M.Tech. (Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Technology) / Small scale farmers often lack the financial resources to purchase the necessary agricultural machinery to make their work easier and more efficient. Consequently they have to employ labourers to do the work manually, work that could otherwise be done by a machine faster and at a lower production cost. The majority of the existing agricultural machinery on the market is designed for large industrial scale farming and is unaffordable to the small scale farmer. After a small scale farming survey, it was found that there is an acute need for cheap agricultural machinery suitable to be used on a small farm, needing a maximum of 1-2 laborers to run the machine. A typical example in this regards is the production of hay bales. Hay is baled to make storage, transportation and selling easy. The most economically efficient hay bales are the large round bales with a mass of about 500 kg as they are durable with a low cost per unit mass of hay. However to produce round large bales expensive equipment and labour is needed. The objective of the present project was to design and manufacture a cheap easy to maneuver and efficient bale loader, affordable to the small farmers, who produce small rectangular bales, with limited material and labour resources. The main features of the new bale loader design are based on existing bale loaders, with the necessary changes and improvements to be fit for the purpose.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the conditions that promoted mobilization against established authority. The analysis of rural mobilization distinguishes from among longitudinal and immediate conditions, the mobilization process itself and the role of the state. The concept of articulation of modes of production examines the processes of rural transformation by following the changing nature of land ownership and patron-client relations. The evolving patterns of class opposition and alliance reflected directly the state of articulation of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production and the process of class formation in the southern Peruvian highlands over the course of the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

South Africa‟s social, economic and political landscape was shaped by a long and bitter history of land reform and dispossession. It is against this background that the land reform policy was introduced. According to the Department of Land Affairs the objective of land reform was to alleviate poverty and improve the livelihoods of the poor. Since the introduction of the land reform policy in South Africa, there is no empirical evidence that land reform is improving the livelihoods of its beneficiaries and other affected groups such as farm workers. However government focus has been on how much land was redistributed to the previously disadvantaged and dispossessed. The study sought to assess the impact of land reform on the livelihoods of farm workers with specific reference to the Oaks/Willows Citrus farm in Maruleng Local Municipality, Limpopo Province. The study focussed on whether this land reform project achieved its intended objective of improving livelihoods and alleviating poverty. The following groups participated in the study: The farm workers, project committee members, representative of the traditional leader and a representative of the Department of Rural development. The study found that the livelihoods of the farm workers had not improved after the implementation of this land reform project. The study also revealed that government intervention with post settlement support programmes to monitor progress or offer assistance with regard to farm management and extension services, is very important to ensure that land reform projects achieve their intended objective of reducing poverty and improving the livelihoods of the poor.

included 24-hour food recalls, infant feeding practices, women's food preferences and frequency of food intake. Anthropometry consisted of weight, height, mid-upper-arm circumference (MUAC), and triceps skinfold (TSF) thickness measurements in women and children, with additional head circumference measurements in children less than 3 years. Major findings from dietary assessment revealed that adult diets were simplistic, consisting primarily of rice, beans, and coffee (with sugar). Analysis of nutrient intake and comparison with international standards showed that women were probably at high risk for vitamin A, iron, calcium, ascorbic acid, and riboflavin deficiencies; children appeared at high risk for vitamin A, iron, and ascorbic acid deficiencies. Infant feeding practices indicated that all children (under 5 years) had been breast fed at birth, although many were weaned at an early age. Negative nutritional infant feeding practices were reported, especially for conditions such as fever and diarrhoea. Belief in the "hot/cold" food classification system was reported by women. Although food taboos were reported for menstruation, pregnancy, immediately post partum, and lactation, relatively few taboos had potentially negative nutritional consequences. Anthropometric assessment indicated that a significant number of women were probably undernourished; a small percentage of women, however, were overweight or obese. Children did not generally appear undernourished; many, however, were stunted in growth. Summative evaluation of the nutrition education program indicated that for women who participated in the program, nutrition knowledge scores showed improvement and were statistically significant at ∝ =.05, using Wilcoxon signed rank test. / Land and Food Systems, Faculty of / Graduate

This thesis evaluates the first three years of the Canadian Farmworkers Union ESL Crusade and the Freire-based philosophy which inspired it. Based on the author's three years of participant-observation, it pursues the following question: In the context of the union, is it possible to operate an ESL program which will both teach basic ESL and further the union's goal of organizing Punjabi farmworkers? The thesis begins by summarizing Freire's educational/ political philosophy, and continues by examining the program's context: conditions of farmwork in British Columbia, the role of CFU in improving them, and the dynamics of the Punjabi community which affect this process. This is followed by a detailed description and evaluation of the Crusade: its objectives, recruiting and training of volunteer tutors, teaching methods and materials, curriculum topics, organizing strategies, results in terms of both teaching ESL and organizing, and finally analysis of the program's limitations. The following section re-evaluates Freire's philosophy in view of three years experience in a North American setting. Key issues include the relationship between students' concerns and the union's agenda, dialogue versus banking, the complex nature of oppression for North American immigrants, the distinction between a realistic and idealistic frame of reference in operating and evaluating a program, and the importance of organizers reflecting on their own vested interests. All these issues proved salient to the daily operation of the program and have ramifications for other programs. In the course of three years, the Crusade was able to develop methods and materials which had good potential both for ESL instruction and organizing, and which approached the Freirian ideal. However, a number of limitations prevented the program from fulfilling this potential. Some of these could be overcome with changes in the Crusade's format, such as using full-time Punjabi tutors rather than Anglo volunteers. The study concludes by outlining these changes plus directions for further research. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

M.S.

In Labor, Race & Visuality in Argentina’s Sugar Industry 1868-1904 I examine the relationship between racialization and mechanization in the growing sugar industry in Argentina’s northern province of Tucuman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that the sugar industrial project yielded an important visual record which foregrounded machine labor at a time when demands on human labor reached a fever pitch. This emphasis on machine labor obscured the existing labor conditions in these industrial landscapes, which involved race-based forms of exploitation. I focus on the particular strategies (posing, framing, lighting and emplacement) that photographers and engravers used to incorporate workers into images of railroad construction sites, factories and plantations—in booster books and state reports related to the sugar industry. Reformers and state officials used these photographs to illustrate arguments that advocated the primacy of one race of worker—creole or European—over the other, and picture ideal labor conditions that contradicted the observations of critics at the time. Laborers in these photographs were often discussed in terms of their capacity for industrial labor and categorized by race. Given the interdependence between the state and private capital on this industrial project, the distinction between creole, indigenous and European workers was not only believed central to the growth of the sugar industry but also to the unity of the nation-state. The photographic and textual records, including political speeches, express the importance of race as an unstable proxy for the forms and conditions of labor. Labor, Race & Visuality in Argentina’s Sugar Industry 1868-1904 is divided into three parts, each addressing the different relationships between the state and industry. In my first chapter, “The Instruments of a New Argentina,” I focus on railway photography depicting the construction of a project intended to connect the plantations of the North to the expansive littoral market. Here I focus on how the figure of the capitalist was instrumentalized by statesmen to argue for increased immigration from Europe as a means of industrializing the nation. In the second chapter, “Beyond the Frame,” I explore the graphic documentation of the sugar industry in Tucumán to show how the representation of masses of workers heralded the mass migration of European workers to Tucumán was an ultimately failed project—creole workers predominated in the industry, and in the images the heralded masses built only to a small crowd. Finally, in “His continuous force makes him the machine,” I examine how the first state-commissioned report on the working class depicted relationships between factory workers and the new industrial machines, aestheticizing European workers through their physical proximity to machines and creole workers through their capacity for machine-like labor. Although many studies about labor and race in industrializing Argentina are historiographical and limited to particular regions, my approach is to mobilize the comparative history of visuality to situate imaginaries of capital within a national and hemispheric context. In addition, by setting my investigation in the context of the Caribbean and North America, my work compares the formation of capital across the Atlantic world and shows how these processes are key to the formation of the Argentine nation-state. By emphasizing the role of creole workers in industrial production, my dissertation challenges commonly-held focus on European immigration in narratives about industrialization and race in Argentina. My dissertation demonstrates that creole workers were in fact central to debates about industrialization and labor within the expanding Argentine nation-state, and that photography is a critical site for understanding how their role was minimized in state narratives.

This dissertation contains three essays in microeconomics. Using descriptive analyses andcausal inference techniques, it examines the role that institutions play in determining children’s human capital investments, adults’ wages, and whether older workers are independent contractors. Chapter 1 explores how children’s human capital development is affected by the interactions between automatic grade promotion, tuition reduction, and rainfall. An important feature of rural life is that children participate in farming. One consequence of this fact is that when there is increased demand for agricultural labor children are more likely to be kept out of school, lowering their human capital. When policymakers implement reforms an important consideration should be whether children’s labor supply elasticity can be affected—will increased labor demand result in them being more likely to stay out of school. Estimating these interactive effects is generally difficult because of the need for several sources of exogenous variation. This paper interacts quasi-random rainfall shocks as a shifter to the demand for child labor and two education reforms in India—automatic promotion of children to grade 8, and a large reduction in fees at government-run schools—to examine whether the policy changes interact with the demand for child labor and whether the two policy reforms interact with one another. I find that tuition reduction increases children’s elasticity of labor supply. Higher rainfall reduces test scores, but when tuition is lowered, the effect of rainfall on test scores is more negative. There are also interactive effects between social promotion and tuition elimination. For children with the average level of treatment, tuition reduction increases test scores by 7% of a standard deviation. The effect of tuition reduction is lower for children who receive an additional year of automatic promotion, only 4.7% of a standard deviation. These results demonstrate that there are interactions between child labor and education policy, which can potentially undermine any beneficial impact of reforms. Future work should examine the mechanisms behind these findings, to better understand families’ decision-making in response to changing education policy. Chapter 2 studies how firms share rents with workers, and the role of labor market institutionsin determining which workers receive rents. Firms can decide whether to produce some goods and services in-house or purchase them from the market. Increasingly, they are purchasing from the market—using subcontractors, temp agencies, and other outsourced labor. Low-wage workers’ wages decline when they are outsourced, but little is known about how outsourcing affects remaining workers. If firms are rent sharing, outsourcing might increase remaining workers’ earnings because there are more rents or fewer workers to share them with. This paper measures the impact of occupational layoff (OL) outsourcing, where firms outsource some occupations, on the earnings and separations of workers who remain employed by those firms. Using employer-employee data based on German social security records in a dynamic difference-in-differences design, outsourcing increases remaining workers’ long-run earnings by 6% in a sample of 260 OL outsourcing events. Remainers are also more likely to stay at the outsourcing firm—outsourcing decreases the probability of remainers switching firms by 7.5 percentage points. Higher earnings and fewer separations are consistent with remainers receiving additional rents. Earnings gains are larger for workers in the bottom-half of the within-firm earnings distribution. Outsourcing only increases remainers’ earnings in firms with collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). In firms with CBAs, outsourcing increases remainers’ long-term earnings by 6%. In firms without CBAs, outsourcing lowers shortterm earnings by 3%. The results are consistent with a model of wage setting where outsourcing firms with CBAs need to compensate remainers. When there is no CBA, firms do not compensate remainers and can lower their wages. Analyzing the impact of outsourcing on within-firm and overall wage inequality, a typical outsourcing event in the sample lowers the within-firm Gini index by 2.5% as low-wage workers leave the firm and low-wage remainers are compensated. Using Recentered Influence Functions, increasing the share of workers part of an outsourcing event by 10 percentage points (from a baseline of 11.7%) increases the top of the earnings distribution by approximately 1-1.5%, and the overall Gini index by 1%. Remainers are relatively high-wage, and outsourcing increases their earnings. By not accounting for this effect, prior studies likely underestimate the total impact of outsourcing on earnings inequality in Germany. Chapter 3 studies the role that labor market demand shocks play in no just whether workersare employed, but the types of contracts they are employed in, especially as they age. Independent Contracting is an employment relationship where workers have fewer legal protections relative to traditional employment. At the same time, workers in these contracts are generally hired to provide defined tasks, and cannot be controlled by their employer to the same degree as regular employees. However, little is known about why firms decide to use contractors as opposed to regular employees. In a simple framework with uncertainty and fixed costs, contracting occurs when there is a mismatch between worker and firm type—either the worker or firm can do better in the next period, so they agree to a short-term contract. Under this framework, contracting can be driven by market factors. Negative labor demand shocks have an ambiguous predicted effect on the use of contractors as (1) employees become contractors and (2) contractors become unemployed. Which effect dominates is tested using data on two negative labor demand shocks—the China Shock and the Housing Wealth Shock from the Great Recession. In both instances, negative labor demand reduces the probability that workers are independent contractors, conditional on being employed in a given industry and occupation. From a baseline of 6.9% of 18-65 year olds employed as contractors, moving from the 25th to 75th percentile of the China Shock reduces contractor probability by 0.8 percentage points, while moving from the 25th to 75th percentile of the Housing Wealth Shock reduces the probability that a worker is an independent contractor by 3.75 percentage points. These demonstrate that economic downturns reduce the overall share of contractors, suggesting that contracting is mostly used on the margin as a supplement to regular employer-employee relationships, rather than as a replacement for those relationships.

Includes bibliographies. / The central hypotheses advanced in the dissertation are: 1. Wine farmers in the Western Cape have, since the 1970s; been increasingly changing the form of labour control on their farms from co-ercive to co-optive techniques. 2. The Rural Foundation has played a key role in promoting and facilitating these changes to co-optive methods of labour control. 3. The changes to co-optive forms of labour control have resulted in corresponding changes in the form of paternalism that has characterised the relations of production in the Western Cape for the past three centuries. 4. Whilst the change to co-optive managerial techniques has improved working and living conditions for farmworkers, it has not necessarily reduced the dependency of farmworkers on the farmers, nor empowered workers. 5. Farmworkers have themselves internalised the ideology of 'enlightened' paternalism, with this ideology being fundamental in structuring their work-place behaviour. Trade unionists need to recognise this, and strategise accordingly. The empirical data that is used both to verify the fore-mentioned theoretical statements, and to provide information used in the construction of these statements, was gathered by means of interviews. Interviews were conducted with nine farmers/farm managers and 25 farmworkers from wine farms in Koelenhof, two members of both the Rural Foundation and the Food and Allied Workers Union and an organiser for the National Council of Trade Union's National Union of Wine, Spirit and Allied Workers. This empirical information is integrated into a conceptual method that draws from both the structuralist and social historian perspectives in agrarian social theory. In this sense, the discussion in both abstract and theoretical, and descriptive. Furthermore, the discussion is, at times, prescriptive, arguing that trade unions should adopt particular tactics in their attempts to defend and advance the interests of farmworkers in South Africa.

A descriptive study of the Escuela Cenpritec school was carried out between September 15, 1969 and November 15, 1969 in La Paz, Bolivia. All pertinent literature was reviewed and interviews were conducted with school and government personnel. A fine physical plant has been constructed that is well lighted and equipped. It is adequately protected by a perimeter wall and by the services of a night watchman. Classes were being conducted in the four areas of electricity, plumbing, masonry and carpentry. Few of the objectives set forth in the organizational documents were met. Classes in the construction trades were offered but subsequent employment of the graduate in his specialty was very low. Coordination of on-the-job training, or, for that matter, any other kind of construction training in the city by Cenpritec did not exist. Only one class in training for the rural worker was held and efforts to encourage his return to the rural areas were unsuccessful because job opportunities were better in the city. Training for the student was at the very basic level and no classes for specialists were ever held. Basic literacy courses did not materialize even though widespread illiteracy among the study body hindered efforts to teach the building trades. No classes in management and supervision training were held. Difficulties which surround the school were myriad. The initial feasibility study apparently was not accurate and was based upon subjective evaluation rather than statistical data. Many promises of support, financial aid and help were never fulfilled. The Board of Directors often failed to discharge its duty in the direction and administration of Cenpritec. The Peace Corps advisors failed to ensure total operation of the school in accordance with its legal documents. A breakdown in communications between USAID/Bolivia and the Peace Corps/Bolivia led to confusion regarding responsibility for the school, conditions necessary for continued financial aid, and extent of authority of the volunteer instructors. Inability or unwillingness of the Government of Bolivia to accept readily its financial responsibility for the school suggests that future funding may reach crisis proportions. A policy for the continued evaluation and observation of Cenpritec does not exist and the rapid exchange of American personnel in Bolivia has led to the responsibility for its operation being placed primarily in the hands of the Peace Corps volunteer instructors. Future successful operation of Cenpritec will depend upon a careful reassessment of its role with respect to the construction industry, a reactivation of the Board of Directors, a pledge of support from the Bolivian Government and a commitment by American officials for continued, long term supervision.