This paper develops a model of voluntary migration into degrading work. The essence of the model is a tension between two “bads:” that which arises from being relatively deprived at home, and that which arises from engaging in humiliating work away from home. Balancing between these two...

Pork production has been evolving from relatively small, family-run operations toward large-scale operations with several employees. This study uses a national survey of pork producers and their employees to answer several questions about the structure of wages and benefits in this rapidly...

For a postscript copy of this paper, click <a href="/Data/isu/isu285.ps"> here. The paper examines changes in employment and wage patterns, industrial restructuring, and foreign competition that affect opportunities of recent immigrants to the non-metropolitan Midwest, especially to Iowa. The focus is on food and kindred...</a>

Although managing labor has become important for farm operations’ success, training and education for farm managers focuses on agricultural production management and few studies provide an empirical basis on how agricultural labor management differs from labor management in other industries....

In the past 20 years the average scale of hog operations has expanded more than fourfold, and some of the new large-scale hog feeding operations have been opposed by residents in some communities. While the environmental effects of such production have been relatively well studied, less examined...

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Production contract tournaments induce self-selection among producers. Self-selection for pork differs from broiler production resulting in a predictably different political response by incumbent producers to contract innovation. The higher capital and status of incumbent pork producers than...

How do dairy farms manage their human resources and how can the farms achieve competitive advantage through the human resource management (HRM) function? This inductive study of six dairy farms in Michigan explores those two questions using the resource-based theory (RBT) framework. Onsite...