| Description |
These three essays investigate how labor market outcomes in the US labor market, including discrimination in hiring decisions, the structure of the labor market, and wage inequality, are contextualized and influenced by the interaction between culture, institutions, and the labor market competition. The first essay explores the interconnection between ethnic/racial/gender conflict in the labor market and the consumer choice of servants by race, sex, and ethnicity in the domestic servant market. We find that in 1870 in San Francisco, wealthy White households showed a renewed preference for White female servants over Chinese. Controlling for wealth, immigrant Whites revealed a preference for coreligionists while native-born Whites were more tolerant of Chinese servants. Thus, households coming from ethnic groups that more directly confronted Chinese in the overall labor market were less inclined to hire Chinese as servants. This suggests that hiring preferences in the domestic servant market were shaped to some extent by competitive pressures and conflicts in the labor market. The second essay turns to the US construction industry to study how collective action, institutions, and regulations can create and maintain "good jobs" in a turbulent industry. Without regulation and collective actions, market pressure and uncertainty will incentivize contractors to use precarious labors. On the contrary, through collective bargaining and other regulations, the turbulence in the construction industry is mitigated iv collectively, and a group of workers is better attached to a group of signatory contractors. The stability for union workers also incentivizes unions to organize apprenticeship programs to invest human capital in the industry. All of these factors create good jobs in the construction industry. The last essay builds on the discussion of unions in the second one and further investigates how the decline of construction unions, which focus on providing labor skills for the industry, will influence the wage inequality. The finding of this essay shows that the decline of construction unions will decrease wage inequality, but in other industries, such effect is positive. This conclusion suggests that the literature about the influence of unions on wage distribution needs to consider the specialty of unions in different industries. |
