<p>Food safety is important to prevent foodborne illnesses that can negatively affect public health and the economy. Preventative measures can be taken by government agencies, food-related workers, and consumers to reduce the occurrence of such illnesses. This paper examines the impact of government policies on food safety from the perspective of consumers, restaurant employees and employers, and food processing workers. The first essay explores how food safety recalls affect consumer behavior. The second essay studies the impact of minimum wage policies on service quality in the restaurant industry. The third essay investigates the effect of minimum wage policies on product food safety in the meat and poultry processing industry. </p>

published_or_final_version / Urban Studies / Master / Master of Social Sciences

This is a study of women’s employment in Great Britain from 1891 to 1921 with special reference to its division from men’s. It examines, first, the occupational distribution of the nation’s labour force during the 1891-1914 period and finds a definite division between the work done by women and the work done by men. It then asks what factors underlay women’s absence from the work men did and women’s presence and men’s absence from the work women did. After answering these questions it shows and accounts for the major changes that occurred in women’s employment between the pre-First World War years of 1891 to 1914, the First World War years of 1914 to 1918, and the post-First World War years of 1914 to 1921 and considers what effect they had on the sex division of labour. Of secondary interest is the reaction of women to their own employment position. The 1891-1921 period coincides with the advance of the so-called women’s rights movement whereby women, as active agents in furthering their interests as citizens, wives, mothers, and persons, also undertook to improve their position as workers. Why was there dissatisfaction with it? What were the measures taken to better it? How effective were they? What did they signify for the division of labour? This thesis encompasses these questions as well. Descriptively this thesis sets out, in more statistical and narrative detail than has ever before been attempted for the 1891-1921 period and for Great Britain as a whole, the existence of a sex division of labour, secondly, its extensiveness, and thirdly, the position of the dividing line. Analytically it isolates the principal factors affecting the determination of what was women’s and what was men’s work. In the process it shows that any analysis that begins with the character of the supply and demand for male and for female labour as given facts cannot adequately explain the sex division as it fails to explain why sex as such appears as a differentiating factor. For this, account must be taken of how males and females were transformed into masculine and feminine persons and how masculinity and femininity as contemporaneously defined affected a person's labour attributes and, directly and indirectly, an employer’s choice of labour. Finally, this thesis, by considering women’s employment over a period of time, becomes a record of how it changed as the factors affecting its determination were modified. Moreover, by focusing attention on the contemporary developments making for change between 1891 and 1921, this thesis provides a springboard for analyzing subsequent changes in women’s employment.

The recent growth of Teach For America (TFA) has enabled it to substantially expand the teacher labour supply in many rural Southern communities, one of its largest and fastest-growing partnership subsets. Though it is generally accepted that these areas face more severe teacher shortages than most other regions in the country, there is little research as to how these staffing challenges arise or how they might be resolved; TFA’s potential to grow the rural Southern teacher supply thus signals a promising opportunity in need of further research. This work offers a case study of teacher labour outcomes in the Mississippi-Arkansas Delta, TFA’s oldest and largest rural Southern partnership site. In this region, local schools have experienced a 600 per-cent increase in corps member presence since 2008; consequently, TFA provided anywhere from a quarter to a half of the area’s new teacher labour supply each year from 2008 to 2010. A mixed-methods analysis illuminates both the causes of Delta teacher shortages and TFA’s potential to address these vacancies. Within the Delta, local schools face chronic teacher shortages because the communities they serve are overwhelmingly poor, geographically isolated, and racially segregated. TFA appears to have targeted the Delta communities where teacher labour policies have systematically fallen short, as it partners with districts bearing the greatest share of the region’s aggregate teacher vacancies. Additional statistical testing reveals that amongst these hard-to-staff districts, TFA has further focussed its resources into the schools that serve more rural, less educated, and/or predominantly African American populations. In this way, TFA funnels its corps members into the very districts where state reform efforts have struggled most, thus serving as a powerful resource for realigning ‘sticky’ outcomes in the most hard-to-staff Delta school districts. These findings notwithstanding, closer examination reveals significant drawbacks and limitations to current TFA outcomes in the rural Southern Delta. TFA does not saturate hard-to-staff school districts enough to produce statistically significant changes in local teacher vacancy rates. Instead, the programme appears to have established an unofficial threshold for the number of teachers placed per district; once this ceiling has been reached, additional corps members are funnelled into a new area regardless of the original district’s remaining need. Additionally, there is no long-term ‘exit strategy’ to help Delta districts employing TFA corps members to eventually cultivate their own high-quality teacher labour supply, thus leaving them perpetually dependent on TFA to staff their classrooms. Preliminary evidence suggests that state governments could address these shortcomings through 1) increased financial support for TFA to fully saturate vacancies in current partnership districts, as well as 2) the simultaneous development of grow-your-own teacher certification programmes in rural Delta districts. The evidence suggests that these two strategies would improve TFA as a targeted teacher recruitment strategy for hard-to-staff communities both in the Delta and across the programme’s nine other rural Southern partnership sites.

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which the laws and policies governing labour migration shape the relationship between migrant workers, employers, and labour markets in advanced industrialised countries. Specifically, it elucidates the intersections of immigration and labour market regulatory norms, structures, and processes that have salient implications for migrants’ work relations. The notions of ‘hyper-dependence’ and ‘hyper-precarity’ are developed as the main analytical and normative lenses in this thesis for examining the particular vulnerabilities associated with migrants’ precarious statuses under contemporary labour migration regimes. Hyper-dependence refers to an acute dependence that transcends the immediate context of an employment relationship, where other aspects of a worker’s life critically depend on that employer. For migrant workers, hyper-dependence may arise where their legal statuses is tethered to a specific employer sponsorship, accompanied by other de jure and de facto restrictions on their labour mobility. Hyper-precarity seeks to capture the multifaceted insecurities and uncertainties in migrants’ work relations and their broader migration projects, which are linked to their exclusion, in law and in practice, from a wide array of social, economic, and civil rights in the host state. Engaging with the various and often competing goals and concerns of immigration law and labour law, the two concepts of hyper-dependence and hyper-precarity are developed and applied through an in-depth comparative analysis of the legal and regulatory architectures of two contemporary temporary migrant workers’ programmes (TMWPs): Australia’s Temporary Work (Skilled) Subclass 457 Visa (‘457 visa’) scheme and the United Kingdom’s Tier 2 (General) visa scheme. In recent years, TMWPs in advanced industrialised countries have been touted by global and national policymakers as a desirable labour migration instrument that delivers ‘triple wins’ for host states, home states, and migrants and their families. I situate the normative concerns of the legally constructed hyper-dependence and hyper-precarity in the ethical debates on TMWPs in liberal states. I also consider how the worst extremes of the two ‘hyper’ conditions combined in highly exploitative work relations could be ameliorated, and in doing so propose some ideas for reforming key features of current TMWPs to enable migrants to exit any employment relationship and to resort to a range of voice mechanisms in the workplace.

This thesis consists of four separate chapters which address different aspects of inequality and income determination. The first three chapters are country-level studies which examine (1) how incomes are shaped by spatial price differences, (2) the factor income composition, and (3) enterprise size. The final chapter analyses how income inequality changed at the global level. The first chapter investigates the implications of regional price differences for earnings differentials and inequality in Germany. I combine a district-level price index with administrative earnings data from social security records. Prices have a strong equalising effect on district average wages in West Germany, but a weaker effect in East Germany and at the national level. The change in overall inequality as a result of regional price differences is small (although significant in many cases), because inequality is mostly explained by differences within rather than between districts. The second chapter is motivated by the rapid increase in top income shares in the United States since the 1980s. Using data derived from tax filings, I show that this pattern is very similar after controlling for changes in tax unit size. Over the same period as top income shares increased, the composition of these incomes changed dramatically, with the labour share rising. Using a non-parametric copula framework, I show that incomes from labour and capital have become more closely associated at the top. This association is asymmetric such that top wage earners are more likely to also receive high capital incomes, compared with top capital income recipients receiving high wages. In the third chapter, I investigate the positive cross-sectional relationship between enterprise size and earnings using panel data from Ghana. I find evidence for a significant firm size effect in matched firm-worker data and a labour force panel, even after controlling for individual fixed effects. The size effect in self-employment is stronger in the cross-section, but it is driven by individual time-invariant characteristics. The final chapter studies the global interpersonal income distribution using a newly constructed and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. The chapter finds that the global Gini remains high and approximately unchanged at around 0.7. However, this hides a substantial change in the global distribution from a twin-peaked distribution in 1988 into a single-peaked one now. Furthermore, the regional composition of the global distribution changed, as China graduated from the bottom ranks. As a result of the growth in Asia, the poorest quantiles of the global distribution are now largely from Sub-Saharan Africa. By exploiting the panel dimension of the dataset, the analysis shows which decile-groups within countries have benefitted most over this 20-year period. In addition, the chapter presents a preliminary assessment of how estimates of global inequality are affected by the likely underreporting of top incomes in surveys.

In this thesis, I draw on the particular experiences of Indian hi-tech immigrants arriving in a growing Canadian technological cluster, the Waterloo Region, located in south-western Ontario. This bilateral pattern of international labour migration between India and Canada reflects both nationsʼ efforts to enhance their economic competitiveness in a global knowledge economy: India as a global exporter and Canada as an importer of knowledge professionals. The stereotypical association of Indian nationals with technology work brings both restrictions and opportunities for Indian hi-tech immigrants navigating a racialised as well as gendered technology labour market in the Waterloo Region. My main aim is to reveal a microcosm of gendered negotiations involving individual economic migrants, their skilled spouses, their employers and the welfare state, particularly in the guise of officials regulating migration and access to childcare. The complex set of individual behaviours, ideologies, attitudes and practices all contribute to the emergence and maintenance of, as well as challenges to, particular gendered divisions of productive and reproductive work among these new entrants to Canada, as they lose the significant employment, social and familial networks and supports that typically are available in India. These Indian newcomer families view their responsibilities to their family to be as significant as their engagement in the Canadian labour market, as well as the advancement of their individual careers. In practice, however, familial responsibilities remain a more significant aspect of womenʼs lives, reproducing gendered divisions of both paid and unpaid work that mirror traditional gender roles and ideologies. The labour market participation of this particular group of Indian hi-tech immigrants, and especially professional immigrant mothers, is limited by the non-recognition of foreign credentials and cultural and/or racial discrimination but perhaps to an even greater extent by the lack of sufficient provisions for reproductive work under Canadaʼs liberal welfare state.

This thesis consists of a short introduction and three self-contained analytical chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the question of learning gaps and divergence in achievement across countries. I use unique child-level panel data from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam to ask at what ages do gaps between different populations emerge, how they increase or decline over time, and what the proximate determinants of this divergence are. I document that learning gaps between the four countries are already evident at the age of 5 years and grow throughout the age trajectory of children, preserving country ranks from 5 to 15 years of age. At primary school age, the divergence between Vietnam and the other countries is largely accounted for by substantially greater learning gains per year of schooling. Chapter 2 focuses on learning differences between private and government school students in India. I present the first value-added models of learning production in private and government schools in this context, using panel data from Andhra Pradesh. I examine the heterogeneity in private school value-added across different subjects, urban and rural areas, medium of instruction, and across age groups. Further, I also estimate private school effects on children's self-efficacy and agency. I find modest or insignificant causal effects of attending private schools in most test domains other than English and on children's academic self-concept and agency. Results on comparable test domains and age groups correspond closely with, and further extend, estimates from a parallel experimental evaluation. Chapter 3 uses panel data from the state of Andhra Pradesh in India to estimate the impact of the introduction of a national midday meal program on anthropometric z-scores of primary school students, and investigates whether the program ameliorated the deterioration of health in young children caused by a severe drought. Correcting for self-selection into the program using a non-linearity in how age affects the probability of enrollment, we find that the program acted as a safety net for children, providing large and significant health gains for children whose families suffered from drought.

Garment sector trade unions have proved largely powerless to combat hypermobile transnational capital’s systematic extraction of surplus value from the newly industrialized Global South. Optimized conditions for accumulation coupled with the 2005 phase-out of the Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA) have meant a radical geographic reconfiguration of the globalised garment industry heavily in favour of capital over labour. The thesis approaches the global garment sector from multiple vantage points across the world with the goal of uncovering the obstacles to workers' organisation, examine workers' strategies of resistance, and analyse the changing composition of labour and capital within the clothing commodity chain. The thesis highlights five distinct but interconnected case studies including a transnational workers campaign from a garment factory in Honduras; a history and present-day feasibility of establishing a transnational collective bargaining from El Salvador to Turkey to Cambodia; the prospects for a countermovement in the organizing strategies at the bottom of the clothing commodity and supply chain in Bangalore; the growth of a 'full package' denim manufacturer in changing the relationship between 'buyers' and 'suppliers' on the outskirts of Bangalore; and finally a continuation of this analysis the case of a strike at a monopoly footwear supplier in China. The central research question is: How do workers build power and establish workers' rights in the globally hypermobile garment sector? Ultimately, what is demonstrated within this thesis is that the actions of garment workers shaped and circumscribed the actions of capital in the sector, and as capital transformed new landscapes for accumulation new vistas for opposition begin to emerge.

This dissertation consists of three articles on social assistance benefit receipt dynamics in European countries. The first article presents an analysis of state dependence in benefit receipt in Germany based on annual survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The observation period extends from 1995 to 2011, thus covering the 2005 'Hartz reforms'. I estimate a series of dynamic random-effects probit models to control for observed and unobserved heterogeneity and the endogeneity of initial conditions. The high observed state dependence has a substantial structural component, with benefit receipt one year ago being associated with an increase in the likelihood of receipt today by 13 percentage points. There is only little evidence for time-variation in state dependence. The second article presents evidence on spell durations and the frequency of repeat spells using monthly administrative data from Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. In the two Nordic countries, short-term benefit receipt is the norm, with only around 6&percnt; and 11&percnt; of spells in Norway and Sweden lasting longer than 12 months. Most recipients however have multiple spells. In Luxembourg and the Netherlands, long-term benefit receipt is frequent, with median spell durations of 14 and 9 months, respectively, and one-third and one-quarter of all spells lasting 24 months or longer. The total duration of benefit receipt across spells is much higher in the Netherlands and Luxembourg than in Norway and Sweden. The third article tests the validity of one of the central assumptions of dynamic discrete-choice models of benefit dynamics, the conditional Markov property. Using monthly administrative data from Norway, the article shows that the Markov property is violated as estimated state dependence is affected by the chosen time unit of analysis. The standard model can be improved by permitting for different entry and persistence equations and duration and occurrence dependence in benefit receipt.