Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2006, Political Science

The purpose of this research is to explain differences in the transnational organizing strategies of U.S. trade unions. Of particular interest is the degree to which economic globalization (e.g., import competition, foreign direct investment, and multinationalization) influences the nature, scope, and priority U.S. labor unions assign to transnational organizing strategies. Toward this end, this research compares the transnational strategies of three U.S. labor unions — the United Steelworkers of America (USW), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — each of which represents a distinct sector of U.S. labor market (manufacturing, service, and professional) and experiences a different level and type of exposure to economic globalization (high, moderate, and low). Using an updated theory of labor transnationalism and primary source data, this study finds that transnational organizing strategies are highly correlated with exposure to economic globalization, particularly multinationalization in a union's core industries. At the same time, in cases where exposure to economic globalization is low, transnational strategies are better explained through intra-organizational dynamics, such as leadership ideology, membership interests, and union size. In the main, this study suggests that in order to explain differences in transnational organizing strategies, one must consider both the level and type of exposure to economic globalization, as well as organizational dynamics in cases where exposure is minimal.

Committee: John Rothgeb (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science, General

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1962, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, History

This project explores the labor history of the Appalachian region and the presence of American labor history in the museum space and in public memory. The first section is a proposal for a Museum of Appalachian Labor Action, detailing the administrative and exhibitionary organization of a museum dedicated to the labor history of the Central, North Central, and Northern Appalachia, situated in Wheeling, West Virginia. The second section, a museum exhibition design titled “The Mine Wars Experience,” attempts to tell the history of the early 20th-century labor conflict, the West Virginia Mine Wars. The final section is an essay titled “Labor in the Museum,” an overall exploration of the place American labor history occupies in the museum space and in public memory more generally.

Committee: David Steigerwald (Committee Member); David Staley (Advisor) Subjects: History; Museums

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Economics

This thesis is a collection of three chapters that study various aspects of the labor force. The first two chapters study how labor markets respond to aggregate influences, when labor market frictions interact with other market features, and a third chapter that evaluates the impact of heterogeneity in households on interest rates. In the first two chapters, I focus on how the post-recession recovery of labor market variables is affected by imperfections in the market. The first chapter investigates the role of on-the-job search in the recovery process of employment, and how labor market power can suppress wages and incentivize against on-the-job search. Labor Market power allows a small number of firms to influence wages and employment in the market, and the suppression of wages persuades workers against expending costly search effort. The second chapter focuses on how the presence of financial frictions can affect the response of labor market variables in a frictional labor market. When bank liquidity is constrained in the event of a downturn, affecting the amount of loans available to firms, firms are unable to purchase the capital input they require to complement labor. This results in firms posting fewer vacancies, and a lower matching rate for workers, which hinders the recovery of employment. The third chapter introduces discount rate heterogeneity in Huggett (1993) and Aiyagari (1994) and evaluates the impact on interest rates.

Committee: Sanjay K. Chugh (Advisor); Pok-Sang Lam (Committee Member); Kyle Dempsey (Committee Member); Julia Zhang (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics

Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2021, History

On May 23, 1866, two African American children in Christian County, Kentucky, were taken from their parents and apprenticed to a white planter, Elijah Simmons. The two children, Fannie, age eight, and Robert, age four, were expected to serve Simmons for the next thirteen and fourteen years respectively. Fannie was disabled. Denoted in her apprenticeship paper as “deaf and dumb,” the Simmonses did not have to provide for her the way they would a non-disabled child, meaning that they did not have to pay her or provide her with anything upon her release from servitude. Although her story seems in some ways unique, Fannie's case is actually noteworthy because she was so typical. Thousands of children were placed in apprenticeships that served to enslave them. This thesis explores the often-forgotten subject of Reconstruction and Black labor in a border state. Fannie serves as a reminder that the work of freedom was far from over after the Civil War, and for many freedpeople was just beginning.

Committee: Drew Swanson Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Noeleen McIlvenna Ph.D. (Committee Member); Nancy Garner Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; American History; Black History; Economic History; History

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2019, History

This dissertation is an investigation of the imperial racialized and gendered origins of surveillance culture. It is primarily an interrogation of the British Empire's methods and justifications for measures taken to maintain imperial control in the colonial Caribbean. The main subjects of this study are women that migrated from India to the Trinidad during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but their story is told within the context of the larger history of the Caribbean. This dissertation is significant because the patterns revealed extend far beyond these subjects, geographical locations, and this historical period of time. This dissertation shows how white colonialists employed racialized and gendered language in their justifications for the establishment of imperial surveillance practices. They created government systems, customs, and laws along with hegemonic attitudes of white superiority that led to unfair and unregulated discriminatory practices against individuals of color. Discussions regarding the physical, sexual, and reproductive labor of women of color dominated white colonial male discourse from the rise of the transatlantic slave system to the present day. Discriminatory language and its accompanying arguments became so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of the colonized people that, in places like the Caribbean where groups of diverse ethnic origin converged, much of that rhetoric persisted beyond the colonial era. The scope of this dissertation ends in the 1960s, just as colonies such as Jamaica and Trinidad gained their independence from Britain, and the research shows that in the power struggle for the emergent nation, men who identified as AfroCaribbean and IndoCaribbean used the same systemic racialization and gendered language to try to assert their own dominance over one another and over the female inhabitants of the region. Through an examination of mid-twentieth-century music, poetry, street fights, custom (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: A. Martin Wainwright Ph.D. (Advisor); Martha Santos Ph.D. (Committee Member); Stephen Harp Ph.D. (Committee Member); Maria Zanetta Ph.D. (Committee Member); Timothy Scarnecchia Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Caribbean Studies; European History; History; Latin American History; Modern History; Womens Studies; World History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1986, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Economics

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1922, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1946, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1967, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2008, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Sociology

This dissertation consists of three studies of worker power and economic inequality. The studies extend inequality research by assessing the impacts of worker bargaining power on two less commonly examined outcomes: household wealth and employer-provided fringe benefits. I conceptualize and measure several types of worker power, spanning marketplace and associational forms, measured at the individual, local-regional, and institutional scales. The studies broaden theories of how worker bargaining power influences the wage and income distributions to the case of wealth and fringe benefits. In the first chapter, I examine the relationship between labor union coverage and household wealth accumulation and inequality. Informed by life course theories of cumulative advantage, I develop novel measures of cumulative exposure to unionization across the career. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 Cohort (NLSY-79) and fixed-effects regression, I find that cumulative career union coverage supports wealth accumulation. This positive association is driven by the influence of union coverage on the accumulation of savings and durable assets. Unconditional quantile regression models reveal that career union coverage is more strongly associated with increases in wealth for low- and middle- than high-wealth individuals. Results suggest worker power is associated with a more equal distribution of wealth and that deunionization contributed to rising wealth inequality among this cohort. The second chapter advances research on the determinants of job quality by considering the effects of worker power on fringe benefit offers. Using uniquely comprehensive data on benefits in the NLSY-79, I leverage changes in union coverage status due to involuntary job displacements (layoffs and business closures) to estimate the effects of unionization on the number of fringe benefits made available to workers by their employers. I find that transitioning to a union job i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rachel E. Dwyer (Advisor); Stephanie Moulton (Committee Member); Vincent J. Roscigno (Committee Member); Michael Vuolo (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Geography

In Ohio, as in the rest of the country, this agricultural guestworker population is increasing every year. Also known as H-2A workers, people with this visa come to the United States every year to work in fields, orchards, and nurseries and return to their home countries at the end of the season. This dissertation uses a mixed-methods approach to understand more about H-2A workers in Ohio. I conducted exploratory research with Department of Labor data, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and designed and administered a survey to 285 H-2A workers throughout the state. The goal was to establish basic demographic information about the agricultural guestworkers in our state, learn more about how they experience their work and life here, and ultimately generate data and analyses that are useful for stakeholders who wish to improve the program.

Committee: Kendra McSweeney (Advisor); Victor Espinosa (Committee Member); Madhumita Dutta (Committee Member); Abigail Norris-Turner (Advisor) Subjects: Agriculture; Geography; Labor Relations; Latin American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2022, Theology

Widely considered the foundational document of modern papal social teaching, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum articulates a host of principles that have informed Catholic social teaching and thought through the twentieth century and beyond. Of these principles, one of the most enduring is Leo's defense of private property as a natural right. Yet, as a host of commentators have pointed out, this defense bears a striking affinity with the property theory of John Locke. Most crucially, Leo seems to assume the Lockean principle that the natural right to property derives from the act of labor. Insofar as Locke is often referred to as the “father” of classical liberalism, it seems that Leo writes one of, if not the, primary tenets of laissez-faire liberalism into papal social teaching at its foundation. Rather than challenge the general consensus concerning Locke's influence on Rerum Novarum, this dissertation argues that the “Lockean problem” extends beyond Leo's defense of private property as a “sacred and inviolable” natural right on two interrelated fronts. First, while challenging the Lockean notion of “free consent” as the sole determinate of remunerative justice, Leo's argument for a just wage terminates in a characteristically Lockean eclipse of the laborer's natural right to property. Second, Leo situates this Lockean approach to both property and remunerative labor in the insurmountable conditions of postlapsarian exile. In concert, these factors constitute the modern economic subject, the subject of labor and property, in the conditions of supernatural necessity, the postlapsarian conditions that require supernatural mediation for consolation in and deliverance from this “vale of tears.” Ultimately, this dissertation will argue that the Lockean problem underlies a coherent, though problematic, theology of labor in Rerum Novarum. At the root of this theology sits the voluntary alienation of labor under the auspices of remunerative consent. While the sor (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Vincent Miller (Committee Chair) Subjects: Theology

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1953, History

Committee: Grover C. Platt (Advisor) Subjects: History

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1953, History

Committee: Grover C. Platt (Advisor) Subjects: History

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2022, Geography (Arts and Sciences)

In this thesis, I examine determinants of Cambodia labor migration to South Korea and explore the migration experiences and post-return situations of Cambodian returned migrants from South Korea through the Employment Permit System (hereafter EPS). I also investigate how their remitted savings and acquired material markers shape their post-return activities and reintegration experiences in the country of origin, using the individual factors. To examine the determinants of their migration to South Korea, their migration experiences, post-return and reintegration activities, I conducted the in-depth semi-structured interviews with four Cambodians who had worked as the labor migrants in and had returned from South Korea prior the interview. The findings show that their return migration intention is largely shaped by the mandatory return policy of the Employment Permit System, and their saving accumulation has influenced their acquired material markers, and their post-return activities in some important ways. Although the EPS removes migrant's agency in deciding their return, the migrant workers still have some interesting agencies to decide what to do in terms of how they maintain their socio-economic ties with their country of origin, how they manage their remittance behavior and their post-return and reintegration activities and coping strategies.

Committee: Risa Whitson (Committee Member); Kim Yeong-Hyun Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Geography; Social Research

BA, Oberlin College, 2022, Economics

The United States lags far behind other developed countries in terms of preschool provision and access. Because subsidized preschool effectively serves as childcare for enrolled students, preschool policies have ramifications in the labor market; namely, whether or not parents return to work after having children. This paper investigates the only two state-wide universal pre-k programs in the country, those of Florida and Vermont. I use a synthetic controls approach in order to address the impact these programs have had on maternal labor force participation rates in each state. I find that while Vermont's pre-k policy may have produced a significant increase in maternal labor force participation, the results from Florida's policy are insignificant. This outcome suggests that differences in how the policies have been implemented drive whether or not the policy has meaningful impacts on mothers' decisions to rejoin the labor force. Vermont offers more full-day options than Florida, although both programs are only free for half-day provision; additionally, Florida offers programming for children ages 4 and up, while Vermont offers programming for children 3 and up. Finally, I suggest other routes to explore which may aid pre-k policies in making it more accessible for mothers to return to work: these include more targeted programs, more full-day options, and subsidized (rather than free) provisions.

Committee: Christopher Andrew James Cotter (Committee Chair); Paul A. Brehm (Advisor) Subjects: Early Childhood Education; Economic Theory; Economics; Education; Preschool Education

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2022, Arts and Sciences: Psychology

This thesis examines migrant workers' perceptions of their workplace, labor, and labor organizing/organizations. Ample literature details the discrimination and oppression migrant workers face in the workplace, provides overview of various forms of labor organizing, including labor unions and community-unionism, and explains the effects they have on worker wellbeing. This research sought to fill the large gap in the literature considering migrant workers' own perceptions on these topics, as well as avenues of possible action to address migrant worker discrimination. Data were gathered via semi-structured interviews with migrant workers over video calls, and interviews were analyzed utilizing Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Findings indicated that migrant workers reported some form of exploitation at their workplace, though specific manifestations vary across participants. Participants also had widely varying perceptions of labor unions, and were generally unfamiliar with worker centers and community unionism. Ways forward indicated by the participants indicate working on policy to address discrimination as well as having more information available to migrant workers in regards to labor organizing/organizations and their labor rights.

Committee: Anjali Dutt Ph.D. (Committee Member); Carlie Trott Ph.D. (Committee Member); Stacie Furst-Holloway Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Social Psychology

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2020, History

This thesis explores the relationship between the AFL-CIO and the Polish Solidarity movement throughout the 1980s. It explores the evolving international policy of the AFL-CIO as it began to support Solidarity through financial and material aid, domestic and international campaigns, and personal friendships between Solidarity and American labor leaders. The discussion begins with Solidarity's founding in August 1980 and the immediate ways the AFL-CIO supported its fledgling period through a heavy public campaign that included the creation of the Polish Workers Aid Fund. The Federation then battled the Carter Administration over the United States role in supporting Solidarity, and would continue to battle the Reagan Administration as well. The battle to support Solidarity took a critical turn when martial law was declared in Poland in 1981, and Solidarity was outlawed. By continuing to conduct a public pressure campaign, smuggling operations into Poland to give aid to Underground Solidarity, and working with the international labor community, the AFL-CIO put itself in the forefront of Solidarity's struggle against communism. That is why this thesis argues that non-state actors like the AFL-CIO played a pivotal role in causing the collapse of the Polish Communist regime, and subsequently the Iron Curtain, in 1989.

Committee: Sheldon Anderson Dr. (Advisor); Amanda McVety Dr. (Committee Member); Stephen Norris Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: East European Studies; History; Labor Relations