Decent work?

Pastoralism and ranching are two different rangeland-based livestock systems in dryland areas of East Africa. Both usually operate under low and irregular rainfall and consequently low overall primary biomass production of high spatial and temporal heterogeneity. Both are usually located far from town centres, market outlets and communication, medical, educational, banking, insurance and other infrastructure. Whereas pastoralists can be regarded as self-employed, gaining their livelihood from managing their individually owned livestock on communal land, ranches mostly employ herders as wage labourers to manage the livestock owned by the ranch on the ranches’ own land property. Both production systems can be similarly labour intensive and – with regard to the livestock management – require the same type of work, whether carried out as self-employed pastoralist or as employed herder on a work contract. Given this similarity, the aim of this study was to comparatively assess how pastoralists and employed herders in northern Kenya view their working conditions, and which criteria they use to assess hardship and rewards in their daily work and their working life. Their own perception is compared with the concept of Decent Work developed by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Samburu pastoralists in Marsabit and Samburu Districts as well as herders on ranches in Laikipia District were interviewed. A qualitative analysis of 47 semi-structured interviews yielded information about daily activities, income, free time, education and social security. Five out of 22 open interviews with pastoralists and seven out of 13 open interviews with employed herders fully transcribed and subjected to qualitative content analysis to yield life stories of 12 informants. Pastoralists consider it important to have healthy and satisfied animals. The ability to provide food for their family especially for the children has a high priority. Hardships for the pastoralists are, if activities are exhausting, and challenging, and dangerous. For employed herders, decent conditions are if their wages are high enough to be able to provide food for their family and formal education for their children. It is further most important for them to do work they are experienced and skilled in. Most employed herders were former pastoralists, who had lost their animals due to drought or raids. There are parallels between the ILO ‘Decent Work’ concept and the perception of working conditions of pastoralists and employed herders. These are, for example, that remuneration is of importance and the appreciation by either the employer or the community is desired. Some aspects that are seen as important by the ILO such as safety at work and healthy working conditions only play a secondary role to the pastoralists, who see risky and dangerous tasks as inherent characteristics of their efforts to gain a livelihood in their living environment.

The relationships of character strengths with coping, work-related stress, and job satisfaction

Personality traits have often been highlighted to relate to how people cope with stressful events. The present paper focuses on character strengths as positive personality traits and examines two basic assumptions that were derived from a core characteristic of character strengths (i.e., to determine how individuals deal with adversities): (1) character strengths correlate with coping and (2) buffer the effects of work-related stress on job satisfaction. Two different samples (i.e., a mixed sample representing various occupations [N = 214] and a nurses sample [N = 175]) filled in measures for character strengths, coping, work-related stress, and job satisfaction. As expected, intellectual, emotional, and interpersonal strengths were related to coping. Interpersonal strengths played a greater role for coping among nurses, as interactions with others are an essential part of their workday. Furthermore, intellectual strengths partially mediated the negative effect of work-related stress on job satisfaction. These findings open a new field for research on the role of personality in coping with work-related stress. Character strengths are trainable personal characteristics, and therefore valuable resources to improve coping with work-related stress and to decrease the negative effects of stress. Further research is needed to investigate this assumed causality.

Diversity and nutritional properties of Pakistani dates: implications for sustainable value chain and decent living perspectives of rural households

Date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) occupies almost three percent of the total worldwide cultivated area, with an annual production of seven million tonnes (t). Pakistan is an ideal place for the cultivation of date palm due to its sandy loam soil and semi-arid climate. In 2012, Pakistan produced 600,000 t of dates, on an area of 95,000 ha. Baluchistan province is the country’s top date producer, followed by Sindh, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) provinces. More than 300 date varieties are known to exist in Pakistan and some commercially important cultivars are: Karbalaen, Aseel, Muzawati, Fasli, Begum Jhangi, Hillawi, Dashtiari, Sabzo, Koharaba, Jaan Swore, Rabai and Dhakki. Six districts from the four provinces of Pakistan (Jhang, Muzaffargarh and Bahawalpur (Punjab), Dera Ismail Khan (KPK), Khairpur (Sindh) and Panjgur (Baluchistan)) with largest area under date palm cultivation were selected to conduct socio-economic surveys including the income sources of date palm growers. A structured questionnaire with open-ended and closed questions was used for face-to-face interviews of 170 date palm growers. At each location after selection of a first farmer through a local guide, the former was requested to provide names and addresses of three other date growers in his area. From these three names, one was randomly selected for the next sampling. Additionally, date palm fronds and fruits of all available cultivars were collected for morphological and nutritional analyses. Soil samples were collected from the groves for subsequent chemical and physical analyses. Almost all farmers used dates as a food item for their families and some were using low quality dates as a feed for their livestock. Apart from dates, other date palm components (trunk, spadix, frond, inflorescence and seed) were used by date palm growers as a raw material for making many by-products for their families. Date palm had a major contribution in the income of households, 24% received 91-100% of their income from date palms. More than half of the surveyed farmers had date palm groves, but scattered plantations, home gardens and intercropping systems with cereal and other fruits were also present. Dhakki, Muzawati, Aseel, and Karbalaen were the most important commercial cultivars grown in the provinces of KPK, Baluchistan, and Sindh. Aseel, Karoch, Haleni, Karbalaen, and Muzawati cultivars had the most firm fruit and good total soluble sugar, calcium and magnesium contents. The amount of magnesium found in dates of studied cultivars ranged from 0.143 to 0.876 mg g-1. A great variation in frond morphology was recorded among the cultivars. Fruit length and fruit weight was highest in Dhakki date, making it visually more attractive for customers in addition to its good nutritional properties. The seed weight of the studied cultivars ranged from 0.7-2.0 g, while Desi dates had largest seed, making them less attractive for marketing. However, in terms of nutritional value and fruit size, most of the investigated varieties can compete with globally important commercial dates.

An Extension to the Tactical Planning Model for a Job Shop: Continuous-Time Control

We develop an extension to the tactical planning model (TPM) for a job shop by the third author. The TPM is a discrete-time model in which all transitions occur at the start of each time period. The time period must be defined appropriately in order for the model to be meaningful. Each period must be short enough so that a job is unlikely to travel through more than one station in one period. At the same time, the time period needs to be long enough to justify the assumptions of continuous workflow and Markovian job movements. We build an extension to the TPM that overcomes this restriction of period sizing by permitting production control over shorter time intervals. We achieve this by deriving a continuous-time linear control rule for a single station. We then determine the first two moments of the production level and queue length for the workstation.

This is funny : On the beneficial role of self-enhancing and affiliative humour in job design

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n

Job stress and burnout in residential child care workers in Spain. ' Estr??s laboral y burnout en educadores de acogimiento residencial en Espa??a'

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n. Resumen tambi??n en ingl??s

Job demands, job resources and individual innovation at work : Going beyond Karasek's model?

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n. Resumen tambi??n en ingl??s

Extension of the Job Demands-Resources model in the prediction of burnout and engagement among teachers over time. 'Una ampliaci??n del modelo de demandas-recursos laborales en la predicci??n del burnout y del engagement en profesores'

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n. Resumen tambi??n en ingl??s

Does Facebook ruin your job Prospects?

News Report: Every Potential 2040 President Already Unelectable Due To Facebook:YouTube fake American news item (2min 39secs) in which all possible candidates are excluded because of something they show on Facebook. And Could your Facebook page ruin your job prospects? - A Guardian article that suggests that employers may be more tolerant than supposed.

7 Tips for Finding a Job After College

A good discussion of things you can do while at University to improve your opportunities when you leave university. Written from an American viwpoint but mostly still valid

Job Specs for COMP1205

You will find here two job specs: - one for an academic internship - one for an industrial internship Choose one to target your CV at before writing it.

Identifying job skills in commercial advisors in a health insurance company

The aim of this research was to identify the criticalcompetence of success of the commercial adviserin a company providing insurance and health services.For this research a sample of 34 commercialadvisers. The sample was divided into four groups(two per product and two per criterion of success).Systematic fi eld observations, interviews of criticalincidents, application of response tests and salesworkshops were used to evaluate the differentialcompetences that the successful advisers wereshowing in relation to the advisers de fi ned as average.The success criteria were based on the generatedcommission performance over the 10 months. Allin all, signi fi cant differences were found betweenthe “successful” and “average” groups. Furthermore,competences that correlate positively with atop sales performance were observed and competencesthat have major level of discrimination betweenthe “successful” and “average” groups wereestablished. Orientation to achievement, planningand management, information search, commercialaggressiveness and strategic vision are the competencesthat were considered to be key in the topperformance of a sales agent or commercial adviser.Additionally, the results in the response testswere analyzed in the four study groups, withoutobserving signi fi cant differences between them,which supports the theoretical framework of thepresent study.

Work-family conflict, burnout and work engagement among teachers: The moderating effect of job and personal resources

The present study contributes to the literature on the Job Demands-resources model in the italian school context. the aim of this paper is to examine how the interaction between work-family conflict (i.e., a typical job demand) and opportunities to learn and to develop and self-efficacy (i.e., typical job and personal resources, respectively) affect the core dimensions of burnout (exhaustion and depersonalization) and work engagement (vigor and dedication). Hypotheses were tested with a cross-sectional design among 143 teachers of a junior high school in the north of Italy. Results of moderated multiple regression analysis partially supported the hypotheses as the opportunities to learn and to develop buffered against the aversive effects of work-family conflict on depersonalization, whereas self-efficacy moderated the relationship between work-family conflict and vigor. From a practical viewpoint, our findings suggest that opportunities to learn and to develop and self-efficacy are important re- sources that help teachers to reduce the negative effects related to work-family conflict.

Job satisfaction in a developing country: exploring the work-family rivalry

This paper empirically analyzes the relationship between familiar duties and job satisfaction in a developing country by using four different indexes. This analysis includes objective measures and subjective measures from data gathered in Colombia. In contrast to previous literature, objective measures are included through the interactive effects between the family responsibilities variables and the gender. Subjective measures are evaluated using the job-family compatibility perception. Our findings show that women tend to be less satisfied at work as the number of children increases, while men are more prone to satisfaction at work when they are single thus showing the importance given to the use of their own time. It also reveals that job- family compatibility is an important determinant of job satisfaction.

The best job in the world. 'El mejor trabajo del mundo'.

Las Unidades de Evaluación se presentan como alternativa a las pruebas de rendimiento o exámenes. Una Unidad de Evaluación tiene tres partes esenciales: el escenario, las tareas y los inventarios de corrección. El 'escenario' es el estímulo, la situación significativa del contexto que se utiliza para movilizar los conocimientos; se utiliza un formato verbal (texto escrito) y otro no verbal (imágenes, tablas, gráficos, cuadros, etc.) que se extraen de cualquier fuente documental. Las 'tareas' permiten conocer, mediante la movilización de los conocimientos, cuál es la competencia alcanzada en el uso de procesos cognitivos, afectivos, sociales y funcionales, y el nivel de logro de los aprendizajes. Para que la información contenida sea completa (saber, hacer y querer) la Unidad de Evaluación debe incluir tareas que valoren aprendizajes receptivos, productivos y valorativos. El proceso de evaluación concluye con la corrección de tareas, realizada por el propio alumno o por el profesorado. Con carácter general, las tareas utilizadas en las Unidades de Evaluación se definen con diferentes formatos de respuesta y criterios de corrección. Esta Unidad de Evaluación se presenta como un modelo de evaluación competencial, en ningún caso pretende ser algo más que una ejemplificación que estimule la creación de materiales para la evaluación de las competencias básicas de los propios docentes. Elaborada por la Oficina de Evaluación de la Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha para su aplicación en las pruebas de acceso a los Ciclos Formativos de Grado Medio en la convocatoria de junio de 2009