Browsing by Subject "Labor"

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1995 ILAS Distinguished Paper: The Experience of the Guatemalan United Fruit Company Workers: Why Did They Fail?
(1995) Batres, Alejandra
A long quavering chant : peonage labor camps in the rural-industrial South, 1905-1965
(2013-05) Reynolds, Aaron Kyle; Jones, Jacqueline, 1948-; Bsumek, Erika; Sidbury, James; Falola, Toyin; Bremen, Brian
This dissertation is a study of social and environmental conditions inside rural industrial labor camps throughout the U.S. South between 1905 and 1965. The use of peonage labor, i.e., the coercion of labor against ones’ will through indebtedness or violence impacted nearly a fourth of rural workers in the postbellum south, particularly in isolated railroad construction sites, lumber operations, turpentine camps, and commercial vegetable farms. Though employers’ various peonage labor regimes changed within the context of the camps’ physical environment and evolved over time, they continually took advantage of marginalized social groups, immigrants, African-Americans, and the poor. The relative inability of workers, their families, and reformers to prosecute employers and foremen for labor abuses stemmed from the collusion of local law enforcement and the indifference of federal government officials. Ultimately, broader market forces of globalization and technology changed peonage labor regimes, not the enforcement of federal statues outlawing the practice.
Backstage, offstage, underground : (folkloric) musicians' invisible work in neoliberal Argentina
(2021-05-03) Lahasky, Sarah; Moore, Robin D., 1964-; Seeman, Sonia; Dell'Antonio, Andrew; Fridman, Daniel; Luker, Morgan
Social scientists have widely studied the effects of neoliberalism on social and economic life in the 21st century, and most agree that the precariousness of many job sectors has increased as a result. However, although many scholars allude to workers’ perilous conditions, few explore the processes that create precarity. What is needed are suggestions for systemic change that lead to greater protection and fair compensation for vulnerable populations. This dissertation argues that an analysis of musicians’ invisible work exposes neoliberalism’s narrowing effect on what activities employers and policymakers consider worthy of financial remuneration. A study of music making is ideally situated to uncover the socially constructed invisibilization of particular people and modalities of work, especially due to the varied activities musicians take part in across the (in)visibility spectrum. Musicians engage in hypervisible performances in front of thousands of people, though the audience often fails to see their backstage and offstage working processes which contribute importantly to the final event. I propose four categories of invisible work—undisclosed, unpaid, undervalued, and unrecognized—to theorize processes of invisibilization in a neoliberal era. My findings suggest that musicians engage in increasing numbers of activities such as marketing, venue hosting, and social activism without compensation due to the normalization of neoliberal economic and social ideologies. Using ethnographic data collected between 2017-2020, I show how música popular musicians in Mendoza, Argentina engage in a wide spectrum of (in)visible work. Revealing such efforts can ultimately lead to a new valuation of their roles in social, economic, and political life.
Breaking the cultural barrier : the evolution of professions in the United States Air Force
(2023-05) Reynolds, Rachel Lee; Suri, Jeremi; Svedin, Lina; Weaver, Catherine; Sankaran, Jaganath; Lawrence, Mark
This study tackles a paradox of professions whereby standardization and bureaucratization of tasks seemingly ought to democratize labor pool participation, but instead reify barriers to entry. Through controlled comparative case study, I examine cases in the US Air Force that have pursued different labor pool strategies in response to apparently similar exogenous pressures. In each case, a suborganization within the USAF encountered resource dilemmas that motivated them to cut labor costs and adopted technological advances that routinized tasks such that lay workers could take on tasks once only performed by experts. Despite forces that seemingly drive organizations to open their labor pools to more junior workers, not all cases saw such an outcome. Instead, I argue that endogenous organizational culture determined how each organization managed its workforce. In the cases of USAF satellite operations and weapons direction career fields, jobs once performed only by officers were opened to enlisted practitioners. In two cases following fliers of in-person piloted aircraft and remotely piloted aircraft, no such labor pool expansion took hold despite experiments that demonstrated the capability of enlisted troops to perform officers’ duties. Through interview, document analysis, and artifact analysis methodologies, I found that cultural barriers prevented labor pool expansion in the latter two cases. Romantic ideals of labor roles, elitism regarding junior worker capability, and negative attitudes like sexism and racism guided labor pool decisions more so than did dispassionate cost/benefit analysis. This work speaks to the evolution of professions broadly. It develops a paradigm missing in the literature on professions: That professionalization not only standardizes specialized work; it also attaches social benefits—prestige, authority, status—to professional experts. Experts, then, are loathe to give up those benefits even when their expertise is no longer required to perform routinized tasks. My findings suggest similar forces are at play in diverse professions whose task environments are increasingly accessible to lay workers: from medicine and journalism, to library science and fashion, to cybersecurity and space exploration. Whether those industries will pursue the most efficient labor pool strategy, I argue, is not a matter of measured decision-making, but a matter of culture.
Chinese coolies in Cuba and Peru : race, labor, and immigration, 1839-1886
(2010-08) Narvaez, Benjamin Nicolas; Brown, Jonathan C. (Jonathan Charles), 1942-; Hu-DeHart, Evelyn; Garfield, Seth W.; Gurdiy, Frank A.; Deans-Smith, Susan; Hsu, Madeline Y.
This dissertation examines the experience of the tens of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers (colonos asiáticos or “coolies”) who went to Cuba and Peru as replacements for African slaves during the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite major sociopolitical differences (i.e., colonial slave society vs. independent republic without slavery), this comparative project reveals the common nature in the transition from slavery to free labor. Specifically, the indenture system, how the Chinese reacted to their situation, and how they influenced labor relations mirrored each other in the two societies. I contend that colonos asiáticos, while neither slaves nor free laborers, created a foundation for a shift from slavery to free labor. Elites in both places tried to fit the Chinese into competing projects of liberal “progress” and conservative efforts to stem this change, causing them to imagine these immigrant laborers in contradictory ways (i.e., free vs. slave, white vs. non-white, hard-working vs. lazy, cultured vs. morally corrupt). This ambiguity excused treating Asian laborers as if they were slaves, but it also justified treating them as free people. Moreover, Chinese acts of resistance slowly helped undermine this labor regime. Eventually, international pressure, which never would have reached such heights if the Chinese had remained passive, forced an end to the “coolie” trade and left these two societies with little option but to move even closer to free labor. That said, this work also considers the ways in which the differing socio-political contexts altered the Chinese experience. In particular, in contrast to Peru, Cuba’s status as a colonial slave society made it easier for the island’s elites to justify exploiting these workers and to protect themselves from mass rebellion. My dissertation places the histories of Cuba and Peru into a global perspective. It focuses on the transnational migration of the Chinese, on their social integration into their new Latin American host societies, as well as on the international reaction to the situation of immigrant laborers in Latin America.
Daughtering and daughterhood : an exploratory study of the role of adult daughters in relation to mothers
(2016-08) Alford, Allison McGuire; Maxwell, Madeline M.; Donovan, Erin; Menchaca, Martha; Vangelisti, Anita
This study investigated the role of an adult daughter in mid-life, a time in a woman’s life when she has a personal relationship with her mother based upon shared interests more than dependence for care. Using interactional role theory (Turner, 2001), this study explored the understanding a daughter has for her role as an adult daughter in everyday encounters with her mother. Participants in this study described that when in situations that call for daughtering, they enact the adult daughter role. For this study, adult daughter participants (N = 33) ranging in age from 25-45 years old participated in face-to-face interviews to discuss their role as an adult daughter to their mothers. All participants had a living, healthy mother age 70 or younger. From daughters’ discussions of everyday communication with their mothers, layers of meaning were uncovered which related to the adult daughter role. Using role theory as a guide, thematic analysis revealed six themes of meaning. These findings contribute to an understanding of the social construction of an important role, which daughters learn over a lifetime and which they use to communicate within a family. Discussions of daughtering were challenging to participants due to borrowed vocabulary for describing this role, narrow role awareness, and a low valuation of the work of daughtering. When sorting role influences, daughters noted their mothers and a variety of other sources that inform role expectations. This finding prompted a new manner for evaluating daughters as a daughterhood, or community of role players collectively enacting the same role. Finally, participant responses revealed new ways to conceive of the social construction of the adult daughter role and the practice of daughtering and daughterhood, with outcomes including a variety of comportments for performing daughtering. Implications for future research by communication scholars, as well as for practitioners who work with adult daughter-mother pairs, will be presented with other results from this study.
¿De las acciones de lucha a los proyectos productivos? La experiencia de la Union de Trabajadores Desocupados de General E. Mosconi en la Provincia de Salta
(2003) Pereyra, Sebastián
De las acciones de lucha a los proyectos productivos? La experiencia de la Unión de Trabajadores Desocupados de General E. Mosconi en la Provincia de Salta
(2006-07) Pereyra, Sebastián
Education, labor, and health disparities of racial and sexual minorities
(2020-06-25) Delhommer, Scott Michael; Murphy, Richard J., Ph. D.; Trejo, Stephen J., 1959-; Oettinger, Gerald; Black, Sandra; Vogl, Tom
The three chapters of this dissertation explore the applied economics of inequality in educational attainment, labor market outcomes, and sexual health for racial and sexual minorities. In the first chapter, I explore the role of same-race teachers reducing gaps in minority education, presenting the first evidence that matching high school students with same-race teachers improves the students’ college outcomes. To address endogenous sorting of students and teachers, I use detailed Texas administrative data on classroom assignment, exploiting variation in student and teacher race within the same course, year, and school, eliminating 99% of observed same-race sorting. Race-matching raises minority students’ course performance as well as improves longer-term outcomes like high school graduation, college enrollment, and major choice. My second chapter examines how public policy can reduce labor market inequality across sexual orientation. I present the first quasi-experimental research examining the effect of both local and state anti-discrimination laws on sexual orientation on the labor supply and wages of lesbian, gay, and bisexual workers. To do so, I use American Community Survey data on household composition to infer sexual orientation and combine this with a unique panel dataset on local anti-discrimination laws. Using variation in law implementation across localities over time, I find these laws significantly reduce inequalities in the labor supply and wages across sexual orientation for both men and women. The last chapter explores the moral hazard and health inequality implications of a life-saving HIV prevention drug, PrEP, for gay men. We document the first evidence of PrEP on aggregate STD and HIV infections. Using the pre-treatment variation in the gay male population, we show that male STD rates were parallel in states with high and low gay population before the introduction of PrEP and begin to diverge afterwards. However, HIV infections were consistently downwardly trending before PrEP with no break at the introduction of PrEP, making inference of the effect of PrEP on HIV infections difficult. Specifically, we show that one additional male PrEP user increases male chlamydia infections by 0.55 cases, male gonorrhea infections by 0.61 cases, and male syphilis infections by 0.03 cases.
Embodied labor, life, and pain of female chikankari kaarigars in Lucknow, India
(2021-07-23) Giles, Charlotte Helen Graziani; Hindman, Heather; Hyder, Syed Akbar; Rudrappa, Sharmila; Shingavi, Snehal; Wilkinson, Clare
Bodies, pain, and the labor of chikankari embroidery are central to this dissertation. My attention begins with the hands, and other limbs and body parts that move and pain in the process of work. I focus on a group of Sunni Muslim women who worked together at Khala’s chikankari embroidery Center. The first two months of my chikankari education left me with notebooks filled primarily with comments about my own bodily discomfort, complaints of pain by others, and descriptions of new stitches learned. Sitting in the Center, our bodies and the physicality of embroidery labor occupied much of the conversation and our wordless gestures. My attention to the bodies of kaarigars is an attention to how women move, how they feel and sense pain due to the labors they undertake, how they process and describe those pains through a particular vocabulary, and then how they manage them. I begin by investigating the way women move and travel throughout Khadra, their neighborhood in Lucknow. Women engage in a series of “tactical cuts” such as “gali cuts” to ensure their mobility within and beyond their mohalla. I then move closer to home, specifically to the home known as the Center where embroidery work takes place and the ladies experience and describe their embodied labor through a pain vocabulary. Women must often hold onto their own pain as well as that of others, an intersubjective act of emotional care labor, in suspension within themselves, leading to the painful and distressful feeling of “tenshan”. Lastly, I move to the intersubjective relations built between the ladies as they give testimonies of their pain to the others who act as witnesses. To engage in these moments is to manage one’s pain and to enable others to manage their own. The moments and events portrayed in this dissertation occurred at a certain time in India, under a right-wing Hindutva regime engaged in Islamophobic rhetoric and violence. The imprints of this violence are scattered throughout and foreground my interactions with the predominately Muslim population of artisans.
Essays on policy, fertility, and education
(2020-06-22) Golightly, Eleanor Keith; Youngblood, Sandra Black; Murphy, Richard J., Ph. D.; Abrevaya, Jason I; Trejo, Stephen J
This dissertation explores the role of policy incentives as determinants of educational investments, household fertility decisions, and infant health. The first chapter studies how the Texas Top 10% rule, which guaranteed state college admission to all Texas high school students in the top decile of their graduating classes, affected student effort and achievement in high school. This regime not only increased access to flagships for top students at disadvantaged schools but potentially made college seem more attainable for all students, through increased salience. Using state administrative data and a difference-in-differences framework, I find that students at disadvantaged high schools increased attendance, graduation, exam and course performance, and college enrollment. Notably, positive effects are not only concentrated among likely top decile students. The second chapter provides the first evidence of the effects of paid family leave on fertility in the United States. I exploit variation in access to paid leave introduced by the first paid family leave mandate in the country, which was implemented in California in 2004. By guaranteeing six weeks of paid leave to new parents, this policy, while not necessarily intended as pro-natal, could encourage increased childbearing. I use data containing the universe of U.S. births from Vital Statistics alongside survey data from the March Current Population Survey. I compare probability of childbirth and state fertility rates before and after policy implementation and between California and other states. Because the policy was introduced in only one state at one time, I employ several methods of inference, including randomization tests with synthetic control methods, to infer causality. Additionally, I exploit variation in county female labor force participation in an intensity-of-treatment framework. I find that as a result of the policy, probability of childbirth increases significantly, and that this is driven by increases in rates of second and higher parity childbearing. Fertility effects are concentrated amongst women in their 30s, with pronounced effects for married women and women with below median family income. Moreover, women likely to have been eligible for leave at the time of their first childbirth are more likely to have a second child. The third chapter evaluates the impacts on infant health of the first state paid family leave programs in the United States. While research shows that these policies may improve mothers’ labor market outcomes, the effects on birth outcomes have yet to be established. I investigate these effects by exploiting the introduction of the paid family leave policies implemented in California in 2004 and New Jersey in 2009. Using Natality data housing the universe of U.S. births, I compare infant health outcomes of likely eligible mothers to multiple control groups before and after these policies were implemented. I find increases in average infant birth weight and reductions in the share of low birth weight births. Access to paid leave also decreases the likelihood of early term birth. My findings suggest that paid leave may particularly benefit the infants of minority mothers.
Estudios Sociales: Revista de Investigación Científica, Número 43, Enero-Junio 2014
(Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo, 2014-01) Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo
Estudios Sociales: Revista de Investigación Científica, Número 49, Enero-Junio 2017
(Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo, 2017-01) Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo
Estudios Sociales: Revista de Investigación Científica, Número Especial, 2010
(Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo, 2010) Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo
Fair work Austin : a study of consumer willingness to pay for premier community builders certified construction in Austin, Texas
(2013-05) Collins, Haley Brooke; Dooling, Sarah
The city of Austin in recent years has undertaken a number of planning initiatives to guide future development in the rapidly-growing urban area. What has emerged is a clear commitment to a broad definition of sustainability that includes environmental, economic, and social sustainability among both policy makers and the public. The city of Austin has made great strides towards its goal of becoming a model city for sustainability, but it still faces many challenges. The long-term sustainability of Texas construction jobs is threatened by declining wages, dangerous working conditions, and few employment-based benefits. To help address these challenges, the Workers Defense Project (WDP), a local community-based organization dedicated to improving working conditions for Austin’s low-wage workers, has partnered with industry and community stakeholders to create the Premier Community Builders (PCB) certification program. Certification programs, which require businesses to meet minimum set of standards in exchange for a seal or trademark that publicizes their commitment to corporate social responsibility, have become a popular tool in recent years for improving conditions in a variety of industries. Implementing a certification program, however, often drives up costs associated with adopting more sustainable practices and is highly dependent upon consumers’ willingness to pay a price premium for the certified product. The purpose of this research is to explore consumer willingness to pay among downtown Austin residents and tourists for PCB certification. This exploratory study utilizes a contingent valuation survey as the primary instrument to determine whether or not downtown Austin consumers are willing to pay more for PCB certified construction and identify any demographic or identity-related factors associated with downtown consumers’ willingness to pay for PCB certification.
Feminism, care work, and collectivity : the case of progressive self-care
(2021-07-30) Berumen, Gwendolyn Marie; Williams, Christine L., 1959-
This study is an investigation into the social nature of self-care. Using the specific case of a phenomenon that I refer to as “progressive self-care,” I study a collection of groups that come together in order to practice a form of self-care that attempts to remove itself from capitalist productivity and consumption practices. Using Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Theory and Paula England’s Care as a Public Good framework, I find that groups attempt to politicize the nature of their meetings and the discourses surrounding rest, identity, and care in order to differentiate their practices from mainstream practices. I also find that collectivity is central to progressive self-care because it is fundamentally a collective practice, not an individual one. Finally, I find that progressive self-care practitioners use selfcare practices and discourses to dissect meanings of care and care work. I finish this study by discussing the implications of this work for further sociological research
La fuerza laboral minera y sus condiciones de funcionamiento. Cerro de Pasco en el siglo XIX
(1986-06) Contreras Carranza, Carlos
Going Into labor: (un)making mothers in India's transnational surrogacy markets
(2013-05) Kohli, Namita; Rudrappa, Sharmila, 1966-; Visweswaran, Kamala
In this study, I am concerned with the practices of representation and labor control that enable the extraction of value from the bodies of working class women in India’s transnational surrogacy markets. Recent ethnographic studies on transnational surrogacy in India have conceptualized surrogacy as a form of waged labor and focused on critically examining the structure of surrogacy markets and the production of mother-workers. This study builds on these ethnographic approaches towards surrogacy as labor, and analyzes the discourses and the practices of labor control that enable service providers to extract value from the women’s bodies; a large part of this value accrues from their treatment as disposable. I begin by analyzing the discourses around surrogate mothers in three key sites of representation, that is, the news media, service provider websites and the draft legislation that is set to regulate the use of assisted reproductive technologies in India. Subsequently, I critically examine my interactions with service providers in New Delhi to unearth the mechanisms of disciplining and surveillance that are used to control, discipline and ensure productivity of the surrogate labor. My findings suggest that surrogate mothers are always framed within the competing discourses of “exploitation” and “empowerment” in the press, while the service providers represent them within the frames of “opportunity”. In the draft legislation, the rights of surrogate mothers are based on the market-based assumptions about reproductive autonomy and the disposability of working class women’s bodies. A critical examination of my interactions with service providers, and their recruitment and disciplining strategies, reveals the ways by which labor is effectively disciplined and controlled for value extraction. Thus, this study highlights some of the ways by which working class women’s labor is exploited and their bodies are treated as disposable. Future studies should attend to the ways in which the surrogate mothers experience these practices that they are subject to and whether, or not, disrupt the production of the “ideal” mother-worker.
Housing in Havana: A Socialist Paradox
(2007-02-03) Nussbaum, Lauren
“I never once thought of them” : retail workers in American department store fiction
(2015-08) Palmer, Ashley Elizabeth; Barrish, Phillip; Cohen, Matt; Hutchison, Coleman; Lesser, Wayne; Murphy, Gretchen
This dissertation focuses on an understudied category of turn-of-the-century American literature: texts that feature department stores and primarily highlight the position of the service workers who staffed them. In composing narratives situated mostly on the workers’ side of the sales counter, I argue, authors attempted to address perceived problems with consumer culture. Drawing upon the historical contexts of Progressive politics and women’s rights movements, this dissertation seeks a fuller understanding of how turn-of-the-century writers depicted the retail worker, responded to injustices of capitalism, and shaped popular opinions about consumer culture. Chapter 1 analyzes popular fiction by Lurana Sheldon and Rupert Hughes to investigate the ways both authors depict hardships of department store labor and envision different possibilities for reform at these sites of consumption. I show that despite both authors’ sympathy for the plight of the shopgirl, they look to business owners and consumers rather than the suffering shopgirls themselves to mend the problems of capitalism. Chapter 2 turns to works of fiction that portray the shopgirl’s hard-won ascent to professionalism (in the position of buyer) as an ambivalent climb to middle management. Readings of realist writer Edna Ferber and popular fiction author Charles Klein suggest that, whereas a work of realism takes a more pragmatic approach to the limits of professional success, popular fiction often employs an idealized marriage plot to complete the protagonist’s ascent. Moving away from the realm of popular fiction, Chapter 3 examines two ambitious literary undertakings: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and David Graham Phillips’ Susan Lenox (1917). Reading Carrie from the perspective of the shopgirl (and in comparison with Phillips’ Susan), I argue, can help us better appreciate the elisions and evasions that complicate the relationship Dreiser imagines between work and consumption. Moving briefly beyond 1920, a Coda considers Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963) and Steve Martin’s Shopgirl (2000) to ask how we might better understand intersections of labor and consumption in our own moment. Finally, an Appendix provides an annotated bibliography that lists works of American department store fiction published between 1880-1920 as a resource for future scholarship.