Daniela Rosiles Torres is an immigrant student from Mexico at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. What led her to apply to this school was her desire to learn more about why hard-working people like her immigrant parents, who work blue collar jobs, work so hard but are not valued as much as she felt they should be. She did not think that they were compensated enough, especially after hearing stories of wage theft and overall lack of good working conditions. To understand the magnitude of the problem, Daniela decided to work on a summer project, under the generous advisement of Professor Robert Smith, that looks at the age-earnings profiles of Mexican-born immigrants, who attended high school but did not graduate, and who came to the US between the ages of 20 and 25. She collected data on the average earnings, by age, of these men – and is comparing their earnings to those of white, non-Hispanic men, with similar educations and ages. The purpose is to compare earnings growth rates and earnings levels of the two groups to gain insight into the returns that Mexican immigrants are receiving for their investment to immigrate.

During her time as a student at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations school, Genevieve incorporated a personal interest in film and creative industries into her coursework by completing a credit internship with the Directors Guild of America in the spring of her junior year. On the tail end of a lively couple of months in the entertainment industry, where each of the entertainment guilds negotiated new contracts with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) with a particular focus on the issue of AI, Genevieve’s internship gave her a closer look at labor relations in practice and understanding how contracts impact guild members. Genevieve’s internship with the DGA, as well as her subsequent summer internship with ILR’s Labor and Employment Law program researching the impact of AI on the future of work, coalesced to inspire her research project for her senior honors thesis, “Technological Change and Hollywood’s Creative Class: How Entertainment Guilds Have Responded to Innovations in Tech.” Genevieve’s research will study the history of labor relations between the guilds and the studios during moments of significant technological change, to serve as points of comparison to, and lend insights on contemporary concerns surrounding artificial intelligence in the industry. Some of the shifts in the industry that her thesis focuses on are the advent of television, the transition from the use of reels motion picture film to digital filmmaking, and changes in media distribution such as DVDs, the internet, and streaming platforms. Utilizing comparative case study research methods Genevieve’s thesis examines dynamics between studios and creative labor at the time, while also looking at how the entertainment guilds (DGA, SAG-AFTRA, WGA) responded to these shifting technologies through collective action, negotiations, and their eventual contracts.