What does May Day mean to you? For us, a labor innovation start-up, it is both a celebration of the many victories of the labor movement and a subtle reminder of the unresolved issues. This May, coincidentally enough, we are beginning an experiment to address an issue that has roots in the May Day movement. Read to find out.
To make impact on the ground, we need to talk to those on the ground. In this piece, we share our first-hand experience of staying grounded.
Motivated by the idea of a tradeoff between exit and voice, we decided to test whether providing workers with voice, in the form of an employee satisfaction survey, could reduce quitting for frontline workers.
At the Good Business Lab, one of our focus areas is to unlock female labor supply. In this post, we pay tribute to the immense potential of female laborforce.
A social startup and a labor innovation lab, with many projects being run in the garment industry, we take a moment to go back and learn about its rich history.
Giving low-wage workers a “voice” on the job — the ability to communicate concerns to management — is believed to improve employee satisfaction and retention. Now a new paper supports this theory using a field-based, randomized, controlled trial — the most rigorous scientific method of impact evaluation.
A social startup and a labor innovation lab, we want to make businesses care for profits, but through a different route. This blog sheds light on it.
The researchers found that at those 26 factories, the mercury spiked above the heat stress threshold (roughly 85 degrees inside the factory) one quarter of the time. And once the temperature passed that tipping point, for every extra degree it got hotter, productivity went down by 3 percent and profits went down by 2.2 percent.
"Our goal with starting a foundation is to study interventions that have the potential to impact worker welfare while also promoting the growth of firms," Adhvaryu said in a statement. "We incubate new ideas and serve as a platform to disseminate findings from our research."
Job growth in India that accompanies output growth is anemic, although not absent. We need to focus on the process of creating jobs in which workers are more productive.
Training workers with soft skills like time and stress management, problem solving, communication and teamwork can have big impacts on the productivity of workers and company profits, says a University of Michigan researcher Achyuta Adhvaryu, assistant professor of business economics and public policy at Michigan's Ross School of Business.
Businesses in developing countries are characterized by low labour productivity. This suppressed productivity is reflected in the remuneration workers receive.