Nonmarket Labor Processes in an Advanced Capitalist Economy

Abstract

In advanced capitalist economies, the treatment of labor as a commodity suggests that labor's cost and availability depend on market mechanisms. Although neoclassical economic thought recognizes the influence of collective bargaining and labor legislation on the cost and availability of labor, economists generally pay scant attention to the ways informal and formal relations of power, along with myths of sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality, combine within labor processes in advanced capitalist economies to influence the cost and availability of labor. This article presents data on the labor processes in the North Carolina seafood processing industry and compares them to the labor processes accompanying the annual, seasonal importation of legal alien farm labor by U.S. agricultural producers. The labor processes of the former rest on kinship and informal social relations while those of the latter rest on formal political authority. The analysis suggests that, even in advanced capitalist economies, employers faced with labor supply problems do not rely on market mechanisms but instead tap formal and informal systems of authority to assure supplies of labor, and support their behaviors with myths of sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality. The article concludes with a discussion of these behaviors in the context of post-World War II international divisions of labor.