The COVID-19 pandemic has vividly and dramatically demonstrated the
importance of supply chains to the functioning of societies and our
economies. The discussion in this timely book explores prominent issues
concerning supply chain networks and labor. The readership is aimed to
include students, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers,
interested in the wide range of topics presented in these pages. Labor
has a particular focus as the driver behind supply chains, whether
associated with food products, life-saving medicines and supplies, or
high tech products that make innovation possible, just to name a few.
The impacts of policy interventions, in the form of wage bounds, and
their ramifications, in terms of volume of attracted labor, product
prices, product volumes, as well as profits, are explored.
Profit-maximizing firms are considered (with relevant associated issues
such as waste management in the case of the food sector, for example),
but also non-profits, as in blood services, as well as humanitarian
organizations engaged in disaster relief. The book is filled with many
network figures, graphs, and tables with data, both input and output and
includes an appendix that provides the foundations of the underlying
mathematical methodologies used.
The book offers strong evidence for the need to provide a holistic,
system-wide perspective for the modeling, analysis, and solution of
supply chain problems with the inclusion of the critical labor
resources. A formalism using the prism of supply chain networks, which
yields a graphic representation of supply chains, consisting of multiple
stakeholders, is constructed. Models that capture the behaviors and
interactions of single decision-makers as well as multiple
decision-makers engaged in supply chain activities of production,
transportation, storage, and distribution, are considered. The models
capture many realistic constraints faced by firms today, as they seek to
produce and deliver products, while dealing with competition, various
constraints on labor, a variety of disruptions, labor shortages,
challenges associated with proper wage-determination, plus the
computation of optimal investments in labor productivity subject to
budget constraints. The book provides prescriptive suggestions in terms
of how to ameliorate negative impacts of labor disruptions and
demonstrate benefits of appropriate wage determination.
