Labor, Cheap

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Labor, Cheap

Racial oppression and cheap labor have historically gone hand in hand. From colonialism to Jim Crow, and from slavery in the Americas to apartheid in South Africa, social systems of discrimination against people of color have typically accompanied economic discrimination in the form of substandard wages and benefits. Cheap labor, however, means more than low pay. To maximize profits, employers have historically subjected workers of color to unsafe and inhumane working conditions. They have also cheapened these workers” labor by cutting costs on factory maintenance, farming equipment, and a variety of other workplace improvements. While race is not the only factor determining which workers are treated as labor, workers of color disproportionately earn less for their labor than their white counterparts, just as immigrants have earned less than native-born workers and women have earned less than men.

A RACE TO THE BOTTOM

In any society, employers drive the cost of labor downward by maximizing their control over the workforce. This is done in a variety of ways. First of all, employers must find the most vulnerable workers, those least able to pressure employers to spend more money on compensation or workplace improvement. Workers of color, for a variety of reasons, have often been among the most vulnerable. At the height of apartheid rule in South Africa, for example, black workers” average wage was one-fourteenth what their white counterparts earned. Although black South Africans were roughly 80 percent of the country’s population, their share of the national income was less than 20 percent. Because apartheid law subjected blacks to severe punishment (from fines to whippings to indefinite imprisonment) for engaging in protest, their ability to fight for fair wages was severely hampered. In this case, the support of the apartheid government and a racist legal and political framework granted employers a great deal of power over black workers.

Displaced workers, from immigrants to slave laborers, have historically been among the most vulnerable and exploitable workers. Transplanted to new cities, countries, or continents, often lacking relevant language skills, knowing little of their new local legal systems and power structures, and lacking basic community support, displaced workers are easily isolated and exploited by their employers. Displaced workers are also often dependent upon employers for a variety of reasons. Employers may aid them in going through the immigration process or help them find housing, for example. While race and displaced status often intersect (as in the case of African slaves in the Americas or North African immigrants in western Europe), displaced status functions on its own to facilitate cheap labor for employers. For example, Polish immigrants in Vance, Alabama, were earning roughly $1,100 per month for working as much as 65 hours per week at an automobile factory (Dixon 2003). This was less than a third of what many of their native-born, unionized counterparts in the United States earned. Though these were white workers, their displaced status left them little leverage to demand better compensation and gave employers a great deal of control.

Another way that employers have driven wages downward is through “de-skilling,” which literally means eliminating a particular skill required to perform a job so that workers become easier to replace. Deskilling is often accomplished through the introduction of new workplace technology. For example, the U.S. Postal Service (whose workforce has historically been dominated by workers of color) introduced sorting machines in the late 1950s that reduced postal sorting jobs to machine monitoring jobs. In the automotive industry, many skilled assembly jobs have similarly been reduced to “minding the machines,” and the same holds true in agriculture. Workers of color have disproportionately been stuck in these unskilled positions, making them easily replaceable and leaving them with little leverage to demand improved working or living conditions. In 1970 an estimated 78 percent of black women workers and 74 percent of black men workers labored in unskilled jobs, compared to only 39 and 40 percent for their white counterparts.

In addition to removing skill from labor, new technologies often lead to job loss, which increases competition between workers for the few jobs that remain. This competition drives down the cost of labor, for workers who complain about poor compensation and working conditions are simply replaced. New technologies often also serve to fragment a workforce, isolating workers from each other. In modern auto plants, for example, robots now perform many of the functions formerly done by workers. As a result, workers have fewer opportunities to develop solidarity and collective strategies for achieving better pay and working conditions.

SLAVE LABOR

Slave labor in the Americas is perhaps the best and most dramatic illustration of how cheap labor relates to racial oppression under capitalism. First, and most obviously, slave laborers were displaced and transplanted into circumstances of maximum vulnerability. Beyond the linguistic and cultural barriers they faced, African slaves were brought into a social and legal system that isolated them from local communities, fragmented their own already fragmentary communities, denied them any basic legal rights, and engendered a culture of oppression and contempt for black skin. In such circumstances, while rebellion was possible, the obstacles to collective action in support of any form of compensation of improved working conditions were, to say the least, formidable. Beyond this social system of oppression, slave owners developed a tight system of workplace control. Dividing workers into “house” and “field” slave categories, demanding that they perform exhausting and humiliating labor, surveilling their workers closely, and maintaining a violent discipline system, slave owners did everything in their power to control their workers” activity and consciousness. Plantation owners profited handsomely from this interlocking system of racial and workplace oppression, which can be seen as a prototype for the use of workers of color as cheap labor under capitalism.

CONTEMPORARY WAGE DISCRIMINATION

Indeed, incidences of modern-day slavery illustrate how employers still use variations on the plantation model of slavery to drive labor costs down. Like former African slaves, in the early twenty-first century the cheapest laborers are usually displaced people, such as immigrants from developing regions, who often immigrate in response to economic pressure. While colonial and capitalist forces drove the Atlantic slave trade, contemporary migration is driven by neoliberalism and globalization. In North America, for example, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has led to massive migration and the cheapening of labor standards from Mexico to Canada. By eliminating trade restrictions, NAFTA has allowed U.S. agriculture companies to flood Mexican markets with cheap, mass-produced corn, pushing local Mexican farmers out of the market. These farmers then often migrate to the United States in search of new work. Once there, they face legal obstacles to citizenship, antiimmigrant nativism and anti-Mexican racism, and exploitative employers eager to provide them with back-breaking farm work for substandard wages and few, if any, benefits. Meanwhile, U.S. employers lobby the government for more restrictive immigration policies that force immigrant laborers further towards the social margin and render them increasingly vulnerable.

Whereas workers of color have been pressed into lower-paying, low-skilled jobs, women workers have found themselves facing parallel pressures. Historically and across cultures, women have typically been consigned to service (as opposed to productive) labor, including domestic work, nursing, cleaning and maintenance, and child care. This labor has been culturally devalued as “women’s work,” and it has consequently received lower pay than productive labor in the manufacturing and distribution sectors. This cultural attitude has been reflected in labor costs, as traditionally female occupations such as nursing and teaching have been consistently lower paid than traditionally male work in areas such as trucking and auto manufacturing. With the onset of industrial capitalism, more and more women entered traditionally male sectors of the economy, but they still received lower pay and found themselves excluded from supervisory positions as well as male-led unions. Indeed, some women workers, excluded from these unions, were forced to form women-only unions in shops where men had already won collective bargaining rights. As recently as 2003, women in the United States earned only 75 percent of the full-time salary of their male counterparts. Where gender and race intersect, wage discrimination is strongest. In 2002, black women earned just 68 cents for every dollar earned by a male worker, while Latina women earned just 56 cents for every male dollar.

Ultimately, the common determining factors for cheap labor (e.g., displacement, social vulnerability, low-skilled jobs, competition among workers) hold true across borders and are found in any Western, industrial, capitalist economy. The justifications for these exploitative labor practices are similarly universal—cheap laborers are consistently blamed for their circumstances, either due to innate, biological deficiencies or poor individual choices. These justifications skirt the plain truth, which is that cheap labor is actively pursued by the capitalist class, which uses racial, gender, and class prejudices to divide workers and render them vulnerable to employer coercion.

SEE ALSO Workfare and Welfare.