Coerced: Work under Threat of Punishment

Abstract

Sociologist Erin Hatton's Coerced: Work under Threat of Punishment (2020) is a must-read for US labor historians interested in the carceral state, American higher education's employment policies, unfree labor practices, and legal definitions of an employee with basic workplace rights. This book connects all of these vital topics in a study of the importance of coercion in the contemporary American labor market by focusing on the legal, legitimate threats to people's status, which has profound implications for their individual livelihoods.Coerced focuses on how today's prisoners, workfare participants, college athletes, and graduate student researchers are compelled to work. Hatton admits they represent “diverse cases,” but they are nevertheless “all sociolegally constructed as something other than ‘workers’ doing something other than ‘work’ ” (8 – 9). None have the employment rights that have established the power dynamics in workspaces in the formal labor market. This deficiency gives corrections officers, case workers, athletic coaches, and professors extraordinary authority over people who “cannot freely seek additional or alternative employment” and “do not earn free-market wages for their labor and in fact are often paid in something other than money altogether” (9). Their status as well-behaved inmates, compliant welfare recipients, obedient sports stars, or overworked researchers matter to both their time in and promised path out of this liminal world of unrecognized work essential to higher education and the intertwined carceral and welfare states.Hatton proceeds thematically to highlight intersections and parallels between the convicts and workfare parents whom too many Americans vilify and the student athletes and graduate researchers whom many venerate. This concise book devotes a chapter to the twentieth-century history of the carceral state, welfare state, and higher education. Hatton then lets present-day prisoners, welfare participants, and students speak for themselves in chapters devoted to detailing the different forms of abuse and degradation that limit these workers’ agency, shape their ability to resist, and see themselves in spaces that few recognize as sites of work.Hatton takes an intersectional lens to understand the experiences recounted in interviews. Coerced, for example, highlights the racist, sexist, and elitist assumptions shaping case workers’ willingness to assign degrading tasks to parents, many but not all of them women of color, in need of workfare. They often waste hours they could devote to finding jobs or caring for children because of the need to wait outside case workers’ offices for their assigned tasks, which include dehumanizing work such as picking up used condoms in public parks. Prisoners, many of them Black men, feel compelled to prove themselves model inmates to avoid both solitary confinement and filthy work, like cleaning up feces. Students, too, fear being labeled as unwilling researchers or athletes even though professors and university development offices depend on their labor, while refusing to recognize it as work. Graduate students rely on faculty for their wages (often labeled stipends), their degrees, and the letters of recommendation that future employers require. That support, like an athletic scholarship, is usually tied to a specific academic year, which robs these vital producers of research and revenue for universities of any real economic security.Highlighting the parallel precarity of people, whose labor currently goes unrecognized as work, makes it much easier to see the status coercion running throughout the American labor market today. As such, like so many compelling books, Coerced raises new questions to understand the present and past, especially in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling in favor of paying student athletes and the University of California recognizing a large portion of members of Student Researchers United. Coerced, for example, indicates that there's more work for historians to do to interrogate the links between government disinvestment, declining labor standards, and the dramatic erosion of workplace rights since the 1940s. Less taxing and spending has, over time, left Americans paying more out of pocket for basic needs. So it seems almost logical that there would be a need to extract labor from graduate students expected to produce research that campuses can patent; from student athletes whose performances can help with ticket sales and recruiting fee-paying students; from workfare parents, assigned the filthiest tasks needed to keep public spaces up; and from prisoners, whose labor maintains correctional facilities that also, as historian Heather Thompson has noted, marketed their labor to businesses eager to cut their payroll costs and pressure their labor forces not to unionize. Hatton's work, then, also adds a new perspective on the many legal, legitimate ways that employers could threaten the status of supervisors and workers to quash union campaigns. Finally, this book invites more historical scrutiny of the kind of status coercion that gave rise to today's gig economy.