Labor in America (eBook)

A History

Melvyn Dubofsky, Joseph A. McCartin (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
496 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-394-20826-5 (ISBN)

Infos

The gold standard of American labor history references, updated to include the latest political, social, and economic developments of the 2020s

Labor in America: A History, Tenth Edition, is a comprehensive and authoritative discussion of the U.S. labor movement from the colonial era to the 2020s. Authors Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin have expanded and updated their landmark text, incorporating significant recent events and their implications for American labor. The book addresses the continuing and evolving challenges faced by American workers, critical developments in U.S. labor history, the impact of economic and political changes, and more.

Dubofsky and McCartin offer nuanced analyses of workers' collective actions, the formation of unions, and the role of labor in shaping American society. They provide a rich historical context and a detailed narrative of labor history for students, scholars, and laypersons alike. The authors also explain the likely impact of major contemporary trends on workers, including the rise of the gig economy, and discuss the most critical influences on modern U.S. labor.

An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history and future of labor in the United States, Labor in America: A History will undoubtedly remain the gold standard in the field for years to come.

Melvyn Dubofsky is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History & Sociology at Binghamton University, SUNY, USA. He has published extensively on labor history and has been a key figure in the field since the 1960s.

Joseph A. McCartin is a Professor of History and Executive Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor & the Working Poor at Georgetown University. He has authored and edited numerous books on U.S. labor history and is a prominent voice in contemporary labor studies.

Textauszug

1
Laboring a Nation into Being

The development of the colonies that became the United States depended upon a vast array of human labor: waged and unwaged; productive and reproductive; artisan and unskilled; agricultural and household. That labor was carried out by diverse peoples, who worked under vastly different conditions, ranging from freely immigrating or indentured Europeans to Africans forcibly transported and enslaved. Between 1619 and 1776, their exertions, whether coerced by a whip and chains or rewarded by a wage and the promise of land and a more abundant life, would transform North America’s eastern seaboard into the world’s most dynamic outpost of settler colonialism, one that would in time give rise to the world’s dominant economic power. As that economy took shape, it would be stamped from the beginning by the sharp distinctions between free and unfree labor upon which it was built.

In the first two and a half centuries of colonization, the east coast and its hinterlands were overwhelmingly rural. Upward of 90 percent of settlers lived in a countryside that had been occupied for millennia by American Indian peoples whose economies depended upon the abundance of the land and waters. The labor systems of these different indigenous cultures had been organized around farming, fishing, and hunting and informed by values much different from the concepts of land ownership and acquisitive individualism that European settlers brought with them. Europeans soon found that the main obstacle they faced in transplanting their conceptions of economy into North America was a shortage of labor.

The early settlers had barely landed in Virginia and Massachusetts when they realized the imperative need for workers. In its first voyage to Jamestown and three succeeding expeditions, the Virginia Company had sent to the New World a motley band of adventurers, soldiers, and gentlemen. In growing despair of establishing a stable colony out of such people lacking in skills and laboring experience, Captain John Smith finally entered an urgent protest. “When you send again,” he wrote home emphatically, “I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, masons, and diggers of trees’ roots, well provided, than a thousand such as we have.” Plymouth fared better. Among the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay in 1630 there were enough artisans that the Bishop of London disparaged them as “cobblers, tailors, feltmakers, and such‐like trash.” Still, the founders of colonial New England, like those of Virginia, worried about the scarcity of free people willing to perform the work necessary to build successful colonies. Cotton Mather thus made it “an Article of special Supplication before the Lord, that he would send a good servant.”

Struggling with a shortage of necessary labor, the colonists considered alternatives. Even as colonists negotiated with Native peoples or made war upon them to take their land, they also attempted to enslave them to address their labor shortage. Spanish conquistadors did the same in New Mexico. In addition to importing Africans into Florida, the conquistadors captured and enslaved Apache and Navajo during war, referring to them as genizaros. (The general prohibition of indigenous slavery in New Spain did not apply to those taken prisoner in war.) As much as one‐third of the population of New Mexico were genizaros by the late eighteenth century. However, along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, Native tribes for the most part succeeded in resisting the colonists’ sporadic efforts to enslave them. Thus, colonial settlers were forced to look back across the Atlantic to two sources of bound labor that together would provide the essential foundation of a growing colonial economy: indentured servants from Europe and enslaved inhabitants of Africa.

Varieties of Bound Labor

The majority of that bound labor force during the early colonial years was furnished by indentured servants: laborers who signed contracts of indenture in Europe; and “redemptioners,” whose cost of passage to the colonies was paid by their indenture (sale) at auction in their port of arrival. They formed the bulk of a labor force in which waged work initially proved the exception. Indentured laborers worked the tobacco farms of the Chesapeake region, provided household labor on farms and in towns in every colony, and engaged in all sorts of labor for their masters.

Attracting indentured laborers was not easy. Agents of the colonial planters and of British merchants scoured the countryside and towns of England, and later even parts of continental Europe, to advertise the advantages of emigrating to America. These crimps and newlanders, as the agents were called, distributed handbills extolling the colonies, as a place where food, land, and opportunity abounded. Nor did they hesitate to engage in fraud. Their extravagant promises induced many to sign articles of indenture with little idea of the hardships that awaited them. Believing that England was overpopulated, local authorities cooperated with these recruitment efforts, hoping especially to rid their communities of so‐called paupers and vagabonds. On occasion, authorities would round up those deemed undesirable and force them to choose between indentured emigration and imprisonment.

Among those generally targeted for transportation were orphans and other minors who had no means of support. In 1619, the Common Council of London designated “one hundred Children out of the swarms that swarme in the place, to be sent to Virginia to be bound as apprentices for certain yeares.” For its part, the Privy Council authorized the Virginia Company to “imprison, punish and dispose of any of those children upon any disorder by them committed, as cause shall require; and so to Shipp them out for Virginia, with as much expedition as may stand for convenience.” The term kidnapping originated to describe the practice of nabbing children and then transporting them to the colonies. When it came to recruiting indentured labor for the colonies, the line between voluntary and involuntary transportation – especially when it involved young children and the poor – was never clear.

Figure 1.1 Certificate of indenture, 1767. This certificate bound one Mary Elizabeth Bauer to Samuel Pleasants for five years of labor in return for his payment of her passage to the American colonies. (With permission of Historical Society of Pennsylvania.)

Prisons too became important sources for indentured labor. Imprisoned people transported across the Atlantic as “His Majesty’s Seven‐Year Passengers” were often simply poor and thus deemed incorrigible. But when the market demanded, even those who committed more serious crimes could find themselves bound for the colonies. The prerevolutionary roster of arrivals in one Maryland county totaled 655 persons and included 111 women. Among their crimes were murder, rape, highway robbery, horse‐stealing, and grand larceny. Contemporary accounts described many of the women as “lewd.”

Many colonials objected to the importation of those who were imprisoned. An “abundance of them do great Mischiefs,” one complained. “Our Mother knows what is best for us,” one bitter contributor to the Pennsylvania Gazette groused in 1751. “What is a little Housebreaking, Shoplifting, or Highway‐robbing … compared with this Improvement and Well peopling of the Colonies?’” Benjamin Franklin bitterly declared that the policy of “emptying their jails into our settlements is an insult and contempt the cruellest, that ever one people offered another.” But such protests were of little avail. Roughly 50,000 people convicted of crimes were transported, largely to the middle colonies. In Maryland, a favored destination, they were the majority of indentured servants in the eighteenth century.

Although involuntary transportation played an important role in the assembly of a colonial labor force, most indentures were voluntary. Indentured servitude largely replicated English patterns of rural employment and adapted them to the labor market realities of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century, redistributing labor to a region where it was scarcer and hence more valuable. Ultimately, the indentured servants who responded to the pull of the colonial labor market constituted a broad cross‐section of the laboring classes.

But redistribution was scarcely smooth. Emigration to the colonies was risky. Often as many as 300 passengers sailed on small vessels – overcrowded, unsanitary, and with insufficient provisions for voyages that could take from 7 to 12 weeks. Typhus and other diseases took a terrible toll. The mortality rate was sometimes as high as 50 percent. “During the voyage,” reads one account of the experiences of redemptioners recruited from the German Palatinate, “there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of seasickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth rot, and the like, all of which come from old and sharply‐salted food and meat, also from the very bad and foul water, so that many die miserable. … The misery reaches a climax when a gale rages for two or three nights so that everyone believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board. In such a visitation the people cry and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.9.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• ISBN-10: 1-394-20826-X / 139420826X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-394-20826-5 / 9781394208265