"Humbug" or "Human Good?": E.P. Thompson, the Rule of Law and Coercive Labor Relations Under Neoliberal American Capitalism

Clark, Gabrielle

doi:10.1093/jsh/shv041

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Moreover, post-slavery, any legal compulsion to work has been interpreted as a badge tantamount to slavery (see Montgomery 1993;Roediger 1991). Although, new unfreedoms at work are considered part and parcel of liberalism (see Clark 2015;Dru Stanley 1992;Oshinsky 1997;Vitalis 2006). 3 The precise number of temporary foreign workers is unknown (DHS only tracks visa entries, not exits; thus, it is not possible to know how many non-agricultural workers remain in the US for each three-year visa period).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Under this view, neoliberal labor regulatory change in the United States and elsewhere is no longer merely seen as a "roll-back" process, defined by the minimization of Keynesian labor market protections, such as collective bargaining rights and welfare retrenchment. Neoliberalism is instead conceived as furthering unfree labor, such as "workfare", prison labor, undocumented labor, and global child labor (see Clark 2015;Lerche 2007;Wacquant 2010 1997:67). 15 The 1914 Smith-Lever Act established a partnership between the agricultural colleges and the USDA to provide for cooperative agricultural extension work.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, post‐slavery, any legal compulsion to work has been interpreted as a badge tantamount to slavery (see Montgomery ; Roediger ). Although, new unfreedoms at work are considered part and parcel of liberalism (see Clark ; Dru Stanley ; Oshinsky ; Vitalis ).…”

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confidence: 99%

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From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

Clark

2016

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In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post-slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non-citizen migrants. At the same time, state-enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post-slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post-Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

Clark

2016

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“…v. NLRB, 535 U.S. 137 (2002), has been shown to be contemporaneously true under the undocumented labor order: that deportation is shaped by labor and employment rights. See Fisk and Wishnie (2005) and Clark (2015). 9.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…My findings ultimately direct us to a new understanding of contemporary state transformation and migrant vulnerability across sectors today. Scholars of the new capitalism and deportable labor alike have, to date, highlighted the rollout of coercion across labor processes and the rollback of state protections in the contemporary economy (Jessop 2007; Clark 2015). However, in contrast, I show that while the coercive power of deportation has spread across sectors, new rights and legal processes leave workers more vulnerable to employer coercion under contemporary capitalism than ever before.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coercion and Contract at the Margins: Deportable Labor and the Laws of Employment Termination Under US Capitalism (1942–2015)

Clark¹

2018

Law soc. inq.

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In 1917, Congress created the status of temporary labor migrant. A new kind of restricted worker born from nineteenth-century free labor politics, employer and citizen worker demands under modern liberal capitalism, and state labor market regulation, temporary migrants have always had an employer-dependent legal status and been subject to deportation. Yet, since 1942, changing rights and legal processes have governed migrant employment termination across sectors. By drawing on employment cases from archival and unpublished files made available to me under FOIA, and court decisions, I compare the impact of laws of employment termination on deportable laborers beginning in 1942, when government agencies planned migration, and under privatized migration after 1964. From agriculture and war to today's service and knowledge economies, I demonstrate how employment rights have always shaped deportable workers' legal status. Yet, I also show how today's rights and legal processes, in contrast to the past, hardly mitigate employer control over migrants under contemporary capitalism.

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Introduction: The Global E.P. Thompson

et al. 2016

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This article introduces the present Special Theme on the global reception and appropriation of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963). It aims to interrogate Thompson's legacy and potential vitality at a moment of renewed social and intellectual upheavals. It emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary and global reflection on Thompson's work and impact for understanding how class, nation, and "the people" as subjects of historical inquiry have been repeatedly recast since the 1960s. Examining the course of Thompson's ideas in Japan and West Germany, South Africa and Argentina, as well as Czechoslovakia and Poland, each of the following five articles in the Special Theme is situated in specific and different locations in the global historiographical matrix. Read as a whole, they show how national historiographies have been products of local processes of state and class formation on the one hand, and transnational transfers of intellectual and historiographical ideas, on the other. They highlight the remarkable ability of Thompsonian social history to inspire new lives in varying national contexts shaped by different formations of race, class, and state.

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"Humbug" or "Human Good?": E.P. Thompson, the Rule of Law and Coercive Labor Relations Under Neoliberal American Capitalism

Cited by 3 publications

References 42 publications

From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

Coercion and Contract at the Margins: Deportable Labor and the Laws of Employment Termination Under US Capitalism (1942–2015)

Introduction: The Global E.P. Thompson

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