High levels of economic inequality found in less developed countries have been attributed to the penetration of their economies by investments of multinational enterprises based in more developed nations of the West. This attribution has been widely supported by both historical and quantitative research. There are several interpretations concerning why this might be so, but the one offered here is that foreign investments cause high levels of inequality by distorting the evolution of the labor-force structure. It is suggested that Third World economies penetrated by foreign capital will have unusually rapidly growing proportions of the labor force employed in the tertiary, and it is growth of this proportion which mediates some of the effects of dependence on inequality. Our quantitative analysis of cross-national data (a) corroborates previous research linking dependence to inequality, (b) indicates that dependence is associated with growth of the tertiary, and (c) suggests this is one important link between dependence and inequality.