Anth 410C  Wolf, Chap. 12, Labor

Key of wage labor: flexibility for employers

Re. Nature of mix of high vs. low plant to labor costs: p. 357

1.     When new technology adopted, low wages may make older technology competitive: Arkwright roller spinning with water power vs. more productive mule spinners.

2.     Delegate some parts of the production process to low-wage, low-investment producers

3.     Increases in the scale of plants and firms, intended to lower production costs per unit of output, may actually reach a critical point where unit production costs remain unchanged or even go up.

4.     Intervening factors: concentration, location, management, labor discipline, demand.

Segmented or differentiated labor market:

          “labor aristocracy” vs. unskilled, rotating labor

Deskilling of once-skilled jobs

Industrial reserve army

Differences among working classes:

1)     origin and history (e.g., cosmopolitan trades vs. industrial workers of peasant background)

2)     composition: e.g., status as members of families (women, children, single men, married householders, phase in life-cycle, migrants …)

3)     nature of social ties among workers (homogenous origins, diverse origins…)

4)     nature of social institutions in working class communities (churches, pubs, etc.)

5)     nature of ties with other than working classes (patrons, kinship…)

Transformations of cities: from governing and trade centers to industrial, manufacturing centers.

Immigration: Nature of sending community, nature of receiving community

• p. 362: “The migrant’s position is determined not so much by the migrant or his culture as by the structure of the situation in which he finds himself.”
• e.g., few Irish Catholics came to US before 1847 (famine), though many Scots Irish did. Reason? 1) bonds to land; 2) anti-Catholic sentiment in U.S.
• Labor contracting vs. landsman chain migration
• Note that England sent far fewer migrants to US than did Ireland and Germany (1820-1860: 750,000; 2 million, 1.5 million respectively)

Creation of native reserves that simultaneously provided labor and supported laborers outside of capitalist economy. (foreshadow my paper)

Ethnic segmentation: “Plural societies”:

Capitalism did not create all the distinctions of ethnicity and race that function to set off categories of workers from one another. It is, nevertheless, the process of labor mobilization under capitalism that imparts to these distinctions their effective values. P. 380

• by ordering the groups and categories of laborers hierarchically with respect to one another
• by continuously producing and re-creating symbolically marked “cultural” distinctions among them

Racial classifications are the outcome of the subjugation of populations in the course of European mercantile expansion.

Ethnic categories express the ways that particular populations come to relate themselves to given segments of the labor market. Such categories emerge from two sources, one external to the group in question, the other internal. Outside stereotyping, internal affinities and solidarities for political and economic gain.