Daria Bogdanska moves to Malmö to attend art school, sets out to find a job, and discovers that in order to work in the country legally, she needs a Swedish personal identity number. But there is a catch: she can't get one without securing a job first. To make ends meet, Daria starts working under the table at an Indian restaurant. There, she discovers another level of inequity: lacking regulation, the underground job market is forcing immigrants to settle for a substandard quality of life. In turning to a union for help she sparks a legal battle that ultimately leads to fairer work practices for the people in her community. Reminiscent of the style of Julie Doucet, Wage Slaves is the autobiographical story of Daria Bogdanska's determined struggle to build a life in Malmö, and how she found a way to succeed, against all odds.
This book begins with a provocative paradox: George Fitzhugh of Virginia, one of the most eloquent defenders of Southern chattel slavery, appealed to a New York abolitionist for support. How can this be? The abolitionist in question, Charles Edwards Lester, had confessed that "he would sooner subject his child to Southern slavery, than have him to be a free laborer of England." Lester was in fact referring to the "white" or "wage" slavery of the mother country. In a three part study, Cunliffe explores the context of chattel and wage slavery in Britain and the United States. He first outlines the evolution of the concept of wage slavery in Europe and the United States, demonstrating how this concept bore upon opinions about chattel slavery in America. In his second section, Cunliffe discusses the precariousness of Anglo-American relationships during the period of 1830 to 1860. In their resentment of British rebukes aimed at the persistence of slavery in a democracy, Americans retaliated by claiming that British wage slavery was worse than American plantation slavery. Cunliffe concludes by charting the career of Lester, the seemingly atypical New York abolitionist. Lester displayed a conviction that Britain was a corrupt and brutal society, most of whose leading citizens detested America. Cunliffe maintains that Lester's opinions were shared by many of his countrymen during the antebellum decades; in this sense he may have been more truly representative of American attitudes than either Southerners like Fitzhugh or Northerner abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison.
The transition from chattel slavery to forced labour in Africa and the Caribbean during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has commanded increasing attention from scholars in recent years. The Wages of Slavery tackles this subject from a protoproletarian perspective, studies new labour regimes in Africa and the Caribbean, and discusses work practices before and after emancipation the nature of the working week, subsistence and surplus for slaves and free person, and labour negotiations and confrontations.
Co-winner, 2010 Merle Curti Award, Organization of American HistoriansWinner, 2010 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, ILR School at Cornell University and the Labor and Working-Class History AssociationWinner, 2010 H. L. Mitchell Award, Southern Historical Association Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end labor market in post-Revolutionary Baltimore. Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic. In the era of Frederick Douglass, Baltimore's distinctive economy featured many slaves who earned wages and white workers who performed backbreaking labor. By focusing his study on this boomtown, Rockman reassesses the roles of race and region and rewrites the history of class and capitalism in the United States during this time. Rockman describes the material experiences of low-wage workers—how they found work, translated labor into food, fuel, and rent, and navigated underground economies and social welfare systems. He also explores what happened if they failed to find work or lost their jobs. Rockman argues that the American working class emerged from the everyday struggles of these low-wage workers. Their labor was indispensable to the early republic’s market revolution, and it was central to the transformation of the United States into the wealthiest society in the Western world. Rockman’s research includes construction site payrolls, employment advertisements, almshouse records, court petitions, and the nation’s first “living wage” campaign. These rich accounts of day laborers and domestic servants illuminate the history of early republic capitalism and its consequences for working families.
Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Yound Adult. Born amidst tragedy and implacable hatreds, the young Peter McCutcheon is denied his freedom, his birthright, and the fruits of his labors by cruel masters, and by a society and history which denies the truth. THE WAGES is a monument to individual courage and to the ongoing injustices caused by the suppression of memories and the oppression of people. It is also a powerful document of America's entanglement in slavery and vicious myths of race. The wages of sin, according to the Bible, is death. Fanny Howe's novel demonstrates that the wages of hate are pain, and a cost not always borne by the perpetrator, or even the current generation.
An enduring history of how race and class came together to mark the course of the antebellum US and our present crisis. Roediger shows that in a nation pledged to independence, but less and less able to avoid the harsh realities of wage labor, the identity of "white" came to allow many Northern workers to see themselves as having something in common with their bosses. Projecting onto enslaved people and free Blacks the preindustrial closeness to pleasure that regimented labor denied them, "white workers" consumed blackface popular culture, reshaped languages of class, and embraced racist practices on and off the job. Far from simply preserving economic advantage, white working-class racism derived its terrible force from a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforced stereotypes and helped to forge the very identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks. Full of insight regarding the precarious positions of not-quite-white Irish immigrants to the US and the fate of working class abolitionism, Wages of Whiteness contributes mightily and soberly to debates over the 1619 Project and critical race theory.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception--and at the heart--of the new south.
Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics is devoted to educating the general public about the history, current trends, and possibilities of culture and politics.
Throughout recorded history, labor to produce goods and services has been a central concern of society, and questions surrounding the terms of labor—the arrangements under which labor is made to produce and to divide its product with others—are of great significance for understanding the past and the emergence of the modern world. For long periods, much of the world’s labor could be considered under the coercive control of systems of slavery or of serfdom, with relatively few workers laboring under terms of freedom, however defined. Slavery and serfdom were systems that controlled not only the terms of labor, but also the more general issues of political freedom. The nine chapters in this volume deal with the general issues of the causes and consequences of the rise of so-called free labor in Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean over the past four to five centuries, and point to the many complications and paradoxical aspects of this change. The topics covered are European beliefs that rejected the enslavement of other Europeans but permitted the slavery of Africans (David Eltis), British abolitionism and the impact of emancipation in the British West Indies (Seymour Drescher), the consequences of the end of Russian serfdom (Peter Kolchin), the definition and nature of free labor as seen by nineteenth-century American workers (Leon Fink), the effects of changing legal and economic concepts of free labor (Robert J. Steinfeld), the antebellum American use of the metaphor of slavery (David Roediger), female dependent labor in the aftermath of American emancipation (Amy Dru Stanley), the contrast between individual and group actions in attempting to benefit individual laborers (David Brody), and the link between arguments concerning free labor and the actual outcomes for laborers in nineteenth-century America (Clayne Pope).
