Occupational Human Capital and Wages: The Role of Skills Transferability Across Occupations

This paper examines the effect of accumulated human capital, and particularly occupational human capital, on the workers’ wages. Unlike previous studies that apply occupational tenure as a proxy for occupational human capital, this paper applies the concept of Shaw’s (1984) occupational human capital to capture the transferability of occupational skills and estimates a new measure of occupational human capital, so-called occupational investment. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) from 1979 to 2000, the key findings of this paper suggest that occupational skills from the previous jobs can also affect the workers’ wages at the current job and that occupational investment is one of the important sources of wages supporting the Shaw’s original work on wage determination. Specifically, 5 years of (3-digit) occupational investment relative to current occupational tenure could lead to a wage increase of 7.7 to 18.4 %. I also find that the general labor market experience accounts for a large share of workers’ wages.     

Occupational Status of Rural Outmigrants and Return Migrants1

Abstract This research analyzes the occupational status payoffs to short-term outmigration and return migration for male workers in a developing country. Using an occupational status model that integrates explanations from the status attainment and migration literatures and longitudinal data from the Philippine Migration Survey, the results show that both outmigrants and return migrants have lower occupational prestige scores than nonmigrants. Regression standardization and decomposition analyses reveal that while rural outmigrants are positively selected on socioeconomic characteristics compared with nonmigrants, their lower occupational prestige scores are largely because their prior farming and fishing occupational experiences does not properly prepare them for the urban labor market Return migrants' lower occupational status scores are due to negative selection on socioeconomic characteristics.     

Occupational Level and the Love of Money

Abstract

As an alternative to the embourgeoisement hypothesis, Goldethorpe, et al., have advanced the notion that the modern working class is privatized in social relations and money-oriented in culture. The present paper addresses itself to this latter point of money-orientedness. Presenting data from a 1973 national survey, the findings support the idea that semi-skilled and unskilled workers place a greater emphasis on money than do other occupational levels. Differences in emphasis on the importance of money are not explained when income is used as a covariate. A part of these differences is explained by education. When both education and income are controlled, differences between occupational levels vanish except for the difference between the semiskilled/unskilled and all other levels. The findings tend to support Form's hypothesis of the ‘internal stratification of the working class” with increasing industrialization.     

Temporary Skilled Migration to Australia: Employers' Perspectives1

With the 1996 introduction of a new visa making it easier for employers to sponsor skilled foreign workers, temporary skilled migration has become a significant component of international migration flows to Australia. This paper examines employers' reasons for sponsoring skilled workers from abroad, their modes of recruitment, the occupational skills they require, and their industry profile. We also discuss issues relating to the perception of a shortage of skilled workers, the extent that sponsoring foreign workers substitutes for investing in local training, and the role of networks in recruiting overseas workers. Many employers' now have a global view of labour recruitment. While this is understandable for multinational companies with global operations, many small businesses and public sector institutions are adopting the same strategy to obtain skilled labour which they say is in short supply in Australia. With the internationalization of the Australian economy, there is also an increasing demand for people with specialized skills and knowledge that is not available in Australia's relatively small labour market. An understanding of the demand factors motivating temporary skilled migration is crucial to effectively managing Australia's migration and labour trends.     

Occupational Sex Segregation and Part‐time Work in Modern Britain

It is often argued that women's full‐time work is becoming less gender segregated, while their part‐time work becomes more so. This article looks cross‐sectionally and longitudinally at the relationship between occupational sex segregation and part‐time work. An innovative application of segregation curves and the Gini index measures segregation between women full‐timers and men and between women part‐timers and men. Both fell between 1971 and 1991, as did overall occupational sex segregation. These results were used to contextualize a longitudinal analysis showing how shifts between full‐time and part‐time hours affected women's experiences of occupational sex segregation and vertical mobility. Human capital explanations see full‐time and part‐time workers as distinct groups whose occupational choices reflect anticipated family roles. The plausibility of this emphasis on long‐term strategic planning is challenged by substantial and characteristic patterns of occupational mobility when women switch between full‐time and part‐time hours. The segmented nature of part‐time work meant that women who switched to part‐time hours, usually over child rearing, were often thrown off their occupational path into low‐skilled, feminized work. There was some ‘occupational recovery’ when they resumed full‐time work.     

Sociodemographic Determinants of Occupational Risks of Exposure to COVID‐19 in Canada

The activities performed by Canadian workers in some occupations may increase the risk of exposure to infectious diseases such as COVID‐19. This research note explores how occupational exposure risks vary by labor force characteristics using publicly available Canadian data in combination with a data set providing information on the level of physical proximity and frequency of exposure to infections or diseases faced by workers in different occupations. The results show important sociodemographic differences. First, women work in occupations associated with significantly higher average risks of exposure to COVID‐19 than men. This is driven by their overrepresentation in high‐risk broad occupational categories such as health occupations. Second, older workers (65 years or more), a group vulnerable to COVID‐19, appear to work in occupations requiring performing activities characterized by a lower level of physical proximity than their younger colleagues, with minimal differences in the frequency of exposure to diseases or infections. Finally, workers in low‐income occupations are employed in occupations that put them at greater risk of exposure to COVID‐19 than other workers. This is especially the case for women, immigrants, and members of visible minority groups in low‐income occupations. More broadly, this research note provides insights into the health‐related dimension of the literature on occupational tasks and labor market stratification.     

Occupational stress and social work

This article describes a research project exploring occupational stress within social work. This includes a literature search and an empirical study via a questionnaire within a Social Services department in South Wales in 1998. The results indicate that the majority of the respondents were experiencing differing levels of stress. Demographic details, support received, job satisfaction, effects on service provision and strategies to combat stress are identified. Implications from the results are used to indicate recommendations for further development of support and help for social workers, including, pointers for social work educators. Ideas for future research are included.     

Not <Emphasis Type="Italic">Merely</Emphasis> TLC: Nurses’ Caring Revisited

The profession and practice of nursing has been studied from quite diverse scholarly perspectives in the United States and abroad. Feminist critiques focus on the gendering of caring and its knowledge/skill features, while professionalization advocates view emotive caring as secondary to other critical activities necessary for the occupational advancement of nursing. Based on ethnographic observations 30 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nurses across different units working at a large urban hospital, this paper examines how nurses define caring as knowledge-based, skilled work. Specifically, nurses described four types of skills—observational, analytical, interactional, and comforting—that they deploy in the accomplishment of caring work at the bedside. My findings go beyond previous literature in this area by showing how nurses think of caring work in line with occupational strategies that emphasize their biomedical knowledge and diagnostic skills and uphold an advocacy or intermediary role in health care. I argue that while this ideological work may reassure nurses of their professional identity and critical role in health care, it may also reinforce the dilemma of nurse professionalization by obscuring the organizational nature of caring, as it remains an unsupported dimension of their work.     

The Occupational Cost of Being Illegal in the United States: Legal Status,Job Hazards,and Compensating Differentials

Considerable research and pervasive cultural narratives suggest that undocumented immigrant workers are concentrated in the most dangerous, hazardous, and otherwise unappealing jobs in U.S. labor markets. Yet, owing largely to data limitations, little empirical work has addressed this topic. Using data from the 2004 and 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we impute legal status for Mexican and Central American immigrants and link their occupations to Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) data on occupational fatalities and occupational hazard data from the U.S. Department of Labor to explore racial and legal status differentials on several specific measures of occupational risk. Results indicate that undocumented workers face heightened exposure to numerous dimensions of occupational hazard – including higher levels of physical strain, exposure to heights, and repetitive motions – but are less exposed than native workers to some of the potentially most dangerous environments. We also show that undocumented workers are rewarded less for employment in hazardous settings, receiving low or no compensating differential for working in jobs with high fatality, toxic materials, or exposure to heights. Overall, this study suggests that legal status plays an important role in determining exposure to job hazard and in structuring the wage returns to risky work.     

Education,Skills, and Wage Gaps in Canada and the United States

We analyse data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies to reveal that immigrants in Canada and the United States make over $200 less per month than native‐born workers. In the United States, immigrants disproportionately work in low‐wage occupations, leading to large mean national differences between immigrants and native workers. The wage differential disappears after accounting for education and cognitive skills, indicating policies must focus on reducing education and skill gaps in the United States. In Canada, an immigrant wage gap persists in nearly all occupational fields, suggesting that the better skilled and educated immigrants in Canada are not receiving the same wage premium as native workers. We close with implications for policy and future research.     

OCCUPATIONAL GROWTH AND THE EXPANSION OF EDUCATIONALLY-RELATED EARNING GAPS

I develop an argument that facilitates understanding of how occupational growth impinges on the relationship between education and earnings. Much of the literature focuses on workers employed at the ends of the occupational hierarchy, whereas my contribution applies to workers positioned all along the occupational hierarchy. I argue that an undersupply of affordable, suitable labor in expanding occupations encourages a division of labor among workers who vary in educational attainment. This division of labor, in turn, leads to greater educationally-related earnings inequality—even among workers who hold similar positions in the occupational hierarchy. Such a development can become pervasive because expanding occupations exist throughout the occupational hierarchy and because educational attainment among workers varies within most occupations. In declining occupations, a different set of conditions pervades, and these conditions facilitate employers' efforts to control their wage-bill by compressing educationally-related earning gaps. A hypothesis is derived from these arguments and tested on a nationally representative sample. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis, suggesting the arguments considered here help explain how the relationship between education and earnings is influenced by whether workers are employed in expanding or in declining occupations. Consequently, this research improves our understanding of how earnings inequality among individuals is linked to structural transformations in the economy.     

Occupational Prestige Hierarchy: Methodological Artifact or Cultural Category System

Occupational prestige findings are among the most stable, replicable findings in all of sociology. Yet, the “cognitive reality” underlying these findings has never been clearly established. Based on the responses provided by students to three questionnaires and comparative data from the more recent NORC study of occupational prestige, the research described in this paper investigates two hypotheses: 1) the occupational rankings resulting from the five‐point scale used in the NORC studies reflect highly differentiated evaluations in the minds of respondents; and 2) occupational prestige rankings form a unidimensional scale. Both of these hypotheses were supported. Not only is the occupational prestige hierarchy highly differentiated in the minds of individuals, it is predominantly a single dimension about which there is substantial agreement. The implications of these findings are briefly discussed.     

Career Adaptability and Occupational Engagement of Student Veterans

This study examined the specific career‐related behaviors of career adaptability and occupational engagement among student veterans (N = 100). Contrary to expectations, findings showed statistically significant negative correlations between career adaptability resources (control, concern, curiosity, and confidence) and occupational engagement. Multiple regression analyses indicated that the curiosity resource of career adaptability significantly predicted occupational engagement. The findings suggest a need to understand the complexity of career adaptability and occupational engagement in both research and practice for student veterans.     

Occupational Destinations and Economic Mobility of Filipino Overseas Workers1

This study examines employment and occupational shifts experienced by Filipino overseas contract workers in the transition from country of origin to country of destination and examines the impact of labor migration on economic conditions and standard of living of the families left behind. Data for the analyses were obtained from a representative sample of 2,346 households drawn from four primary sending areas in the Philippines. The analyses focus on characteristics of the households and of the household members employed overseas. The findings reveal that a considerable number of overseas workers (both men and women) were unemployed prior to migration and that the overwhelming majority of these workers were recruited to fill low‐status (manual and service) occupations in the host country. The analysis demonstrates that the odds for Filipino overseas workers to be employed in low‐status occupations were extremely high, net of human capital characteristics, net of the occupations they held in the Philippines, and net of country of destination. Further analysis reveals that overseas employment is associated with a substantial increase in earnings (five‐fold for men and four‐fold for women). Comparison between households with and without overseas workers reveals that, net of household characteristics, the flows of income earned abroad are used to purchase household goods to improve standard of living. These findings provide firm support to expectations derived from the household theory of migration according to which labor migration is a strategy adopted by the household unit to allocate family resources rationally to increase the flows of income in order to raise the family standard of living.     

Immigration and the Wages of Native Workers: Spatial versus Occupational Approaches

Using data from the Current Population Survey, we study the impact of the increasing proportion of immigrants on the wages of native workers. Two different approaches are contrasted. The most common method has been the spatial approach that uses some geographic unit of analysis to investigate the multivariate association between the proportion of immigrants and the wages of native workers. Previous studies using the spatial approach have generally found little evidence of a significant negative effect. We propose, however, a contrasting method that represents an occupational approach in which occupations are the unit of analysis to investigate the impact of the proportion immigrant. This occupational approach avoids the bias that is inherent in the spatial approach due to the endogenous nature of immigrants' decisions about where to reside and the economic opportunities of local areas. In contrast to the spatial approach, our results using the same data but employing the occupational approach yield consistently negative net effects of the proportion immigrant on the wages of native workers during the period from 1994 to 2006.     

Occupational Engagement and Academic Major Satisfaction: Vocational Identity's Mediating Role

This study examined vocational identity as a mediator of the relationship between occupational engagement (i.e., participation in a breadth of activities and interactions) and academic major satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors evaluated whether satisfaction with academic major related to academic success (i.e., grade point average). The mediational model was tested in a sample of undergraduate students (N = 215). Results indicated that occupational engagement significantly predicted academic major satisfaction and that vocational identity fully mediated that relationship. These findings support occupational engagement as an important contributor to adaptive career decision making and encourage research on occupational engagement as an intervention point for career counselors.     

Social Workers' Role in Promoting Occupational Health and Safety

Workplace safety and prevention of on-the-job illness and injury is an area of concern to all workers and their families. Effective practice with individuals, families, groups and community organizations must integrate an awareness of the historical, social and political dimensions of the field of occupational health and safety with assessment and treatment of psychosocial problems emanating from hazardous workplace and environmental conditions.     

EMPLOYER SPONSORED MEDICAL BENEFITS: The Influence of Occupational Characteristics and Gender

This research investigates gender differences in employer-sponsored medical fringe benefits: health insurance, dental insurance, sick leave, life insurance, and eye care coverage. Using data from a nationally representative sample of workers in the United States, human capital and structural theoretical approaches are drawn upon to explain the receipt of these benefits. The data suggest (a) men were more likely than women to receive each medical benefits from their employer; (b) occupational conditions largely account for the gender differences in coverage; (c) structural conditions of the occupation were more likely to predict the receipt of employer-sponsored medical benefits than were human capital attributes; (d) hazardous working conditions were not compensated for with medical benefits, with the exception of eye care coverage; and (e) gender did influence the relationship between several occupational conditions and benefit coverage.     

Occupational mobility and wealth evolution in a model of educational investment with credit market imperfections

We study the implications of individual heterogeneity for occupational mobility and the evolution of wealth distribution. These issues are investigated within a model of occupational choice with credit market imperfections and local non convexities in educational investment. Whether and under which conditions private wealth accumulation leads to the elimination of the effects of credit market imperfections is also studied. In the cases where steady states feature wealth and occupational mobility we show that private wealth accumulation cannot eliminate the effects of credit market imperfections if, at any point in time, investment correlates with wealth within households in the skilled occupation. Persistence of wealth constraints in the economy with occupational mobility motivates our exploration of policies. Compared to the case of homogeneous ability, we show that heterogeneity requires more persistent policies to achieve similar results in terms of enhanced investment opportunities and income per capita. It is also shown that the scope for policies is larger under heterogeneity: policies can be effective in environments where they would fail in a world of homogeneous abilities.