The servicing of America: Political economy and service work in postwar Southern California

This dissertation charts and analyzes the history of low-wage service work in the postwar United States, focusing on Southern California. In so doing, it contributes to a variety of subjects in postwar American historiography, ranging from labor history, to the history of gender and the family, to immigration, to urban redevelopment. I argue that in the decades following World War II, capital investment strategies, industrial and agricultural automation, residential dispersal, changes in the social organization of the family, and state urban redevelopment, labor, and immigration policy combined to produce the most profound transformation in how Americans worked since industrialization. The result was an explosion in low-wage jobs in hospitality, janitorial, and health care industries, jobs in which Americans no longer produced tangible commodities. This shift in how people worked rippled through American life. It undermined the political and cultural power of organized labor and diminished class as a dominant category in American politics and society. It provided the social and economic backdrop for both California and national political debate surrounding undocumented immigration after 1965. As this shift was characterized by a rapid integration of women into the workforce, it profoundly transformed the economic and social relationships of America's households. Several key features of postwar American society come into sharper focus as a result of my approach, including the commodification of household labor previously viewed as outside the purview of the market, the politics of privatization, the evolving linkage between specific types of service work and racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, the political economy of urban redevelopment, and the explosion of undocumented immigration as a key issue in national politics. This project aims to show the contingent forces that gave rise to the American service economy while specifying how the rise of an economy dominated by the distribution of services rather than industrial production affected both politics and the daily lives of individuals and families across the Los Angeles metropolitan area.;In order to analyze these changes, the project uses a variety of distinct archives and primary sources collections. Key collections include the papers of labor unions like the Service Employees International Union, federal records of agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board and the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department, the manuscript collections of politicians such as former California Governor Ronald Reagan and Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, urban redevelopment collections relating to Bunker Hill, and a variety of other primary sources. The disparate nature of such archives is necessary to chart the largely untold social and cultural history of a large group of workers, who, this project argues, were largely rendered invisible in their work and lives and thus show up infrequently in the historical record.