Making a Workforce, Unmaking a Working Class: The Creation of a Human Capital Society in Houston, 1900-1980

Abstract

This dissertation explains how increased educational attainment became the most politically viable means of reducing economic inequality in the postwar United States. Using Houston as a case study, the dissertation argues that a heterogeneous group of people and organizations played a role in the creation of a society in which human capital development served the vital political function of structuring economic inequality: employers who sought to raise worker productivity at minimal direct cost to themselves and to wrest control of worker training from labor unions; ordinary Houstonians in search of economic security and opportunity, including black and Latino civil rights activists who used human capital development to dismantle the racial division of labor; and federal, state, and local government officials who used education to lower unemployment and spur economic development.