Labor: Freedom and Coercion

Three. Labor: Freedom and Coercion

Both race and gender have been incorporated as fundamental organizing axes of the labor system in the United States, and in turn the labor system has been organized in ways that create and re-create race-gender categories and relationships. This was true both in the early republic and during the antebellum period, when the economy was still primarily agrarian and characterized by small producers, and after the Civil War and at the turn of the century, when the economy was being transformed by industrialization and monopoly capital.

The democratizing movement for political equality among white men in the early nineteenth century led to a shift in the meaning of economic independence, which had long been defined in terms of property ownership. White male independence came to be anchored in the notion of "free labor." For free labor to emerge as a supposed source of independence, it had to be distinguished from "unfree labor." Thus there was a gradual differentiation in which statuses between freedom and slavery, such as indentured servitude and master-servant relations, were eliminated for native white men while continuing for blacks and other people of color (and sometimes immigrants). The category of unfree labor thus became racialized as nonwhite at the same time that free labor was racialized as white. What did not change was the assumption that independent manhood entailed control of and ownership of wives' and children's labor. This meant that women were

Labor: Freedom and Coercion

excluded from the category of free labor and therefore from economic independence. The status of free labor proved precarious, however, threatened on one side by growing capitalist industrialization, which was displacing the small-producer economy, and on the other side by the existence and spread of racial slavery.

The Civil War removed one of the threats: slavery, as well as indenture and peonage, was formally abolished, rendering all men free laborers in a system regulated by the legal doctrine of "liberty of contract." It did not remove the other threat, industrial capitalism, which in fact mushroomed after the Civil War. The central question is why and how in the new capitalist industrial labor system, in which, according to the operative myth, race and gender ought to have been irrelevant, they instead became central organizing features. Part of the answer lies in the continuation of older common law traditions. Women continued to be excluded from "free labor" protections because the common law marriage contract obligated wives to provide labor for their husbands. The Elizabethan-era obligation of the poor to work was revived in expanded vagrancy laws which subjected the poor, but especially those of color, to forced labor.

The other part of the answer lies in the changes brought about by capitalism itself. First, capitalist industrialization reorganized production and reproduction, removing much production from the home and drawing men into the labor force to work for wages and leaving reproduction to be carried out as unpaid work by women at the household level. This led to a greater separation and demarcation of home and work, to differential valuation of men's and women's work, and to a secondary disadvantaged position for women in the labor market. Second, capitalist industrialization was characterized by cyclical crises, new class formations, and heightened conflicts between capital and labor, between capitalists in different sectors, and between different segments of workers. The main conflict was between capital and labor, as workers resisted the new disciplinary regimes, deskilling, and relentless downward pressure on wages. These conflicts often took the form of competition between male and female or white and nonwhite workers, as capitalists sought to drive down wages by hiring cheaper and more docile workers-those with less political leverage. Simultaneously, higher-priced workers used whatever leverage they had to keep cheaper workers out of desirable jobs and industries. Complex