Thesis--New York University. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-61).

Thesis--Columbia University. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-153).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 149-156). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb 16, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Dissertation advisor: Dr. Joseph Bien. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

On July 2, 1964, the members of the all-black Independent Metal Workers Local 2 at the Hughes Tool Company in Houston, Texas struck a major blow for the rights of black workers by securing an order from the National Labor Relations Board prohibiting their employer and all-white IMW Local 1 from practicing racial discrimination in union membership policies and in company contracts. The NLRB decision set a national precedent in favor of racial equality in industrial employment. It was the culmination of three decades of effort by black oil and steel workers in and around Houston to use the institutions of organized labor – unions, federal labor agencies, and labor law – to secure substantive economic gains and equality of opportunity, rights, and treatment at work. The long fight against employment discrimination in Houston met opposition both from employers and from white workers reluctant to surrender their positions of marginal privilege. It also split the city’s black community on the labor question. Groups of black workers, civil rights activists, lawyers, and community leaders battled over fundamental issues of strategy and over the proper relationship between black workers and the labor movement, their white counterparts, and employers. There were two broad factions: one committed to a social democratic vision of working class advance through the biracial unions of the CIO, the other mistrustful of white workers and labor leaders, favorably disposed towards employers, and dedicated to promoting black self-determination and autonomy through “independent” labor organizations. Drawing upon the records of unions, the NAACP, and the federal labor bureaucracy, as well as Houston’s black newspapers, this dissertation pays particular attention to the many mid-level organizers and activists involved in union campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s and charts the turn towards the courts and the NLRB in the 1950s and 1960s as black workers disappointed with the labor movement fought to secure their rights. In doing so, it aims both to explore the relationship between black workers and organized labor and to assess the strengths and shortcomings of biracial movements, democratic institutions, and the law as means for promoting equality. / text

No description available.

This dissertation consists of three essays in the area of Labor Economics.

This dissertation consists of three essays which combine studies of Industrial Organization and Labor Economics to investigate how institutions, like the intellectual property regime and funded R&D affect the production of patents and engineering degrees. Also occupational mobility in engineers is investigated as a source of additional supply of engineers. In the last two decades there have been significant changes in the interpretation of patent-law in the U.S. Most important for this study, software became a 'patentable subject matter' by 1995. Since 1995 the number of software patents has increased annually at an approximate rate of 15%. In the first essay I examine the impact of this treatment of property rights in patents, with the help of a self-compiled data set that matches firms' patent-portfolios with their financial variables, for the period 1986--2001. The last two essays examine the labor markets and the development of human capital in the engineering profession. I first model the annual production of engineers at the three degree levels (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) and four engineering sub-fields over the time period of 1970--1998. Unlike previous models, I disaggregate R&D by the two main performing groups: industry and university. Industry performed R&D is treated as a demand-side variable, while university performed R&D is treated as a supply side variable, through its impact on funding for higher education in engineering. Distributed lags of R&D spending are used as indicators of the extent of long-run opportunities in engineering. Starting salaries are interpreted as indicators of spot labor market conditions for newly minted degrees. A system of equations, models the number of engineering degrees at one degree-level as a potential applicant pool for the next higher degree-level. The availability of foreign students in the applicant pool is also accounted for. One of the major worries in engineering training is the extent to which the number of engineers in subfields in engineering will be mismatched with the demand for engineers in these subfields. Parts of the second and the entire third essay further examine mobility of engineers across engineering sub-fields. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This dissertation aims at enhancing the knowledge about dual job holding. While most studies in labor economics assume that each person holds only one job, a significant part of the work force holds two jobs simultaneously. The first part of the dissertation empirically analyzes the determinants of wages for dual jobholders, with an emphasis on the contribution of the "on the job" human capital accumulation. In order to increase the number of observations, data from 1990 to 1994 have been pulled together, thus resulting in a panel. The usual problem associated with panel data, together with the need to control for the selection bias, makes the full information maximum likelihood estimation very challenging. New econometric techniques developed by Wooldridge (Journal of Econometrics, 1995) and Vella and Verbeek (Journal of Econometrics, 1999) are used to overcome this problem. We found some evidence that the motivation behind the decision to hold two jobs may play an important role in determining the market return of moonlighting. Given the results of the first study, I explore the motivations that induce workers to hold two jobs and I explicitly design a labor supply function that includes these different motivations. I identify two major motivations: I call the first motivation the "hours constraint model". The hours constraint model says that workers underemployed will seek a second job in order to fulfill the gap in their work schedule. Yet, some workers may decide to hold two jobs simply because each job has some peculiar characteristics that makes it appealing to the worker. I call this motivation the "job portfolio model". The last part of the dissertation looks at the impact of hours regulation on the decision to hold two jobs. The understanding of this relationship is important in order to address the real impact of time-sharing policies on reducing unemployment. By enforcing stricter working week standards, labor policies aim at creating new jobs by inducing employers to shift from an intensive to and extensive use of workers. However I found that reducing the working week causes some workers to be underemployed, thus increasing the number of moonlighters.