Setting federal salaries in the space age / by Margaret W. Rossiter.
Abstract:
'Thus over a period of thirteen years during which science and politics were generally coming closer together, important countersteps were taken to detach federal salaries--on which the security, health and welfare of the nation do to a certain degree depend--from politics. But this essential battle was fought out not at the lofty level of presidential science advisers and National Academy reports, areas on which historians of science usually focus, but instead in the pork-barrel world of congressional committees and even postal unions. It forms a central chapter in federal labor history and in the history of federal science: the transformation of the civil service into a predominantly white-collar force, led by NASA's compelling needs for tens of thousands of scientists and engineers in the 1960s.'
Science after '40. p. 218-237