UCLA study shows unions continue to take a beating in post-recession climate
September 5, 2011
The Great Recession and ensuing job crisis continue to take a toll on union membership, according to UCLA’s annual report on organized labor.
From July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011, unionization rates remained essentially flat in Los Angeles but fell close to a percentage point in California and tumbled to historic lows nationwide, researchers from the university’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) found.
“The trend is bad for unions, it’s bad for workers and, because it’s a reflection of a jobless recovery, it’s bad for the country,” said Chris Tilly, director of the IRLE and a professor of urban planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.
“The State of the Unions in 2011: A Profile of Union Membership in Los Angeles, California and the Nation,” publishes on Labor Day, Sept. 5.
The report is based on an analysis of the U.S. Current Population Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. The IRLE report tracks year-to-year changes in unionization for the nation, California and the Los Angeles metropolitan area, including Santa Ana, Riverside, Long Beach, Thousand Oaks, Ventura, San Bernardino, Oxnard and Ontario.
The proportion of the workforce that is unionized in the Los Angeles metro area now stands at 16.4 percent, down from 16.5 percent last year, a drop that did not prove to be statistically significant. Even with its lackluster 2010
Insomnia costing US workforce $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity, study shows
September 1, 2011
Insomnia is costing the average U.S. worker 11.3 days, or $2,280 in lost productivity every year, according to a study in the September 1 issue of the journal Sleep. As a nation, the total cost is 252.7 days and $63.2 billion.
“We were shocked by the enormous impact insomnia has on the average person’s life,” said lead author Ronald C. Kessler, Ph.D. “It’s an underappreciated problem. Americans are not missing work because of insomnia. They are still going to their jobs but accomplishing less because they’re tired. In an information-based economy, it’s difficult to find a condition that has a greater effect on productivity.”
The results were computed from a national sampling of 7,428 employees, part of the larger American Insomnia Study, which was led by Kessler and funded by Sanofi-Aventis Groupe. Participants were asked about sleep habits and work performance, among other things. Previous estimates have relied on smaller consumer panels and on medical and pharmacy claims databases focused on treated insomnia patients, the study said.
The estimated prevalence of insomnia in the AIS sample was 23.2 percent among employees. Insomnia also was found to be significantly lower (14.3 percent) among workers age 65 and older, and higher among working women (27.1 percent) than working men (19.7 percent). Clinical sleep medicine experts independently evaluated a subsample of AIS respondents and confirmed the accuracy of those estimates.
Kessler said accurate estimates on the costs of insomnia in the workplace might justify the implementation of screening and treatment programs for employees. Because insomnia is not considered an illness – the kind that results in lost days at work – employers tend to ignore its consequences, he said.
“Now that we know how much insomnia costs the American workplace, the question for employers is whether the price of intervention is worthwhile,” said Kessler, a psychiatric epidemiologist with the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. “Can U.S. employers afford not to address insomnia in workplace?”
Roughly speaking, the average cost of treating insomnia ranges from about $200 a year for a generic sleeping pill to up to $1,200 for behavioral therapy, according to study co-author James K. Walsh, Ph.D., executive director and senior scientist at the Sleep Medicine and Research Center at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chesterfield, Mo.
The SLEEP study also found a lower than average insomnia prevalence among respondents with less than a high school education (19.9 percent) and among college graduates (21.5 percent). Those with a high school education (25.3 percent) or some college education (26.4 percent) showed higher rates of prevalent insomnia. The AIS survey was conducted in 2008 and 2009.
The study, “Insomnia and the performance of US workers: Results from the America Insomnia Survey,” was sponsored by Merck & Co. The AIS was conceived of and funded by Sanofi-Aventis (SA) Groupe.
Learn more about insomnia from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine on the Sleep Education Blog at http://sleepeducation.blogspot.com/search/label/insomnia.
The monthly, peer-reviewed, scientific journal Sleep is published online by the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC, a joint venture of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society. The AASM is a professional membership society that is the leader in setting standards and promoting excellence in sleep medicine health care, education and research (www.aasmnet.org).
For a copy of “Insomnia and the performance of US workers: Results from the America Insomnia Survey,” or to arrange an interview with an AASM spokesperson, please contact PR Coordinator Doug Dusik at 630-737-9700, ext. 93459, or ddusik@aasmnet.org.
Tobacco companies use corporate social responsibility for political purposes
August 24, 2011
Corporations may use corporate social responsibility programmes not only to improve their public image, but also to gain access to politicians, influence agendas, and shape public health policy to best suit their own interests. In a research article led by Gary Fooks from the University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group in the UK and published in this week’s PLoS Medicine, these programmes are revealed as “an innovative form of corporate political activity”.
The authors document the persistent efforts of British American Tobacco (BAT, the world’s second largest publicly traded tobacco company, which has won several awards for its social and environmental programmes) to re-establish access with the UK Department of Health, following the Government’s decision to restrict contact with major tobacco companies.
In a detailed case study that involved searching BAT documents made publicly available as a result of litigation in the US (for the period, 1998-2000), the authors illustrate how the company used its corporate social responsibility programme in its dialogue with policymakers to influence the priorities of public and elected officials in the UK, encourage them to take notice of proposals that best suited the company (for example, to make regulation voluntary), and to revise the Government’s concerns about whether the industry could be trusted to work in partnership.
The authors document examples of correspondence from Martin Broughton (BAT’s chair between 1998 and 2004) and notes from meeting with politicians, including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, to show how BAT was able to link its preferred policies to political and societal values, such as harm reduction, child health, and cooperation between business and government.
The authors argue that their findings underline the need for broad implementation of Article 5.3 of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (an international treaty that aims to reduce the harm associated with tobacco use) which aims to protect public-health policies on tobacco control from tobacco industry influence. Successful implementation will require measures to ensure transparency in all interactions between all parts of government and the tobacco industry and to increase awareness across government of what tobacco companies hope to achieve through corporate social responsibility, report the authors.
The authors say: “our case study underlines the value of understanding BAT’s [corporate social responsibility programme] as an innovative form of corporate political activity. This approach to conceptualising [corporate social responsibility] has potentially important implications for public health given the widely documented impact of tobacco companies’ political activity in delaying and blocking health related policies. ”
They continue: “More generally, it is likely to be relevant to understanding the impact of [corporate social responsibility] in other industrial sectors, such as alcohol and food, where corporate social responsibility also seems to have been used to shape government policy.”
The authors add: “we suggest that our findings – and the absence of strong evidence suggesting that co-regulation is capable of aligning the business models of big food and drinks companies with the demands of public health – suggest that the role of corporate social responsibility in the [UK Government's Public Health Responsibility] Deal needs to be subjected to closer scrutiny.”
Citation: Fooks GJ, Gilmore AB, Smith KE, Collin J, Holden C, et al. (2011) Corporate Social Responsibility and Access to Policy Élites: An Analysis of Tobacco Industry Documents. PLoS Med 8(8): e1001076. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001076
Funding: GJF and CH are supported by the National Cancer Institute of the United States National Institutes of Health (grant number: 2 R01 CA091021-05). ABG is funded by a Health Foundation Clinician Scientist Fellowship (Developing and evaluating policies to reduce tobacco use and harm in the UK, November 2006-2011). During manuscript preparation KES was supported by the Smoke Free Partnership (SFP) through a CR-UK grant (CR-UK is one of the SFP partners [www.cancerresearchuk.org]), the others being the European Respiratory Society (ERS at www.ersnet.org), and the Institut National du Cancer (INCa at www.e-cancer.fr). JC receives research funding for tobacco document research from the NCI of the US NIH (grant number: 2 R01 CA091021-05). The funders had no influence on the research design, data collection, data interpretation or the writing of this article.
Competing Interests: JC and ABG were part of a WHO Tobacco Free Initiative (TFI) Expert Committee convened to develop recommendations on how to address tobacco industry interference with tobacco control policy, and as such travel to a meeting in Washington D.C. was reimbursed by WHO TFI. ABG was previously an unpaid Board member of Action on Smoking and Health. KL is on the Editorial Board of PLoS Medicine.
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Notes:
1. This work was funded by the US National Cancer Institute (at the National Institutes of Health).
2. The University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group is part of the UK Centre of Tobacco Control Studies (UKCTS) a network of nine universities in the UK working in the field of tobacco control.
Contact: Clare Weaver
press@plos.org
44-122-344-2834
Public Library of Science
Fine art in advertising can backfire
August 23, 2011
Throughout the ages, fine art has been accorded a special significance and recognized as a powerful communication tool. Art has been used to sell everything from products to politics to religion.
But art can be stripped of its special status if used carelessly by advertisers, according to a new study by researchers from Boston College and the University of Houston.
If the artwork is viewed as a product-relevant illustration, then consumers no longer view it as art. Suddenly, they can take a critical view of its message, according to the new study, which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
“Art is valued for its own sake,” said Henrik Hagtvedt, a marketing professor in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. “If brands are associated with art in a tasteful way, consumers will accept and even appreciate it. But as soon as the artwork is viewed as a mere product-relevant illustration, it is demoted to the status of any other ordinary image.”
Art may thus lose its unique powers of communication, Hagtvedt and colleague Vanessa M. Patrick, a professor of marketing of the University of Houston, found in three experiments in which art was presented on product labels and in advertisements.
One study conducted by Hagtvedt and Patrick involved a wine tasting at a bar. While tasting, the patrons also inspected the wine labels, which featured paintings by the French artist Renoir. For some customers, the bartender had been coached to comment that the bottle labels featured paintings. People who tasted these wines judged them all favorably.
For others, the bartender casually mentioned that the same wine label paintings depicted people. The patrons still judged the wine favorably if the label featured what seemed like an appropriate image, such as guests at a luncheon. But the same wine in a bottle labeled with an out-of-place image, such as a woman and child playing with toys, was received less favorably.
The findings reveal not only that wine labels can influence how wine tastes to consumers, but also that it matters how those consumers perceive the labels. Art causes wine to taste good, but only as long as it retains its status as art. This demonstrates some of the limits marketers face when using fine art to pitch their products.
“When people view an image as an artwork, it communicates as art and it doesn’t matter whether the content fits,” said Hagtvedt. “But when they start to focus on the content of the image, such as the people or their activities, then it becomes a product illustration and consumers begin to weigh whether it fits or not.”
Two other experiments, in the context of advertising for soap or nail salons, replicated the pattern of results. Different images caused different product evaluations, but if the images were viewed as artworks rather than illustrations, then the products tended to be viewed in an equally favorable light.
The researchers suggest the responses reflect how humans have evolved to recognize and appreciate art as a special category of expression.
“People have evolved to care about art,” said Hagtvedt. “It is something we have appreciated in all societies known to man, throughout history and pre-history. It is also a magnificent tool for marketers who rely on its communicative power in a thoughtful and honest manner, but those who use it thoughtlessly are not likely to impress anyone.”
Contact: Ed Hayward
ed.hayward@bc.edu
617-552-4826
Boston College
Handsome annual reports cause investors to value company higher
August 23, 2011
Study from University of Miami School of Business finds looks count
Coral Gables, FL (August 23, 2011) – As firms begin the 2011 annual report process, which many do at this time of year, they may want to pay closer attention to the way those reports look. A recent study out of the University of Miami School of Business Administration found that investors, regardless of their experience, place a higher value on firms with attractive annual reports than they do on those that produce less attractive reports. The study found that annual reports that utilize more color are perceived to have at least one percent higher annual revenues than those with lackluster designs.
“The role of aesthetics in consumer goods like those you’d find on store shelves has been widely studied, but our research is novel in that we look at this effect in the extreme context of financial decision-making and what we find is just how boundless the role of aesthetics can be,” said Claudia Townsend, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Miami School of Business Administration, who conducted the research with Suzanne Shu of the UCLA Anderson School of Management. “Better-looking documents produce increased pride of ownership for a company, and this pride increases valuation. People are not aware of the effect of aesthetics on their financial decisions and we found that when their attention was drawn to this issue they were able to overcome the bias and make wiser investments.”
Researchers conducted a series of three studies: one with finance students, one with members of the general population, and one with more experienced investors. Respondents in each study indicated that the design of a firm’s annual report would be of little significance in their valuation of a company. But after reviewing the first few pages and/or a sampling of annual reports, participants rated firms with more attractive reports higher than those with less attractive reports. Specifically:
- In the student study, in which participants were given the first three pages of two annual reports with the same financial information, the students priced the stock shares of a firm with the more attractive annual report nearly 70 percent higher than shares of a firm with the less attractive report.
- In the general population study, respondents gave the product of a company with a more attractive annual report an average rating of 5.08 on a seven-point scale versus a rating of 4.79 for the product of a company with a less attractive annual report.
- In the study involving experienced investors, in which participants were asked to rank companies based on how likely they would be to invest in those firms, the findings suggested that including an additional color throughout a firm’s annual report would have the same impact on an investor’s firm ranking as a 20 percent improvement in revenue from the previous year.
“The implications of these findings should point firms in the direction of good graphic designers,” added Townsend. “After all, it is a lot easier to add color to a printed piece of paper than to add revenue to a company’s bottom line.”
The research paper can be found online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057740810000677.
About the University of Miami School of Business Administration
The University of Miami School of Business Administration is a leading business school, offering undergraduate business, full-time MBA, Executive MBA, MS, PhD and non-degree executive education programs. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Miami, the School is located in a major hub of international trade and commerce and acclaimed for the global orientation and diversity of its faculty, students and curriculum. The School delivers its programs at its main campus in Coral Gables as well as at locations across Florida and abroad. More information about the University of Miami School of Business can be found at www.bus.miami.edu.
Contact: Catharine Skipp
c.skipp@miami.edu
305-284-3667
University of Miami
New job trends reproducing old forms of gender inequality
August 21, 2011
Jobs that come with large paychecks but long work hours are slowing the gains women have made since the late 70s in narrowing the gender wage gap.
A study by sociologists from Indiana University and Cornell University finds that the growing trend of overworking — working 50 hours a week or more — is partly responsible for the slowdown Americans have experienced since the mid-1990s in the convergence of the gender gap in pay. The gap between the percentage of women working full-time compared to men has shrunk during the past 30 years but the gender gap involving long working hours has changed little and remains large.
“Women, even when employed full time, typically have more family obligations than men,” said IU sociologist Youngjoo Cha, who specializes in gender, labor markets and social inequality. “This limits their availability for the ‘greedy occupations,’ that require long work hours, such as high-level managers, lawyers and doctors. In these occupations, workers are often evaluated based on their face time.”
Cha will discuss her findings on Sunday during the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Las Vegas.
The study, using data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, finds the relative hourly wage of overworkers compared to full-time workers has increased substantially over the past three decades. Because a greater percentage of male workers are overworking, this change benefited men more than women.
“Gender gaps in overwork, when coupled with rising returns to overwork, exacerbate the gender gap in wages,” Cha said. “New ways of organizing work are reproducing old forms of inequality.”
More about the study:
- In 1979, 15 percent of men and 3 percent of women worked 50 hours or more per week. These percentages peaked in the late 1990s at 19 percent of men and 7 percent of women. The percentage for men decreased slightly during the 2000s, possibly due to the effects of the recession on occupations overrepresented by men, and has remained stagnant for women.
- The real wages of men who worked 50 hours or more per week increased 54 percent between 1979 and 2009. The wages of women who worked the same hours increased, too, by 94 percent. The wages of standard full-time workers (35 or more hours, but less than 50 hours) increased 13 percent for men and 46 percent for women between the same years.
- The rising price of overwork slowed the decrease in the gender wage gap by 9.2 percent between 1979 and 2007. The effect is large enough to offset the gains achieved by narrowing the education gap.
- The increase in overwork was most prominent in professional and managerial occupations, as was the increase in wages paid to overworkers. In these occupations, the rising price of overwork had the greatest impact on the gender gap in wages — in managerial occupations, for example, the gender gap in wages would be 34 percent smaller if prices for overwork had remained constant.
- Overwork compensation can be compared to standard full-time wages by breaking them down into an hourly wage. In 1979, men who overworked earned 14 percent less than men who worked fulltime once their pay was spread over the longer hours, and women saw a 19 percent penalty. Pay for overwork has increased so rapidly over the years that now men and women both earn a six percent premium in this hourly wage comparison.
Most of the decline in the gender gap in wages occurred in the 1980s. Women now earn an estimated 81 percent of what men earn.
Cha will discuss her findings on Sunday, Aug. 21, during a 2:30-4:10 p.m. session on Organizations, Occupations and Work at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. The co-author of the study is Kim Weeden, Cornell University.
To speak with Cha, contact Tracy James, University Communications, at 812-855-0084 and traljame@indiana.edu.
Justice Dept. Investigating S&P Ratings of Mortgages
August 18, 2011
The New York Times is reporting that the Justice Department is investigating the the nation’s largest credit ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s for improperly rating dozens of mortgage securities in the years leading up to the financial crisis. Sources telling the Times that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating S&P for possible misconduct based on reports of incidents where the company’s analysts wanted to award lower ratings on mortgage bonds but may have been overruled by other S.& P. business managers. The investigation may be perceived as payback, but it reportedly began before S&P’s high-profile downgrade of the U.S.’s AAA credit rating. It is not immediately clear if the Justice Department investigation includes the other two rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch.
Stock markets can regulate themselves
August 18, 2011
A look at the history of the markets offers an insight into the effects of regulation on the success of initial public offerings
Whenever crisis threatens the financial markets, voices are loud in calling for greater control. It is dubious, however, whether tighter regulation would actually offer investors better protection against losing their capital. “Economic history shows us that strictly regulated stock markets do not necessarily function better than those that are given a free hand,” says historian and economist Carsten Burhop of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn.
Based on selected sample cases, he and two British colleagues, economist David Chambers and legal expert Brian Cheffins, have studied and compared the success of initial public offerings on the Berlin stock market and two subsections of the London stock exchange between 1900 and 1913. “We were interested in seeing whether detailed statutory regulation is a necessary precondition for successful trading in initial public offerings. The parameters we chose by which to judge success were survival rates, returns and fluctuations subsequent to flotation,” as Carsten Burhop explains their approach.
In choosing the Berlin exchange, they picked a prime example of a strictly regulated market. “Following the company and securities law reforms of 1884 and 1896, public share offerings were substantially more tightly regulated and the protection afforded to external investors greatly increased.” In comparison with Prussian market bureaucracy, the attitude in both sectors of the London Stock Exchange at the start of the 20th Century was distinctly laissez faire. The state largely kept its distance from affairs on the London markets. There was virtually no legislation governing share issues, and even company law offered little in the way of direct protection for small investors. “As a result the merchants who ran the London Stock Exchange were left to decide for themselves which initial public offerings were admitted to the market,” Burhop adds. In addition to the main market for officially quoted companies, there was a second segment in which initial public offerings were traded over the counter in an even more liberal manner.
In comparison with the Berlin stock exchange, the researchers found that over the same period of time there were substantially more initial public offerings on the London markets, covering a far broader range of industries. On the other hand, stocks traded over the counter in London proved to be an extremely risky venture for investors. “Failures were regular events between 1900 and 1913,” they observed. “19 percent of companies went bankrupt within the first five years.” Whereas on the Berlin stock exchange that was heavily regulated on Prussian principles, failures were exceptional occurrences. “They amounted to less than one percent,” says Burhop. Taken on its own, the official market at the London Stock Exchange was not far behind with failure rates of three to four percent. Measured by their development over an extended period, London stocks actually performed better than their Berlin counterparts, since the average returns in London were higher than in Berlin – that is when one considers that in the faster growing German economy, share prices generally climbed more steeply. In Berlin, on the other hand, prices were more stable.
“Our findings show that a stock market cannot function entirely without rules,” Burhop concludes. However, measures designed to provide investor security would appear in the long term to be bad for business. Similarly, the development in officially quoted securities on the London stock exchange has shown that markets are well able to control themselves, the researchers believe. “On the basis of our study, it is relatively unimportant whether control is exerted by statute and by a state commissioner as in Berlin, or by knowledgeable merchants as on one of the two London market segments.”
Preprint of the original publication:
Carsten Burhop, David Chambers, Brian Cheffins
Is Regulation Essential to Stock Market Development? Going Public in London and Berlin, 1900-1913
Link: http://www.coll.mpg.de/?q=node/2696
Contact: Dr. Carsten Burhop
burhop@coll.mpg.de
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Google Inc. to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion
August 15, 2011
Google Inc. has agreed to acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. for about $12.5 billion. The move should make Google more competitive in the mobile-computing market, bolstering adoption of its Android mobile software to compete with smartphone rival Apple Inc. Google swooped in to buy Motorola Mobility and its attractive patent portfolio after losing out on a bid for Nortel’s patents.
Google, which owns the fast-growing Android operating system used in millions of mobile phones, has a thin portfolio of wireless and telecommunications patents.
Google will run Motorola Mobility which split from Motorola Inc. eight months ago, as a separate business that will remain a licensee of Android. Google also said Android will remain an open platform.
Google expects to complete the transaction by early 2012. It has already been approved by the boards of both companies but requires regulatory approvals in the U.S., European Union and other areas, as well as the blessing of Motorola Mobility’s shareholders.
GM buying interest in Yoplait to secure foothold in U.S. yogurt market
May 18, 2011
You might think this was a case of strange bedfellows but actually they have been partners in the US since 1977. And now US automaker General Motors is buying a controlling stake in French yogurt maker Yoplait, according to Fox News. The move is to secure exclusive U.S. distribution rights to the world’s second-largest yogurt brand after Danone. General Mills, whose brands include of Haagen-Dazs ice cream and Cheerios cereals, expects the deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, to close at the end of May.