likely to exacerbate the already existing inequalities in the labour market. After outlining the reasons for the so-called teleworkability divide, the Author shows that the cleavage between those who can and those who cannot work remotely is not neutral, but rather a factor that accelerates and sharpen disparities among groups of workers, favouring only some of them. Attention will also be paid to the issue of discrimination in teleworking access policies and that of its so-called segregating effect. Finally, some possible remedies to the detrimental consequences of the teleworkability divide are proposed.
Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence, Labor. Work. Working class
This study explores the impact of appearance discrimination in the labor market and whether education can mitigate this issue. A statistical analysis of approximately 1.058 million job advertisements in China from 2008 to 2010 found that about 7.7% and 2.6% of companies had explicit requirements regarding candidates' appearance and height, particularly in positions with lower educational requirements. Literature review indicates that attractive job seekers typically enjoy higher employment opportunities and wages, while unattractive individuals face significant income penalties. Regression analysis of 1,260 participants reveals a significant positive correlation between attractiveness scores and wages, especially in low-education groups. Conversely, in high-education groups, the influence of appearance on income is not significant. The study suggests that enhancing education levels can effectively alleviate income declines associated with appearance, providing policy recommendations to reduce appearance discrimination in the labor market.
Purpose: is to develop a model and mathematical framework for the decision-making process regarding the cybersecurity of information systems of critical infrastructure objects, taking into account the properties and requirements of objects that have strategic importance for the state.
Method: is based on a comprehensive approach that combines analysis of contemporary information sources, expertise, and analytical data from leading cybersecurity professionals, as well as linear mathematical modeling.
Theoretical implications: include proposing an adapted decision-making model for protecting critical infrastructure from hybrid threats by integrating frameworks and emphasizing adaptability, it enhances the understanding of decision-making processes in cybersecurity.
Practical consequences. It represents an innovative decision-making model aimed at protecting critical infrastructure and enabling rapid response to cyber threats. It combines the frameworks of existing models, the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loop and PDCR (Plan, Do, Check, React), widely applied in cybersecurity across various industries. This adaptive model allows for observation, analysis, and response to emerging cyber risks, ensuring the necessary level of cyber resilience. The developed model provides a practical tool for safeguarding critical infrastructure and minimizing damage in a growing threat landscape
Paper type: theoretical.
Jinghao Lyu, Alexander B. Boyd, James P. Crutchfield
When reformulated as a resource theory, thermodynamics can analyze system behaviors in the single-shot regime. In this, the work required to implement state transitions is bounded by α-Renyi divergences and so differs in identifying efficient operations compared to stochastic thermodynamics. Thus, a detailed understanding of the difference between stochastic and resource-theoretic thermodynamics is needed. To this end, we explore reversibility in the single-shot regime, generalizing the two-level work reservoirs used there to multi-level work reservoirs. This achieves reversibility in any transition in the single-shot regime. Building on this, we systematically develop multi-level work reservoirs in the nondissipation regime with and without catalysts. The resource-theoretic results show that two-level work reservoirs undershoot Landauer's bound, misleadingly implying energy dissipation during computation. In contrast, we demonstrate that multilevel work reservoirs achieve Landauer's bound while producing arbitrarily low entropy.
The title is meant as way to honor two great mathematicians that, although never actually worked together, introduced concepts of convergence that perfectly match each other and very fruitfully interact: De Giorgi's $Γ$-convergence of lower semicontinuous functions and Gromov's convergence of geometric structures.
AbstractThe postwar situation in Calcutta was part of the picture of seething anticolonial popular and labor discontent in the Indian subcontinent; this was perhaps the most radical, the most potent, period for the subalterns in the country. However, this complex historical moment with varied, competing, shifting, overlapping tendencies has been reduced and flattened in the historiography. It is as if the twin events of partition and independence were inevitable. City workers, especially the port workers, emerged as a visible and powerful presence in the anticolonial movement. By reconstructing the arena of collective action—focusing on the context, the modalities, and the social content of the major strikes involving port labor or “moments” of radicalism, this article seeks to recover the role of workers in decolonization. It will show how workers contested and outstepped the politics of nationalist leadership(s) and communalism in significant ways multiple times, placing a politics of labor rights and entitlements, of struggles against exploitation and poverty on the postcolonial agenda. The article argues that a “workers’ way,” an alternative even if hazily defined pathway of decolonization, in which new citizens would not be divided on religious lines, was concretized and became a part of the political imagination of the time. The port strike of 1947, a swing-back from the deadliest episode of communal riots, in a matter of months, signifies the extreme fluidity of the political situation in the late 1940s, which is unsurprisingly missed in the conventional historiography. The article finally highlights the limits of postwar radicalism: the “historic” port workers’ strike was ultimately channelized as a legal industrial dispute by the communist leadership of port workers’ union. With their key demand of parity of wages and allowances with government employees, port workers staked their claim to labor institutions offered by the postcolonial state, which was to cordon large sections of them as a privileged layer from rest of the laboring classes in the city.“To articulate the past historically. . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.
We consider quantum batteries given by composite interacting quantum systems in terms of the thermodynamic work cost of local random unitary processes. We characterize quantum correlations by monitoring the average energy change and its fluctuations in the high-dimensional bipartite systems. We derive a hierarchy of bounds on high-dimensional entanglement (the so-called Schmidt number) from the work fluctuations and thereby show that larger work fluctuations can verify the presence of stronger entanglement in the system. Finally, we develop two-point measurement protocols with noisy detectors that can estimate work fluctuations, showing that the dimensionality of entanglement can be probed in this manner.
Many previous studies have demonstrated that work statistics can exhibit certain singular behaviors in the quantum critical regimes of many-body systems at zero or very low temperatures. However, as the temperature increases, it is commonly believed that such singularities will vanish. Contrary to this common recognition, we report a nonanalytic behavior of the averaged work done, which occurs at finite temperature, in the Dicke model as well as the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model subjected to the sudden quenches of their work parameters. It is revealed that work statistics can be viewed as a signature of the thermal phase transition when the quenched parameters are tuned across the critical line that separates two different thermal phases.
College students graduating in a recession have been shown to face large and persistent negative effects on their earnings, health, and other outcomes. This paper investigates whether students delay graduation to avoid these effects. Using data on the universe of students in higher education in Brazil and leveraging variation in labor market conditions across time, space, and chosen majors, the paper finds that students in public institutions delay graduation to avoid entering depressed labor markets. A typical recession causes the on-time graduation rate to fall by 6.5% in public universities and there is no effect on private institutions. The induced delaying increases average graduation by 0.11 semesters, consistent with 1 out of 18 students delaying graduation by one year in public universities. The delaying effect is larger for students with higher scores, in higher-earnings majors, and from more advantaged backgrounds. This has important implications for the distributional impact of recessions.
Background: The provision of home-based care for frail older adults in Italy and Israel is predominately provided by live-in migrant care workers (MCWs). However, despite the important role that they play in filling the demand for home care, MCWs often experience labor rights violations. This not only impacts the well-being of MCWs but also leads to lower-quality care being provided to people in need of support. Method: This scoping review used Arksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework to map literature. This article aims to analyze the scope, main topics, themes and gaps in the existing academic literature on how micro and macro level indicators impact the working and living conditions of live-in MCWs in Italy and Israel. Scopus, Pubmed, and Web of Science Core Collection were searched for peer-reviewed articles. Search terms were adapted from the Multilevel Framework of Transnational Care Migration (MFTCM). Themes were developed using Braun and Clarke’s method for conducting reflexive thematic analysis. Articles were included if they focused on Italy and/or Israel, included analysis on the working and living conditions of live-in MCWs at the macro and/or micro levels, were written in English, and were published between 2015 and 2020. Results: Out of the 1088 articles retrieved, 33 met the inclusion criteria. A total of 18 articles focused on Italy and 14 on Israel, and one focused on both Italy and Israel. The majority of articles in Italy (84 per cent) and Israel (53 per cent) included analysis on care regimes. Only 37 per cent of articles in Italy and 20 per cent in Israel included analysis on gender regimes. At the micro level, 80 per cent of articles in Israel discussed Power/Class Asymmetry, compared to 37 per cent in Italy. In total, six themes were developed. At the macro level, these themes included funding care work, MCWs as a pragmatic approach, care in the home, and valuing care work. At the micro level, the themes included being part of the family, and perceptions on class asymmetries. The findings presented in this review show that MCWs in both Italy and Israel face many of the same challenges in accessing decent work opportunities, despite contrasting employment and migration policies in each country. This can be partially attributed to the undervaluing of care work because of racialized and gendered notions of care. At the macro level, this has contributed to a lack of political will to develop long-term sustainable solutions to create or monitor decent work standards for MCWs. At the micro level, this has led to power imbalances between MCWs and people in need of care and their family members, resulting in MCWs being expected to work hours beyond those contractually allowed, having little to no time off, and experiencing emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Conclusion: This study provides a review of the most recent contributions to the fields of labor migration and health concerning the MCW markets in Italy and Israel. While there have been many studies in each country that detail the labor rights violations experienced by MCWs, this is the first review that develops themes around the underlying causes of these violations. By thematically analyzing the findings of recent studies and current gaps in existing knowledge, this scoping review assists in building the groundwork for the development and implementation of policy, strategies, practice and research to improve the rights and migration experiences of MCWs.
The globalization development of the world allows the economic development presenting knowledge. Talent cultivation is similar to long-term investment that the importance cannot be neglected. Moreover, low birth rate in current society has each child being the treasure of the parents, who spoil the children with permissive parenting and do not realize the immaturity and low self-control of children in the preschool stage to result in children's deviant behaviors and teachers’ increasing workload and pressure. Aiming at kindergarten teachers in Jiangsu as the research objects, total 380 copies of questionnaire are distributed, and 277 valid copies are retrieved, with the retrieval rate 72%. The research results are summarized as below: Kindergarten teachers are general people who have emotion and cannot exercise forbearance for everything. For this reason, school organizations should be considerate of kindergarten teachers’ emotional labor problems, parents and the mass society should treat teachers’ work with objective perspective and putting themselves in the place. Using individual emotional intelligence to achieve personal emotional accommodation in the process is an important strategy for kindergarten teachers; In the cultivation process, kindergarten teachers stress on evaluating children's level, strength, and weakness for individualized instruction. Step-by-step design of learning content aims to emphasize the importance of rational evaluation. In this case, special education teachers with better emotional intelligence performance could well apply rational evaluation and emotional accommodation strategies, reduce working pressure, and enhance subjective well-being; Kindergarten organizations could properly support teachers with time flexibility to reduce kindergarten teachers dealing with class affairs or other problems with extra time. Cooperation among people would help deal with problems and promote individual positive affect. According to the research results, suggestions are eventually proposed, expecting to help kindergarten teachers present higher commitment and better effectiveness on the teaching performance to promote the overall education quality.
The Birth of Energy is a well-structured book that frames energy humanities, British colonialism, and environmental history within the field of cultural studies. This work is a resource for the social history of technology in the United Kingdom of the Victorian era, and a contribution to energy and environmental studies. The author’s cross-disciplinary approach aims to spark new avenues of interpretation and discussion of today’s energy consumption, conservation, waste, and inequality. The book focuses on the mark given to the human habitat by the dominating “culture of labor” rooted in the mantra of the need for perpetually increasing productivity, and on the epistemological and physical origin of the concept of energy in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom, revisiting the history of thermodynamics. In doing this, Cara New Daggett attempts to explain how the Western perception of force, growing in dominance in the nineteenth-century, shaped the idea of work, human-machine interdependency, and energy utilization—and changed the course of human and environmental conditions. In her book, Daggett engages the reader with her analysis of the links between the mechanics of steam technology, Protestant culture, politics, and industrialization, eventually showing how these forces contributed to expansionist goals. The book develops in two parts. Part I is composed of four chapters on early studies and interpretations of energy, the understanding of the potential of the steam engine, and the role of the Protestant work ethic. Within this framework, the governing elites utilized the mass exploitation of fossil fuels and the rise of a “wage-labor” working class to create a so-called unequivocal avenue to the (supposed) wealth of the masses to the glory of capitalist society. B O O K R E V I E W S
O objetivo deste artigo é analisar as ações e os seus julgados no Supremo Tribunal Federal para apontar os pontos convergentes a favor dos estudos sobre gênero utilizados pelos ministros da Suprema Corte em suas decisões. A análise de oito Arguições de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental ou Ação Direta de Inconstitucionalidade, já julgadas pela Suprema Corte, constituem a base documental da pesquisa. A grosso modo, os achados mostram a legalidade dos estudos de gênero na escola, ancorada na Carta Constitucional.
Palavras-chave: Gênero; Legalidade; Supremo Tribunal Federal; Educação.
Special aspects of education, Labor market. Labor supply. Labor demand