Globalization and Employment Relations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Globalization and Employment Relations - Essay Example A peek into their social and political structure from the beginning of the twentieth century to today's fast paced world and also a study of the hypothesis of convergence will help us in making definite conclusions about the subject. Katz evaluates three hypotheses that have been suggested to explain the trend towards decentralized bargaining: first, shifts in bargaining power from unions to employers; second, the emergence of new forms of work organization, which put a premium on flexibility and employee participation; and third, the decentralization of corporate structures and diversification of worker preferences. Katz concludes that the second hypothesis is the most convincing, on the grounds that labour and management appear to have gained distinct advantages from work restructuring that accomplished decentralization. However, shifts in bargaining power, as well as the diversification of corporate and worker interests, are important contributing factors to the decentralization process. Sweden became an industrial society later when compared to most other countries in Europe. At the start of the 20th century, Sweden was a poor agrarian society with high emigration rate. It is now a relatively wealthy, welfare-oriented, service society. Sweden has 25% of its civilian workforce employed in industry, only 2.4% are still in agriculture, while 73% are in services, partly as a result of the strong growth of local and regional government since the 1960s. Swedish employment relations have long fascinated foreign observers. With a total population of 9 million and with 4.4 million in labour force, Sweden is the smallest of the countries in Europe. However, 76% of its women are in the labour force which is the highest female participation rate of any OECD country. Employment relations in Sweden have passed through three broad stages since the nineteenth century. The beginning of the union movement was the first stage, which lasted from the 1890s to 1930s.Unions were established during this period and there were disputes between the capitalists and the laborers. The government was either passive or supported the capitalists. The second stage was approximately from mid-1930s to the early 1970s. The 'Swedish model' was established during this period, with a low level of industrial conflict, a 'solidaristic' wage policy, an active labour market policy and labour-management cooperation. An economic policy reliant on economic growth subsumed many of the pay-related problems for the unions and paved way for a pattern of employment relations with few industrial disputes. Emergence of a third stage can be traced to the 1970s. More radical union ambitions, the election of a non-socialist government in 1976 severe economic problems, and a strategy based on free enterprise and a market economy, on the employer side, represented significant changes. The 1980 dispute symbolized these developments. Wage earner funds were introduced after a bitter conflict, but were not seen as a complete victory by the unions. The wage earner fund system became a political burden for the Social Democratic Party and did not result in a basic change in Sweden's economic system. The employers tried to reverse the trend as much as

Live Like YouRe Dying Essay Example for Free

Live Like YouRe Dying Essay Clean, Cull, and Connect. In his short essay â€Å"Live like you’re dying,† Chuck Palahniuk refers them as the â€Å"Three C’s. † After confirming that suicide is the only escape route, they are the three final chores you must finish on your last â€Å"lively† week. Clean everything. Your bathroom, car, refrigerator, everything. Cull down your resources, donate and destroy needless possessions, and get a good haircut. Connect to everyone you’ve ever known and say something nice, no matter how bad you hate them. Don’t feel humiliated, you’ve got nothing to lose except a few days of your life. Also, know that no one will remember you, know that the world will not change after you die. Know that you will not be missed. And after all of this, Palahniuk says you probably won’t bother to kill yourself, since by then you’ll be surrounded by friends who recognize you as a decent and valuable friend. But there is more to the essay than explaining what the three C’s are. Both the title and content clearly spotlights death as a major concept of the essay, as most of Palahniuk’s writings are. Actually, Palahniuk touches on death so often that it seems he cannot go through a single essay without discussing about it. Also, from start to beginning, his sentences are written in such a clean-cut way that the reader almost feels suicidal. â€Å"Do everything. † â€Å"Destroy it. † â€Å"Treat yourself. † â€Å"Your oven will be clean, your car vacuumed. † Even in the merriest mind, one cannot help but be persuaded that the world will crumble when the essay ends. Why does Palahniuk do so? It seems odd – and arduous – for any writer to be so â€Å"deathly† when he writes. Palahniuk was beleaguered by death all his life. In his mind, his happy family had already died when his parents divorced, leaving him and his three siblings to live with their grandparents. Later on, Palahniuk volunteered at a hospice as an escort, where he had to witness the death of a patient he had grown attached to (which lead him to stop volunteer working). And around 1999, Palahniuk’s father – Fred Palahniuk – was shot and dragged into a house which was put on fire. Palahniuk later on helped the decision of the killer’s death sentence, the ex-boyfriend of Fred Palahniuk’s girlfriend. Although death is a frequently visited topic for Palahniuk, he probably doesn’t always write in such a â€Å"deathly† manner on purpose. But it is also not surprising that Palahniuk ends up writing about death every time. Palahniuk’s word choice during the essay is also different from the ordinary writer. Not only that most of them are short, but all of them are so-called â€Å"easy† words (perhaps â€Å"procrastinate† at the last paragraph is an exception). Of course, it comes from Palahniuk’s minimalistic writing philosophy, but anyone with internet connection to Wikipedia can figure that out. The question is, where does his writing philosophy come from? Palahniuk claims himself to be a romantic who expresses ideas that others do not believe in. It is only natural that he holds different ideas from the ordinary man, regarding the unordinary world he grew up in. Therefore, readers of Palahniuk need to think twice about what he wrote to understand it. But complex words tend to have an accurate meaning to it, which doesn’t leave any space to think again about what he was actually trying to say. This leaves Palahniuk no choice but to use more flexible, simpler and original words. Although it doesn’t show in the essay â€Å"Live like you’re dying,† an exception is when it comes to mechanics. For example, in his novel â€Å"Fight Club,† most of the processes in making plastic bombs or soap is described in an accurate manner. This is probably because Palahniuk used to work for Freightliner as a mechanic, but his tendency to describe mechanical processes accurately has less to do with his flow of words than we have interest to. As it has been clearly shown, â€Å"Live like you’re dying† has a deep relation to Palahniuk’s background, almost as if the essay is a shadow of Palahniuk. Everything that Palahniuk has been through, and is going through, is spilled out and spread, conscious or unconscious, on the computer screen when he writes. He can’t help it. And it would be nonsense to say that this only counts for Chuck Palahniuk – every essay is a shadow of the author in some way or the other, a footprint of what he has been through. There’s a sort of syllogism going on here: what you’ve one is what you are, what you are is what you write, so what you’ve done is what you write. If you disagreed, you’d be challenging Socrates.

Analyzing User Requirements by the Unified Process and Total Quality Management :: essays research papers

Analyzing User Requirements by the Unified Process and Total Quality Management Summary A successful project demands a correct and thorough requirements analysis. This paper proposes a refined requirements workflow, TQM/UP, to analyze requirements systematically. This workflow integrates five management and statistical analysis tools of Total Quality Management (TQM)—Affinity diagram, Tree diagram, Brainstorming, Pareto analysis and Process Decision Program Chart (PDPC)—into the Unified Process (UP) and helps the team to analyze requirements in a more efficient way. The guidelines I provide are based on my own experiences in an IT company, Interlancer, Limited which is briefly introduced at the latter part of this paper. Educator & practitioner summary I would like to thank all of the people at UL for their support and input during this project. I give special thanks to my project advisor, Mr. John Noonan, for his support and guidance. I would also like to thank my girlfriend, for her enduring support over the past several weeks. Contents Summary 1 Educator & practitioner summary 2 1 Introduction 5 2 What are Requirements? 5 3 Capturing Requirements by UP 6 3.1 What is UP? 7 3.1.1 UP is Use-Case Driven 7 3.1.2 UP is Architecture-Centric 8 3.1.3 UP is Iterative and Incremental 8 3.2 The Life of UP 8 3.3 The Role of Requirements in the Software Life Cycle 10 3.4 Requirements Workflow in UP 10 4 A Refined Requirements Workflow: TQM/UP 13 4.1 Introduction of TQM Tools 13 4.1.1 Affinity diagram 13 4.1.2 Tree diagram 13 4.1.3 Brainstorming 13 4.1.4 Pareto analysis 14 4.1.5 Process Decision Program Chart (PDPC) 14 4.2 TQM/UP 14 4.2.1 How to Analyze the Problem? 14 4.2.2 How to Understand Stakeholder Needs? 17 4.2.3 How to Define the System? 18 4.2.4 How to Manage the Scope of the System? 19 4.2.5 How to Refine the System Definition? 20 5 A real world case: Interlancer, Limited 21 5.1 A brief introduction of Interlancer 21 5.2 TQM/UP in Interlancer 22 5.2.1 Analyze the Problem 22 5.2.2 Understand Stakeholder Needs 24 5.2.3 Define the System 27 5.2.4 Manage the Scope of the System 27 5.2.5 Refine the System Definition 28 6 Conclusion 30 Appendix: Glossary of Terms 31 List of illustrations 32 List of tables 32 References 33 1 Introduction Requirements analysis of a software system is one of the most crucial steps in the software development process. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. has pointed out that no other part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong and no other part is more difficult to rectify later than requirements analysis. The potential impact of errors in requirements is substantial: †¢ The resulting software may not satisfy users’ real needs.

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler Essay

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a story of great tragedy, with a web of controversies and a tangle of secrets. In such a beautiful irony, it portrayed that the small town wherein the heroine resides with her husband, is inflicted with gruesome gossip and twisted tales of conflicted interests. Hedda Gabler, a born aristocrat who marries to a class beneath her, has to do with a lifestyle far inferior than what she is used to. The writer used a conversational tone to portray Hedda’s manipulative nature as she controls those that surrounds her. The story revolves around this young wife, as she plays with people’s feelings and affairs, and meddle with things so much so that they work out to her advantage. In this tragedy, it pays to ask the question: what provoked Hedda to marry Tesman? II – Marriage of Different Lifestyles I am interested with Ibsen’s idea of Hedda Gabler being an aristocrat who had to get used to a different lifestyle. There were many analysis offered for the play Hedda Gabler, yet only a handful of them displayed this very obvious fact. The fact that Hedda is manipulative and is using her husband, Jà ¼rgen Tesman, is evident from the first scene of the play, when Tesman commented how fat Hedda is getting, when in fact his wife is pregnant and he has no idea. Even Tesman’s aunt, Aunt Julle, picked up upon this very noticeable change in Hedda, yet Hedda dismissed her with curt replies. SparkNotes (2009) even commented the tyranny of Hedda over Tesman’s household, wherein Berte, the maid, is scared of not being able to please her, and Aunt Julle is tormented by her. Tesman lived to do his wife’s every bidding. In fact, Tesman did everything he can to make sure that they afford the lavish house they are living in, just because Hedda happened to mention that she would want to live in that particular house. When further analysis from SparkNotes (2009) revealed that Hedda only said she wanted that house because she cannot think of anything else to say. To Hedda the house is a joke, a sign of Tesman’s unwavering devotion and faithfulness, to Tesman, the house is a fulfillment of his wife’s wish. Along the play, Tesman followed his wife’s every bidding. There was in instance wherein Hedda was rude to Aunt Julle and Tesman reprimanded her afterwards. Still, basically Tesman’s role in the play was to follow Hedda’s wishes. When Hedda burned the novel of Ejlert Là ¶vborg, Tesman was delighted. He actually thought that Hedda did it because she wanted to help him advance in his academic profession, when in fact Hedda burned the novel because she didn’t want to be reminded of the romance between Ejlert and her. This is interesting to notice, seeing as in other cultures, it is actually discouraged that people from different social standings to marry. With Hedda and Tesman, it is plain that she had to adjust to a different lifestyle, and because of this, she was bored, and living with Tesman does not excite her, as she confides to Judge Brack. This brings me back to my original thesis: what provoked Hedda to marry Tasman, seeing that he is a man of lower class, and he cannot afford her lavish lifestyle? We could only grope Ibsen’s wisdom. Perhaps it is because through Tasman, Hedda can forget about her past relationship with Ejlert, or perhaps, through Tasman, Hedda can still indulge herself a playmate whom she can take advantage of. We can never be certain, until Ibsen partakes the real reason for the two’s matrimony. III – Secrets Revealed Throughout the play, there were numerous secrets disclosed. SparkNotes (2009) mentions the secrets, such as Hedda taking advantage of all the men in the play, Hedda’s affair with Ejlert, which scarred the latter for life, the relationship between Mrs. Elvsted and Ejlert, among many others.   The author cleverly reveals each secret little by little, dragging the audience to the edge of their feet before giving the final picture. Throughout the play, the audience is captivated by how many more secrets will be revealed, and how will Hedda manipulate people to tell her what she wants to hear. I love the irony discussed with the last scene, wherein Aunt Julle returned to the household that is now filled with mourning, what with Aunt Rina’s passing and the horrible incident with Ejlert. Aunt Julle was very welcoming and still hints at Hedda for children, and was oblivious to the fact that so many changes happened within the home, and to pretend that nothing happened is otherwise insane. Yet the author was able to get away with such a tricky symbolism, as the audience is sure to applaud the wit and charisma Aunt Julle brings into the last scene. Also worth mentioning is the way Tasman was horrorstruck when he found out that his wife had burned Ejlert’s novel. However when he thought she was doing it out of love so that he will be able to secure the teaching post he so much wanted, he would have gladly embraced Hedda. How could someone be blinded so much by a manipulative woman? I’ve known that some people say that love is blind, but in Tesman’s case, the clichà © is very much overrated, seeing as she was fooling him in his own home. How can a man not see that his wife is pregnant, and yet would opt to commend on her new curves and new body? Does he not see the baby that is growing in Hedda’s belly? With this, perhaps the pregnancy is the reason why Hedda is manipulative and very sarcastic. Women who are pregnant are prone to mood swings and irrational thinking, yet what would contribute to Hedda’s dark nature? Is she really being sarcastic and arrogant because of her proud upbringing, or is she acting this way because she is pregnant and she has no feelings for the child in her womb and with the baby’s father? Overall the play is very satisfactory. Even in the ending wherein Hedda committed suicide, the audience could rest their breaths, knowing that Tasman is in the arms of a capable woman, Mrs. Elvsted. SparkNotes (2009) describes Mrs. Elvsted as a competent woman who bounces off from men to men, according to her needs. She met Mr. Elvsted by working for him, and afterwards they were married. With Ejlert, the Elvsteds hired him to be a tutor for their children, and Mrs. Elvsted turned out to be Ejlert’s assistant in his research and writing. After Hedda burned the novel, Mrs. Elvsted mentioned that she knew some parts of Ejlert’s manuscript because she helped him research for it. She and Tasman immediately tried to reconstruct the manuscript that Ejlert wrote. Now that Hedda is out of the picture, and the original author of the manuscript is also gone, then Mrs. Elvsted is free to make her move in regards to Tasman, and the two of them can prove to the audience that in their dreary old town, it is still possible for love to exist.

Differences Between the Wartime, Presidential, and Congressional Reconstruction Essay

There are similarities and differences between the Wartime, Presidential, and Congressional Reconstruction. Each had a purpose and plan. There was a major difference between the Republican President and Republican Congress that caused many conflicts. The Wartime Reconstruction actually started during the war. Lincoln in the beginning wanted settlement of blacks in countries or something known as repatriation. A major part of this Wartime Reconstruction was the Proclamation of Amnesty. What this did was offer a Presidential pardon to all Southern whites who took an oath of allegiance to the Union and accepted abolition of slavery. The only people that were excluded from this were Confederate official and high-ranking military officers. In states where ten percent of male population took the oath they would be able to reestablish a state government. This policy was carried out in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. This Wartime Reconstruction also included Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. This freed slaves in the states that were at war with the Union. Both President Lincoln and President Johnson wished to give back land to pardoned ex-Confederates. President Lincoln and Congress were similar in wanting to refute pardons to those who ill-treated or murdered captured black and white Union soldiers. They did agree on this matter. While President Lincoln only required ten percent of allegiance from past Confederates, Congress wanted the majority of white men in Confederate states to take the oath of allegiance. Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson took presidency. He favored harsh punishment for traitors. He issued two proclamations without help of Republicans. This was the Presidential Reconstruction. When he issued the two proclamations it caused a division. It covered official pardon for whites except Confederate officials and military officers worth more than twenty thousand dollars, and he names a provisional government for North Carolina. Only whites with amnesty could vote there. The South was disobedient and none of the state conventions enfranchised a single black. Johnson issued thirteen though sand five hundred Presidential pardons to those he earlier hoped to keep out. There were many ex-Confederates who were elected to Congress. Also the state legislatures in the south demoted blacks to a second class status, and this was known as the Black Codes. These codes states blacks were not allowed to vote, be on juries, testify against whites, could not interracially marry, and it was most unfair in Mississippi and South Carolina. Johnson like Lincoln wanted to restore the Union in as little time as possible. Congress comes in to play in December 1865. The Congress was made up mostly of Republicans and they refused to let past Confederates to take their seats in Congress at this time. This marked the beginning of Radical Reconstruction or sometimes known as Congressional Reconstruction. The president and the congress did not agree on many issues. Congress overrode President Johnson on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, The Fourteenth Amendment, and the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill. The Fourteenth Amendment spelled out rights of both black and white citizens as equal. It prolonged Federal powers for the enforcement of civil rights. States that approved the Fourteenth Amendment were considered reconstructed, and Tennessee did so. President Johnson advised other southern states to oppose doing this. Congress passed many laws to limit President Johnson’s powers. They passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 which set new procedures for readmission to the Union. Johnson did not agree with this act and resisted it. When President Johnson removed Edwin M. Stanton from the head of the War Departments Republicans were very upset. They charged Johnson with the Tenure of Office Act and Johnson was impeached. After President Johnson’s impeachment, the Fifteenth Amendmen t, which prohibited states from denying vote based on color, was ratified. This Radical Reconstruction was successful in passing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Amendments. Congress also wanted married law affirmed in the South for the period of Reconstruction and they wanted to discipline ex-Confederates. President Lincoln and Congress did not agree with how many pardons President Johnson gave out. The Wartime Reconstruction, Radical or Congressional Reconstruction, and the Presidential Reconstruction all had their similarities and differences. Each was designed by someone different and had a specific plan and goal in mind. The differences between the president and congress caused many splits and problems. The Radical Reconstruction was most successful in my opinion.