Industry change and labor segmentation: The banking industry in Los Angeles, 1970-1990

The economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s have disrupted prevailing patterns of labor segmentation, increased employment insecurity for many workers and ushered in more 'flexible' employment relations in the name of restoring the economic, social, and institutional conditions for profitability. This dissertation investigates how contemporary forms of production organization are altering the contours of labor demand in the banking industry in Los Angeles, 1970-1990, and evaluates the implications of these changes for different groups of workers.;I synthesize information from three sources: the census, other secondary sources and 33 semi-structured work place interviews with senior management at the nine largest banks in California with a presence in Los Angeles. While most bank employees perform clerical work, banks' products and their labor process are becoming much more knowledge intensive. As banks introduce more part time work into their clerical ranks to trim labor costs, they are also looking, increasingly, to the external labor market, rather than their internal labor markets, to recruit specialists with computing, sales and other finance related skills. As a result, new lines of inter-occupational segmentation--vertical and horizontal--are taking shape and polarizing the wages and prospects for mobility of different groups of workers.;The significance of this is twofold. First, in opening up their internal labor markets in the 1980s, the banks are already experiencing higher turnover, labor poaching and increased wage pressure. Questions of labor control and reproduction need to figure much more prominently in debates about labor flexibility for the significance of ongoing changes to become intelligible.;Related to this, as banks shift the burden of skill formation to the external labor market, the question of how skills are to be produced, and how the costs of this are to be socialized, come to the fore. It is not only firms that need to consider their changing relationship with the external labor market. As mobility becomes more closely intertwined with educational attainment, the provision of skills in the external labor market becomes an increasingly significant arena structuring discrimination in labor markets.