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  • Title: Immigration, gender and the process of occupational change in the United States, 1970-1980.
    Author: Tienda M, Jensen L, Bach RL.
    Journal: Int Migr Rev; 1984; 18(4 Special Issue):1021-44. PubMed ID: 12340227.
    Abstract:
    Since World War II, the industrial shifts from agriculture to services have transformed the nature of employment opportunities in the US and generally resulted in occupational upgrading. This reorganization of occupations, which continued into the 1970s, has reduced the proportion of workers employed in the least skilled manual jobs. The most important result of this trend is that immigrant women--in fact women and men-- experienced both an improvement and deterioration in their occupational position. While the national pattern involved a decrease in relative employment of native workers as laborers and farm laborers, immigrant women increased their share of these jobs. Immigrant men moved into 4 occupational categories largely being abandoned by native-born workers--jobs as operatives, service workers, laborers and farm laborers. The shift of immigrant women into laborer jobs was made possible through changes in the organization of work within industries, rather than a change in the availability of the types of employers needing them. The well-advertised promise of employment in new growth industries, such as electronics, and the expansion of jobs requiring greater skills, is not uniformly available to all groups of women. Thus, jobs requiring few skills and offering few opportunities for advancement are usually filled by migrant ethnic workers, particularly women, who also lack leverage for demanding and securing higher status positions. The combination of the relative increase in the proportion of immigrant men and women in the least skilled manual jobs left behind by native-born workers, and the apparent concentration of specific national origin groups in these jobs, renders this important segment of the labor market clearly identifiable on political and ethnic ground. It also contributes to the understanding of the on-going debate as to whether immigrant workers displace or complement native work force.
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