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Book Review
| Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 329. $60.00, cloth (ISBN 0-521-77360-1); 23.00, paper (ISBN 0-521-77400-4).
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| Robert Steinfeld's goal in this ambitious book is nothing less than a radical reinterpretation of the history of free wage labor in the nineteenth-century United States and Great Britain. Common wisdom and historiographical tradition, he argues, have produced a conception of the "free wage labor of our imaginations" (315) in which wage labor has always been free in the sense we think of it today—that is, in which workers are free to choose whom they will work for (provided, of course, they get hired) and, crucially, free to quit a job if they so chose. Free labor (and other forms of "freedom") ostensibly accompanied the rise of a free market society, which in turn replaced older, state-regulated labor markets and more coercive forms of labor control. Presumably marked by an absence of strict, legal contract enforcement, modern free labor represented a state of affairs "perfectly acceptable to employers," who relied on the "dull compulsion of economic relations to secure all the labor they needed at prices they were willing to pay" (2). Steinfeld further insists that ingrained in people's minds is a sharp distinction between pecuniary pressures aimed at compelling workers to work–-for example, one must work or go hungry–-and nonpecuniary remedies–-for example, legal enforcement of labor contracts implying threat of imprisonment for contract breach. This distinction, he argues, is how we differentiate free from unfree labor, with pecuniary pressures representing a regime of free labor and nonpecuniary pressures representing a regime of unfree, or even slave, labor. |
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Although Steinfeld concedes that "hardly anyone accepts" (1) this narrative in this form any more, he believes it nonetheless has "left its stamp" (1) on our understandings of nineteenth-century wage labor and its assumptions are those we "carry around in our heads" (4). According to Steinfeld, those understandings and assumptions are "deeply flawed" (83). There are several crucial elements to his argument. The first insists that the dichotomy between free and unfree labor is too starkly drawn, for classically understood forms of unfree labor like slavery included pecuniary incentives with their nonpecuniary compulsions while classically understood forms of free wage labor combined coercion (nonpecuniary pressures) with its incentives. In practice, even free labor's pecuniary aspects could prove coercive, for wage workers often labored under the unpalatable choice of working or going hungry. In place of the binary opposition of free and unfree labor Steinfeld recommends the notion of a broad continuum of the "degrees of coercive pressure that can be brought to bear to elicit labor" (16). |
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The second thrust of Steinfeld's argument, and the one he spends much of his book demonstrating, involves the prevalence of legal, coercive, nonpecuniary tools aimed at limiting workers' choices, particularly in England. Early and mid-nineteenth-century English workers were frequently hired under contracts that specified the length of time they would work for their employer (a year, a month, or several weeks, for instance); as late as the 1860s, "employment at will was far from being the norm" (169). A variety of statutes provided for criminal sanctions for workers accused of employment contract breaches. Once convicted, a worker might serve months at hard labor before being forced to return to his (or her) employers' control to complete the contract. Penal sanctions were "an integral part" (47) of the market revolution, Steinfeld argues, as employers enthusiastically supported and utilized them well "into the second half of the nineteenth century" (72). Indeed, he estimates that between 1857 and 1875, an average of 10,000 workers in England and Wales were charged under master and servant laws with contract breaches and were "dragged into the criminal justice system" (81). By the 1860s, a concerted campaign, backed by organized labor, was underway to oppose long contracts, support "minute" or at-will contracts, and change the master and servant laws to ban penal sanctions. The Employers and Workmen Act of 1875 made it substantially more difficult for employers to utilize penal sanctions, ultimately leading to the "effective end of imprisonment following breaches of labor agreements" (218). |
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Free labor's history in the United States followed a different trajectory. Employers there had little access to nonpecuniary tools after the 1830s. Whether one was a free wage laborer or a contract laborer imported from Europe, an individual could not be imprisoned for breach of the employment contract. The abolition of slavery in the northern states and the exigencies of local American politics produced a set of employment rules that excluded criminal sanctions for employment contract breeches in the antebellum era. Yet contract enforcement was an important issue to employers and the courts. Instead of penal sanctions, employers often relied upon the threat of wage forfeiture to keep employees at work for the duration of a labor contract. (How often they did this, or how extensive or effective this threat was, are questions Steinfeld does not fully address). Even this tool was judicially restricted when the courts, by the early twentieth century, increasingly undermined the doctrine of "entirety"—under which workers had to perform all of the work agreed to, either completing an agreed-upon term of labor or completing an agreed-upon task before receiving payment—by viewing it as unnecessarily harsh and as "always odious both at law and in equity" (302). In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court resolved lingering questions about involuntary servitude, particularly for southern African Americans, in Bailey v. Alabama, which ruled that peonage was impermissible. The American and British cases suggest to Steinfeld that modern free labor "did not arise as the result of the spread of liberal ideas or the diffusion of 'free' markets based on 'free' contract." Rather, it "is the result of a difficult political and moral resolution of fundamental conflicts within liberalism ... of the liberal paradox of coercion and consent" (284). |
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Steinfeld's detailed and impressive study is based overwhelmingly on an examination of laws, individual court cases, and on legislative debates and enactments, not on the actual social history of the trades or groups of workers he mentions. Surprisingly, though, he draws relatively little on the large, secondary literature in business, labor, and social history that would have allowed him to "humanize" the cases he explores or, more importantly, to assess more fully the impact of the abstract forces he analyzes. But he succeeds well in demolishing what he calls the "conventional wisdom" that establishes a false picture of a pure and non-coercive free wage labor; the thrust of his arguments will be accepted readily by countless labor historians, whose studies chronicle in considerable detail workers' actual experiences of wage labor in practice. |
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| Eric Arnesen
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| University of Illinois at Chicago |
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