- 31 Mar 2021 04:06
#15163936
I personally see a pattern of wage slavery here in the U.S. I am sure other forum members would agree. This particular article discusses this apparent reality here in today's modern day America.
The author, Alex Gourevitch, further writes:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/wage ... ders-labor
Alex Gourevitch of Jacobin wrote:It is natural to think there is something deeply unfree about work in the contemporary United States. Describing her job in an Amazon warehouse, journalist Emily Guendelsberger writes, “I walked up to sixteen miles a day to keep up with the rate at which I was supposed to pick orders. A GPS-enabled scanner tracked my movements and constantly informed me how many seconds I had left to complete my task.” A man employed at a different facility said he found pervasive surveillance and inhuman speed “so soul-sucking I found myself nearly crying in my car right before I was supposed to walk in.”
That feeling is connected to a real material fact about the workplace: one of the defining features of the employment relationship in all capitalist countries is that the worker’s will is, by law, “subordinate” to the employers. The employer has the right, within broad bounds, to define the nature of the task, who performs it, and how. This shows up in all kinds of surveillance, control, and submission — also known as maximizing productivity and extracting profit.
Just consider who controls one of the body’s most essential functions: going to the bathroom. Workers in the United States can be forced to urinate during employer-mandated drug testing; or forbidden from urinating if it isn’t break time. In Amazon warehouses, workers, whose every move is tracked, forego trips to the restroom to avoid being disciplined or fired for too much “time off task.” In a poultry-packing plant, employees were forced to wear diapers to work because they said they knew they would be let go if they demanded the bathroom breaks their bosses denied them. Employers control or seek to control many other aspects of workers’ lives, from their Facebook posts and political speech to the wages they earn and the rates at which they work.
It is no surprise, then, that there is a long history of comparing capitalist wage labor to chattel slavery.
In 1873, Ira Steward, son of abolitionists and founder of the eight-hours movement, looked out over the United States’ industrial sweatshops, its fourteen-hour days for poverty wages, and wrote, “Something of slavery still remains.” His point was not that wage labor and slavery were the same, but that, for all the talk of emancipation, many aspects of the employment relationship smacked more of servitude than of freedom.
The author, Alex Gourevitch, further writes:
Alex Gourevitch of Jacobin wrote:After the Civil War, the critique of “wage slavery” really took off. A group I have elsewhere called “labor republicans” drew on and extended the earlier views of people like Skidmore and Evans to argue that capitalist labor relations failed to live up to their promise. Labor republicanism formed the guiding ideology of the Knights of Labor. Founded in 1869, the Knights were the first national labor association to organize relatively unskilled black workers together with whites on a mass basis — an effort not meaningfully duplicated in the United States for another fifty years. In 1886, their membership peaked at nearly 1 million workers, with everyone from predominantly white Northern shoemakers to Southern black cane-cutters carrying a Knights of Labor card.
In articles with titles like “Wages Slavery and Chattel Slavery,” the Knights argued that “the whole process of civilization has been to emancipate human beings from the condition of slavery in which they have been held by their fellow men . . . [however] civilization has not yet reached its highest point of development, nor can it develop much further without first having abolished wages slavery, for that form of slavery stands to-day as one of the greatest barriers to the progress of civilization.”
This “wage slavery,” the Knights contended, first appeared in the dependence of propertyless workers on their employers. Lacking any reasonable alternative but to look for a job, workers were in a structurally subordinate role. This made the labor contract something less than fully free. As George E. McNeill, one of the Knights’ leading figures, put it, in a labor contract, the workers “assent but they do not consent, they submit but they do not agree.”
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/wage ... ders-labor
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