Thesis advisor: Heather Cox Richardson / Between the 1850s and World War II, millions of workers participated in a system of continuous labor migration that drove the development of the Pacific Northwest. Western industries relied on short-term workers because of their seasonal and economic cycles. These industries were often located far from urban centers and thus relied on a highly mobile pool of North American, European, and Asian workers to turn the Northwest’s abundant natural resources into wealth, an arrangement I call the footloose labor system. In order to manage workers’ movement within and across United States borders, employers turned to immigrant labor contractors and employment agencies to bring order to this chaotic labor market. But those agencies did little to settle the high labor turnover, and instead, exerted increasing control over migrant workers. By the mid-twentieth century, white workers had largely risen out of the system, leaving migrant labor to Asian, and increasingly, Latinx workers who have come to represent “migrant workers” in today’s America.This dissertation argues that the presence of both hobos and Asian workers in the footloose labor system dynamically shaped the conditions of the labor market, and together, cemented a racialized migrant labor system in the Pacific Northwest that would come to be dominated by Latinx workers in the second half of the twentieth century. Placing labor migration—and the labor brokers who engineered the footloose labor system—at the center of the story shifts our perspective to see that hobos and Asian immigrant workers existed in the same labor market dominated by employers who relied on footloose workers. From the point of Northwestern employers and labor brokers, migrant workers, whether they were born in Kansas, Greece, China, or the Philippines, proved useful only if they made a business profitable. Employers continued to hire both white and Asian workers through labor brokers into the 1920s. But white migrant workers increasingly sought jobs outside of the footloose labor system as new technology in agriculture reduced the number of available jobs and post-World War I politics put a greater emphasis on homeownership and conformity. White workers' departure left the most precarious and exploitative jobs to Japanese, Filipinx and eventually Latinx workers. The footloose labor system always depended upon a highly mobile pool of workers who were kept on the fringes of society to do the difficult, cheapened, and necessary work of turning natural resources into wealth. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Temporary contracts: exposition and criticThe contract of term or fixed term or determined period constitutes one of the most frequent modalities of so-called atypical contracting. EfrénCórdova, in his famous presentation at XI World Congress of the International Society for Labor Law and Social Security (Caracas 1985), noted that, being typical the contract celebrated between an employer and a worker, to be executed to full time at the center of work and for an indefinite atypicalperiod, comes to be one that lacks any of these attributes, this is: (i) in which involves more than one employer, or (ii) the journey is partial or doesn’t fit to traditional parameters of eight hours per day and forty-eight a week at most, or (iii) performs out the usual local, or (iv) is for adefined time. It is about these lasts that is dedicated the present article. / El contrato a término o plazo fijo o de duración determinada constituye una de las modalidades más frecuentes de la llamada contratación atípica.Efrén Córdova, en su célebre ponencia en el XI Congreso Mundial de la Sociedad Internacional de Derecho del Trabajo y de la Seguridad Social (Caracas 1985), señaló que, siendo típico el contrato celebrado entre un empleador y un trabajador, para ser ejecutado a jornada completa en el centro de trabajo de aquel y por tiempo indefinido, atípico viene a ser aquél quecarece de alguno de esos atributos, esto es: (i) en el que participa más de un empleador, o (ii) la jornada es parcial o no se ajusta a los parámetros clásicos de ocho horas por día y cuarenta y ocho a la semana como máximo, o (iii) se desempeña fuera del local habitual, o (iv) es por tiempo definido.Es a estosúltimos que está dedicado el presente artículo.