The Archives of Virtual Slavery

Up From Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History Eric Arnesen (bio) Over a quarter century ago, historian Herbert Gutman complained with good reason about the “absence of detailed knowledge of the ‘local world’ inhabited by white and Negro workers” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1 The studies of black urban communities that were proliferating within African-American historiography had relegated black workers to the margins of community development led by black professionals and middle-class activists. Within labor history, an older tradition influenced by industrial relations scholarship emphasized institutional union structures and paid little attention to rank-and-file workers of any race. With the exception of a few studies, black workers remained largely outside the traditional narratives of labor history, entering the picture only as strikebreakers or as a “problem” that white labor had to confront. Writing in 1969, a year after Gutman, James Gross similarly complained that a quarter century’s scholarship on the subject merely “amounted to classifications of the racial practices of organized labor: laissez faire, equalitarian, discriminatory, or those unions excluding Negroes by constitutional provision or bylaws.” What was needed, Gross proposed, were explorations not of “attitudes toward the Negro workers . . . but the ideas and ideals of the Negro worker.” 2 In the ensuing decade, the first flowering of the new labor history revolutionized the study of the American working class, but through the early 1980s, its emphasis lay with skilled artisans, white industrial workers, and immigrant communities. With few exceptions, neither black workers nor race were the focus of attention, and the agenda proposed by Gutman and Gross remained unaddressed. 3 Since the late 1980s, labor historians themselves have grown increasingly critical of their field’s failure to address issues of race. Inspired in part by the writings of the former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) labor secretary-turned-academic, Herbert Hill, they charge that labor history has a serious “race problem.” Over the years, Hill has offered the strongest academic criticism of the American labor movement’s racial practices and, recently, of the new labor history for its treatment of race and racism. Hill has repeatedly denounced white trade unions as racist [End Page 146] vehicles for excluding black, Asian, and other minority workers. At the same time, he charged labor historians with denying the centrality of race because of their blind devotion to Marxist social theory. 4 Hill’s charges have struck a deep chord. The new labor history, Noel Ignatiev similarly argues, has treated racism as “peripheral to the main line of working-class formation and struggle.” Historians’ search for “the famous ‘usable past’” has led them to “denial, and denial [has] led to apologetics.” 5 If the late 1960s complaints of Gutman and Gross accurately reflected a paucity of scholarship, the same cannot be said of the 1990s charges. The characterizations of labor history’s encounter with race by such writers as Hill, Ignatiev, and David Roediger are, to say the least, overdrawn. There is no denying that the first generation of new labor historians did not put white labor’s racial practices and beliefs or minority workers’ perspectives and strategies at the top of its research agenda. Today, however, these issues are central topics in their own right. Since the mid 1980s, labor historians have begun to engage issues of race in significant ways. The past decade has witnessed a veritable outpouring of new scholarship on trade union racial practices, black and other minority workers’ experiences and activism, and on white working-class racial identity. Far from being the academic backwater it was in the late 1960s, the study of race and labor has become an academic growth industry. “Scholarship on race in American labor history steadily grows in quantity and quality,” concluded Joe Trotter, Jr. and Alan Dawley in a recent special issue of Labor History devoted to race and class. “Every month seems to bring added understanding of the intersections of race and class, racial segmentation of the labor market, and the impact of race on culture and community.” 6 What is striking is not only that the scholarship on race and labor is...

1. Migrants at Work and the Division of Labour Law PART I: DIVIDING THE OBJECTS OF LABOUR LAW 2. Precarious Pasts, Precarious Futures 3. Employers and Migrant Legality: Liberalization of Service Provision, Transnational Posting, and the Bifurcation of the European Labour Market 4. Immigration and Labour Market Protectionism: Protecting Local Workers' Preferential Access to the National Labour Market 5. Migrant Workers in Agriculture: A Legal Perspective 6. The EU's Internal Market and the Fragmentary Nature of EU Labour Migration PART II: DIVIDING THE SUBJECTS OF LABOUR LAW 7. Migration Status in Labour and Social Security Law: Between Inclusion and Exclusion in Italy 8. The Sectoral Regulatory Regime: When Work Migration Controls and the Sectorally Differentiated Labour Market Meet 9. Migrants, Unfree Labour, and the Legal Construction of Domestic Servitude: Migrant Domestic Workers in the UK 10. Migrant Labour in the United States: Working Beneath the Floor for Free Labour? 11. Enforcement of Employment Rights by Migrant Workers in the UK: The Case of EU-8 Nationals 12. The Right of Irregular Immigrants to Back Pay: The Spectrum of Protection in International, Regional and National Legal Systems 13. Employer Checks of Immigration Status and Employment Law PART III: REINTEGRATION THROUGH EQUALITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 14. Migrant Workers and the Right to Non-discrimination and Equality 15. The European Social Charter on Migrant Rights 16. Black Women Workers and Discrimination: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty...or 'Shifting'? 17. Migration, Labour Law, and Religious Discrimination PART IV: REINTEGRATIVE RESPONSES FROM LABOUR LAW 18. Reconciling Openness and High Labour Standards? - Sweden's Attempts to Regulate Labour Migration and Trade in Services 19. Links between Individual Employment Law and Collective Labour Law: Their Implications for Migrant Workers 20. Organizing against Abuse and Exclusion: the Associational Rights of Undocumented Workers 21. Home from Home: Migrant Domestic Workers and the ILO Convention on Domestic Workers 22. Conflicted Priorities? Enforcing Fairness for Temporary Migrants

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

In the wake of public debate about reforming social security, Democratic Party leaders, union leaders, and black leaders defend the current social security program because it is designed to provide disproportionately large monthly benefits to low-wage earners relative to their lifetime average monthly earnings. Despite the progressive benefit formula used by the program, an important question remains: Do black workers receive disproportionately larger benefits during their lifetimes in relation to their lifetime contributions, as well as disproportionately larger monthly benefits? This article presents findings from a study that shows that when the lifetime perspective is taken, black workers receive less money's worth in social security benefits than white workers. Implications for policies are discussed. Key words: benefits; black workers; contributions social security; white workers The United States is facing a dual agenda regarding social security. On the one hand, maintaining the program's financial solvency beyond year 2037 requires some form of structural reform as the Board of Trustees (2000) of the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds warned. On the other hand, policymakers who are concerned about black and other minority group workers need to assess how the current system is working for them. If the system is working well for them, it should be maintained with minimal alterations. If it is not, it needs to be reformed more radically. Such a critical assessment of money's worth in social security benefits is needed because it is generally believed that the current program serves people of color well. In particular, liberal politicians and leaders of black communities tend to defend the current system on the basis of the benefit formula, which is slanted in favor of low-wage earners. Because black workers' earnings tend to be lower than those of white workers, this view is correct--but only partially. The missing variable is the shorter average life expectancy of black workers than white workers. If black workers receive social security benefits for fewer years than white workers, the apparent progressiveness in the benefit formula may be offset to a considerable degree. Indeed, an assessment of the social security benefits that black people are expected to receive during their lifetimes and of the relationship between their lifetime contributions and lifetime benefits is an important prerequisite to making an informed judgment about whether the social security system should be reformed and, if so, in what way. This article addresses the central question: Do black workers, who tend to earn lower wages than white workers, receive disproportionately larger benefits than white workers on the basis of lifetime benefits, as well as on the basis of monthly benefits? This question is critical because the life expectancy of black workers is shorter than that of white workers. Thus, the aim of our study, the findings of which are presented in this article, was to evaluate the degree of money's worth that black and white workers receive for their lifetime contributions. In particular, the study investigated the mean ratio of the present value of lifetime benefits to the present value of lifetime contributions of black and white workers. It also compared the mean ratio of monthly benefits to the average indexed monthly earnings of black and white workers. METHOD OF CALCULATING SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS All social security benefits are based on the primary insurance amount (PIA), which is derived in two steps. First, the worker's average indexed monthly earnings (AIME) are calculated by indexing the taxable earnings for each year from 1951 onward to the average wage level in the second year before age 62, disability, or death; summing indexed earnings (and unindexed earnings in the years after age 60); and dividing the sum by the number of months elapsed after 1950 (or age 21, if later) through age 61 (or the year before the year of disability or death). …

Treating the United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act as its focus, this article examines what the legal characterization of labour unfreedom reveals about the underlying conception of the labour market that informs contemporary approaches to labour law in the United Kingdom. It discusses how unfree labour is conceptualized within two key literatures – Marxist-inspired political economy and liberal approaches to modern slavery – and their underlying assumptions of the labour market and how it operates. As an alternative to these depictions of the labour market, it proposes a legal institutionalist or constitutive account. It develops an approach to legal characterization and jurisdiction that is attentive to modes of governing and the role of political and legal differentiation both in producing labour exploitation and unfree labour and in developing strategies for its elimination. It argues that the problem with the modern slavery approach to unfree labour is that it tends to displace labour law as the principal remedy to the problem of labour abuse and exploitation, while simultaneously reinforcing the idea that flexible labour markets of the type that prevails in the United Kingdom are realms of labour freedom.

The phenomenon of unfree labour relations in the Indian countryside continues to remain a matter of concern. While multiple factors contribute to attachment and unfreedom of labour dependency on employers for housing, it is an understudied issue in the existing literature. Drawing on a detailed field study of an agriculturally advanced village in Sri Ganganagar district of north-western state of Rajasthan, this study discusses the role of housing in labour relations and contracts. It has been argued that when the proximate cause of unfree labour relations in this village is the lack of access to housing and homestead among the local landless Dalit labourers, the nature of overall dependence derives from multiple socio-economic factors rooted in unequal caste and class relations, inequality in land ownership and limited employment opportunities within the capital-intensive local agrarian production system. This article also discusses the nature, mechanisms and types of long-term labour contracts and labour services prevalent in the village and how all these are closely intertwined with caste relations. The study explores labour dependency in relation to labour contracts, wage negotiations, freedom and mobility, and working and living conditions.

Recently the South African company law landscape underwent a dramatic overhaul with the introduction of the Companies Act 71 of 2008. Central to company law is the promotion of corporate governance. It is clear that companies are no longer accountable just to their shareholders but also to society at large. Leaders should, for example, direct company strategies and operations with a view to achieving the triple bottom-line (economic, social and environmental performance) and should thus also manage the business in a sustainable manner. An important question in company law still today is in whose interest the company should be managed. Different stakeholders of importance to companies include shareholders, managers, employees, creditors etcetera. The Companies Act aims to balance the rights and obligations of shareholders and directors within companies, and it encourages the efficient and responsible management of companies. When considering the role of employees in corporations it must be noted that the Constitution grants every person a fundamental right to fair labour practices. Social as well as political changes were evident after South Africa's re-entering the world stage in the 1990s. Changes in socio-economic conditions within a developing country were also evident. These changes had a major influence on the South African labour law dispensation. Like company law, labour law is to a large extent also codified. Like company law, no precise definition of labour law exists. It is clear from the various definitions of labour law that it covers both the individual and collective labour law and that various role-players are involved. Some of these role-players include trade unions, employers/companies, employees, and the state. The various relationships between these parties are ultimately what will guide a certain outcome if there is a power play between them. In 1995 the South African labour market was transformed with the introduction of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995. The LRA remains the primary piece of labour legislation that governs labour law in South Africa. The notion of industrial democracy and transformation of the workplace are central issues in South African labour law. This is due to the constitutional changes that have taken place in South Africa, where the protection of human rights and the democratisation of the workplace are advanced. Before the enactment of the LRA, employee participation and voice was a much-debated topic not only locally but also internationally. It is therefore essential when considering employee participation to take due cognisance of both the labour and company law principles that may be pertinent, as well as the need for workers to have a voice in the workplace and for employers to manage their corporations. This article will attempt to indicate how the different functions, theories and models of labour and company law accommodate and promote the interests of employees in corporations and will also attempt to reconcile these differences.

Recently the South African company law landscape underwent a dramatic overhaul with the introduction of the Companies Act 71 of 2008. Central to company law is the promotion of corporate governance. It is clear that companies are no longer accountable just to their shareholders but also to society at large. Leaders should, for example, direct company strategies and operations with a view to achieving the triple bottom-line (economic, social and environmental performance) and should thus also manage the business in a sustainable manner. An important question in company law still today is in whose interest the company should be managed. Different stakeholders of importance to companies include shareholders, managers, employees, creditors etcetera. The Companies Act aims to balance the rights and obligations of shareholders and directors within companies, and it encourages the efficient and responsible management of companies. When considering the role of employees in corporations it must be noted that the Constitution grants every person a fundamental right to fair labour practices. Social as well as political changes were evident after South Africa's re-entering the world stage in the 1990s. Changes in socio-economic conditions within a developing country were also evident. These changes had a major influence on the South African labour law dispensation. Like company law, labour law is to a large extent also codified. Like company law, no precise definition of labour law exists. It is clear from the various definitions of labour law that it covers both the individual and collective labour law and that various role-players are involved. Some of these role-players include trade unions, employers/companies, employees, and the state. The various relationships between these parties are ultimately what will guide a certain outcome if there is a power play between them. In 1995 the South African labour market was transformed with the introduction of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995. The LRA remains the primary piece of labour legislation that governs labour law in South Africa. The notion of industrial democracy and transformation of the workplace are central issues in South African labour law. This is due to the constitutional changes that have taken place in South Africa, where the protection of human rights and the democratisation of the workplace are advanced. Before the enactment of the LRA, employee participation and voice was a much-debated topic not only locally but also internationally. It is therefore essential when considering employee participation to take due cognisance of both the labour and company law principles that may be pertinent, as well as the need for workers to have a voice in the workplace and for employers to manage their corporations. This article will attempt to indicate how the different functions, theories and models of labour and company law accommodate and promote the interests of employees in corporations and will also attempt to reconcile these differences.

 Reviews reviews Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Stacey L. Smith The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2013. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 344 pages. $39.95 cloth. This book centers California, and more broadly the American West, in a story historians used to tell as the southern history of African American slavery, freedom, national reconstruction, and racial segregation. Stacey L. Smith joins a throng of recent historians pulling apart the exceptionalist story of the West as a region removed from, antithetical to, and an antidote for the racial struggle that led to the American Civil War. She relocates the West in the middle of antebellum race relations and in the failed promise of racial equality and civil rights that followed. Smith focuses on California because of its history as a free state with a complicated history of human bondage, both before and after the Civil War. And while the story she tells could be (and probably should be) explored in every western territory and state, California’s large and multiracial society — the product of generations of exchange and the tsunami of gold rush immigration — makes this a particularly satisfying analysis of the multiple forms of bound labor that existed in the West and the fluidity of racial categories across time. Smith argues that California — a transnational crossroads of imported social and economic systems — exploded the dichotomous concepts of race (black and white) and labor (free and slave) in the United States. Across seven chapters, Smith explores the different kinds of imported bound-labor practices that coexisted in California with the arrival of peoples from Chile, Mexico, Hawaii and the South Pacific, China, Japan, Europe, and the United States — white, black, and Native. As those peoples converged in the mines, their methods of “managing, binding, and disciplining labor” converged as well (p. 17). When Californians organized themselves as a free state in 1850,they had to navigate (socially as well as legally) those distinctive versions of wage and contract labor, debt bondage, peonage, indentured servitude, wardship, prostitution, and slavery. Californians did so through a shifting lens of racial classifications and valuations. Smith documents the ways slave-owning Southerners bound blacks under contracts different from hereditary slavery as a means of perpetuating state-sanctioned bondage on free soil.Asian“coolie”and Latino “peon” labor, defined as threats to free white labor, elicited legal expulsion or exclusion, yet the use of Indian or black children — bound through legal guardianship as domestic servants — gained protection. Smith also evaluates the ways in which sexual commerce and the labor of prostitutes was both normalized and criminalized, depending on race. With the onset of the Civil War, California’s Union Party embraced political emancipation,freeing African Americans while ignoring the virtual slavery of unfree Indians and Asians. In her most significant interpretive argument,Smith then connects the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to California’s experiments with racially discriminatory immigration laws in the 1870s that evaded the “equal protection” intent of the Fourteenth Amendment and other civil rights laws by masquerading as antislavery measures. Those laws emerged as a means to prevent Asian immigration by defining their bound labor as imported slavery, a threat to free white labor, and therefore excludible. In this way, Smith traces how an era of emanci-  OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 pation in the West morphed along racial lines into a national era of exclusion. Smith excels at illustrating her arguments with the stories of real people struggling to make a living and find their place in California ’s society and polity. Rather than abstract nameless victims of bound labor and a legal system dominated by faceless white men of power and greed, she reconstructs individuals with agency, motive, and history. Smith mines information from newspapers, memoirs, letters , and legal cases, introducing readers to a parade of characters who illustrate the ambiguity and historical contingency of unfree labor.Readers meet indentured Indian servant Augustín, a New Mexican genízaro, who along with Mexican debt peons Benito Pérez and his wife, travelled from Sonora to California to dig gold and wash laundry for their patrone Antonio Francisco Coronel. There is James...

 Reviews reviews Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Stacey L. Smith The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2013. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 344 pages. $39.95 cloth. This book centers California, and more broadly the American West, in a story historians used to tell as the southern history of African American slavery, freedom, national reconstruction, and racial segregation. Stacey L. Smith joins a throng of recent historians pulling apart the exceptionalist story of the West as a region removed from, antithetical to, and an antidote for the racial struggle that led to the American Civil War. She relocates the West in the middle of antebellum race relations and in the failed promise of racial equality and civil rights that followed. Smith focuses on California because of its history as a free state with a complicated history of human bondage, both before and after the Civil War. And while the story she tells could be (and probably should be) explored in every western territory and state, California’s large and multiracial society — the product of generations of exchange and the tsunami of gold rush immigration — makes this a particularly satisfying analysis of the multiple forms of bound labor that existed in the West and the fluidity of racial categories across time. Smith argues that California — a transnational crossroads of imported social and economic systems — exploded the dichotomous concepts of race (black and white) and labor (free and slave) in the United States. Across seven chapters, Smith explores the different kinds of imported bound-labor practices that coexisted in California with the arrival of peoples from Chile, Mexico, Hawaii and the South Pacific, China, Japan, Europe, and the United States — white, black, and Native. As those peoples converged in the mines, their methods of “managing, binding, and disciplining labor” converged as well (p. 17). When Californians organized themselves as a free state in 1850,they had to navigate (socially as well as legally) those distinctive versions of wage and contract labor, debt bondage, peonage, indentured servitude, wardship, prostitution, and slavery. Californians did so through a shifting lens of racial classifications and valuations. Smith documents the ways slave-owning Southerners bound blacks under contracts different from hereditary slavery as a means of perpetuating state-sanctioned bondage on free soil.Asian“coolie”and Latino “peon” labor, defined as threats to free white labor, elicited legal expulsion or exclusion, yet the use of Indian or black children — bound through legal guardianship as domestic servants — gained protection. Smith also evaluates the ways in which sexual commerce and the labor of prostitutes was both normalized and criminalized, depending on race. With the onset of the Civil War, California’s Union Party embraced political emancipation,freeing African Americans while ignoring the virtual slavery of unfree Indians and Asians. In her most significant interpretive argument,Smith then connects the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to California’s experiments with racially discriminatory immigration laws in the 1870s that evaded the “equal protection” intent of the Fourteenth Amendment and other civil rights laws by masquerading as antislavery measures. Those laws emerged as a means to prevent Asian immigration by defining their bound labor as imported slavery, a threat to free white labor, and therefore excludible. In this way, Smith traces how an era of emanci-  OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 pation in the West morphed along racial lines into a national era of exclusion. Smith excels at illustrating her arguments with the stories of real people struggling to make a living and find their place in California ’s society and polity. Rather than abstract nameless victims of bound labor and a legal system dominated by faceless white men of power and greed, she reconstructs individuals with agency, motive, and history. Smith mines information from newspapers, memoirs, letters , and legal cases, introducing readers to a parade of characters who illustrate the ambiguity and historical contingency of unfree labor.Readers meet indentured Indian servant Augustín, a New Mexican genízaro, who along with Mexican debt peons Benito Pérez and his wife, travelled from Sonora to California to dig gold and wash laundry for their patrone Antonio Francisco Coronel. There is James...

This paper examines cross-country differences in labour policies and practices and employee performance and attitudes toward work from a sample of nearly 30,000 employees in a large multinational manufacturing firm. The analysis shows: 1) large establishment and country differences in work practices, performance, and attitudes toward work across countries; 2) qualitatively similar responses of workers to work practices across countries; 3) a strong link between the establishment average of employee reports on the quality of labour-management relations and establishment average measures of employee performance 4) a positive relation between average employee performance and average employee-management relations at the country level, but no relation between country level performance in the firm and measures of the extent of national labour regulations or practices.

The same yet different: Worker reports on labour practices and outcomes in a single firm across countries

This contribution deals with unfree labour in Germany from the early modern age until the beginning of the 20th century. It presents the main conclusions of a book published in 2013 on this subject in German. Unfree labour is not identified in the first place with slavery or any other labour relationship based on status. Instead, this study aims at an analysis of freedom and coercion in contractual labour relationships. It will be argued that in Germany contractual labour relationships before 1800 were embedded in a legal system that strongly restricted contractual autonomy and aimed at the suppression of free labour markets. The scope of this legislation was to guarantee efficient labour performance, which was not only perceived as being in the personal interest of an employer, but as a fundamental element of the common good. After 1800 the system changed to more incentive-based legislation that established freedom of contract for labour relations. Nevertheless, coercion in order to perform the contractual duties of a work contract remained important for many groups of workers, especially farmhands and industrial workers. The last criminal sanctions for breaches of labour contracts were only abolished in the revolution of 1919. This development shows the difficulties German law had in extending the principles of private law to workers. When a system of free labour was fully established, the issue of unemployment and economic problems, especially in the Weimar Republic, required a new system of protective rules. The history of free market based labour contracts in Germany was therefore very short, with state intervention shi ing from control and coercion to social assistance. Recommended citation: Keiser, Thorsten, Between Status and Contract?. Coercion in Contractual Labour Relationships in Germany from the 16th to the 20th century, in: Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History Rg 21 (2013) 32-47, online: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/rg21/032-047

Corporate labor policies and practices during China's transition: An exploration of implications for social stratification

During the colonial period, Indian criminals primarily migrated to Southeast Asia to work on sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, rice, and rubber plantations. ‘Free’ and ‘unfree labour’ or passage’ emigration of traders, clerks, bureaucrats, and professionals during the colonial period in Southeast Asia based on contract labourers under the ‘Indenture System’ or ‘Kangani System’. For the British Crown, the forced migration of Indian criminals to Southeast Asia served two purposes: it was considered a harsh alternative to capital punishment, and hence might serve as a warning to Indians, and it provided labour for British Imperial projects, notably in Southeast Asian possessions. In Southeast Asia, Indian prison labourers-built roads, bridges, canals, jetties, piers, temples, churches, batteries, and government structures, in addition to working as private house servants. Even in Southeast Asia, Indian labourers were incorporated as public and private servants in every settlement. It was difficult for the colonial authorities to enrol locals in such small pockets. ‘Convict Workers’ primarily characterised their job as productive labourers to divert attention away from their incarceration. So, this chapter highlights the role and contribution of Indian Indenture Labourers as ‘Convicts’ for the development of colonial settlements in Southeast Asia.