Wage Earning Slaves

"This volume is the first systematic study of coartación, a process by which slaves worked toward purchasing their freedom in installments. Focusing on Cuba, this book reveals that instead of providing a "path to manumission," the process was often rife with obstacles that blocked slaves from achieving liberty"--

This essay sheds light on the main causes behind wage slavery and elucidates how to escape wage slavery through entrepreneurial endeavors. Moreover, how to make substantial money online through brand building and creating income generating assets without being a wage slave is delineated in this essay. In the digital era, wage slavery is more prevalent than anytime in history. This calamity has been precipitated due to a myriad of reasons that have ultimately contributed to profusely eviscerating individuals out of both their sacrosanct time and hard earned infinitesimal wealth. It is no mystery why wage slavery has become rampant in the digital era in which the cost of living is at an all time high and real wages adjusted for inflation are contrastingly at an all time low. With over 13,000 evisceration fees imposed by bureaucratic apparatuses that incessantly drain the individual's wealth, the insalubrious k-12 13 year compulsory indoctrination camps having already siphoned the individual out of thousands of hours of their sacrosanct time needed to create income generating assets, and the cost of living continuing to amplify to an unprecedented height while the non-sustenance minimum wages for dead end jobs perpetually loose purchasing power every day, it ultimately creates a recipe for perpetual wage slavery, agony, distress, and destitution. This issue of wage slavery has become all the more exacerbated since the fixed amount of fiat currency the wage slave receives does not even provide them with any semblance of a sustenance wage. The disparities in wealth are astronomical to the point in which a small cohort of 8 people have more wealth than 60% of the entire aggregate population. Moreover, it is not uncommon for the average CEO to earn at least 40,0000% more per year than his average employee which means he earns more in one day loafing around than his wage slave employee will earn in an entire year from laboriously trudging away to subsidize the CEO's jets, yachts, trust funds, exotic vacations, and accoutrements of the higher life from the fruits of his labor just to receive a pittance of a fixed amount of fiat currency from a dead-end, minimum wage, unfulfilling, dispiriting job that does not even offer a sustenance wage for even affording ramshackle housing. Unlike in the 1950s in which the CEO may have earned 1500% more per year than their average employee, the disparities in wealth have become so enormous that when dollars are adjusted for inflation, it means that the CEOs are earning far more in a couple week in the digital era than they would have received working the entirety of the year amid the 1950s. The disparities in wealth are not the main drivers behind wage slavery since CEOs have created jobs for hundreds of millions of jobs even though they only offer a negligible amount of revenue to employers. Some people provide substantially more economic value than others and should be able to reap the fruits of their labor commensurate to the amount of economic value they provide others. Out of sheer and utter desperation to immediately attain some semblance of sustenance, prospective wage slaves will concede to being exploited as capital livestock by employers since they will agree to work for a pittance of a fixed amount of fiat currency from a dead-end, minimum wage, unfulfilling, dispiriting job that just provides them with enough income afford to buy groceries and have very little money remaining to buy anything else beyond food product from the discount grocery store. Since these highly time consuming, dead-end, minimum wage, unfulfilling, dispiriting job just offer enough money buying groceries without even being able to afford housing, it keeps the wage slaved entrapped in an inextricable position of poverty and causes them to reach and impasse with no foreseeable way out since food is not free to access and the wage salve does not have a modicum of leverage nor negotiating power.

Wage-Earning Slaves is the first systematic study of coartación, a process by which slaves worked toward purchasing their freedom in installments, long recognized as a distinctive feature of certain areas under Spanish colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Cuba, this book reveals that instead of providing a “path to manumission,” the process was often rife with obstacles that blocked slaves from achieving liberty. Claudia Varella and Manuel Barcia trace the evolution of coartación in the context of urban and rural settings, documenting the lived experiences of slaves through primary sources from many different archives. They show that slave owners grew increasingly intolerant and abusive of the process, and that the laws of coartación were not often followed in practice. The process did not become formalized as a contract between slaves and their masters until 1875, after abolition had already come. Varella and Barcia discuss how coartados did not see an improvement in their situation at this time, but essentially became wage-earning slaves as they continued serving their former owners. The exhaustive research in this volume provides valuable insight into how slaves and their masters negotiated with each other in the ever-changing economic world of nineteenth-century Cuba, where freedom was not always absolute and where abuses and corruption most often prevailed.

"... a very welcome addition to the literature on labour history." --Labour History Review "This is a valuable collection of essays which gives fresh perspectives and interesting empirical data on the modes of labor bargaining by New World slaves and on the transition from 'chattel' to 'wage' slavery." --New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids "Of uniformly high quality, these essays underline the fluidity and dynamic of bargaining processes, the diversity of political and economic contexts, and the importance of external factors.... will provoke discussion on parallels between capitalist agriculture and capitalist industrial organization, and will fuel debates on slave as proletarian, and on the notions of 'peasant breach' and the two economies." --Choice "[These essays] provide important answers to questions relating to levels of slave subsistence, the material conditions of the enslaved, the control mechanisms of owners, the contexts which generated labor bargaining on the part of the enslaved and the reasons owners/employers acquiesced to laborers' demands rather than rely on the coercive power of the whip." --Labor History "[The] contributors deserve commendation for making salutary advances towards developing an integrated analysis of the history of labouring people in slavery and freedom that transcends the particularities of their legal status." --Slavery & Abolition "... this collection addresses an important topic and will serve as a valuable resource for scholars and students of comparative slavery in the Americas." --Judy Bieber, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque The status of labor during slavery and post-emancipation in the Caribbean and the Americas. Contributors investigate the terms under which slaves in the Caribbean, the Southern States, and Latin America worked and how they struggled to establish informal contract terms.

The transition from chattel slavery to forced labour in Africa and the Caribbean during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has commanded increasing attention from scholars in recent years. The Wages of Slavery tackles this subject from a protoproletarian perspective, studies new labour regimes in Africa and the Caribbean, and discusses work practices before and after emancipation the nature of the working week, subsistence and surplus for slaves and free person, and labour negotiations and confrontations.

This book explores how a generation of American thinkers and reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, labor advocates, jurists, moralists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free society. Their arguments over the meaning of slavery and freedom were grounded in changing circumstances of labor and home life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. At the heart of these arguments lay the problem of defining which realms of self and social existence could be rendered market commodities and which could not. From Bondage to Contract reveals how the problem of distinguishing between what was saleable and what was not reflected the ideological and social changes wrought by the concurrence of abolition in the South and burgeoning industrial capitalism in the North.

"With the home the sacred center of social life in the nineteenth-century United States, few social tensions carried more weight than "the servant problem." As slavery tore at the nation, tension about domestic dependency became a heated topic to which publishers responded by producing a steady stream of literature instructing homemakers how to hire, treat, and discipline staff. In Love, Wages, Slavery, Barbara Ryan surveys an expansive collection of these published materials to chart shifts in thinking about what made a servant "good" and how servitors felt about attending non-kin, as well as changing ideas about gender, waged and chattel labor, status, race, and family life." "Love, Wages, Slavery examines the nature of "free" servitude before and after Emancipation through an in-depth comparison of negotiations of attendance and household management. Paying particular attention to women servants, Ryan traces a complex discussion as it developed in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly, Godey's Lady's Book, and Harper's Bazar."--BOOK JACKET.

Co-winner, 2010 Merle Curti Award, Organization of American HistoriansWinner, 2010 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, ILR School at Cornell University and the Labor and Working-Class History AssociationWinner, 2010 H. L. Mitchell Award, Southern Historical Association Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end labor market in post-Revolutionary Baltimore. Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic. In the era of Frederick Douglass, Baltimore's distinctive economy featured many slaves who earned wages and white workers who performed backbreaking labor. By focusing his study on this boomtown, Rockman reassesses the roles of race and region and rewrites the history of class and capitalism in the United States during this time. Rockman describes the material experiences of low-wage workers—how they found work, translated labor into food, fuel, and rent, and navigated underground economies and social welfare systems. He also explores what happened if they failed to find work or lost their jobs. Rockman argues that the American working class emerged from the everyday struggles of these low-wage workers. Their labor was indispensable to the early republic’s market revolution, and it was central to the transformation of the United States into the wealthiest society in the Western world. Rockman’s research includes construction site payrolls, employment advertisements, almshouse records, court petitions, and the nation’s first “living wage” campaign. These rich accounts of day laborers and domestic servants illuminate the history of early republic capitalism and its consequences for working families.