From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers- Transformation of the Soci

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Industrial & Labor Relations Review

| Number 1Volume 58 Article 90

2004

From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers:Transformation of the Social Question

Robert Castel

Review ofFrom Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question, by RobertCastel. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, Vol. 58, No. 1.Available at: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58/iss1/90
http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreviewhttp://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58/iss1http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58/iss1/90http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58/iss1/90http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58/iss1http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreviewhttp://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/


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From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the SocialQuestion

This book review is available in Industrial & Labor Relations Review: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58/iss1/90
http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58/iss1/90http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58/iss1/90


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BOOK REVIEWS 157

proposals to curb imports and a proliferation oflabor-management cooperation schemes,proved ineffective in resuscitating the unionidea. Lichtenstein concludes on a somewhatoptimistic note, finding in the Los Angeles la-bor movement an approximation of the politi-cized bargaining and labor-community alliancesneeded to return the labor question to centerstage. Yet he also notes the episodic characterof union expansion, acknowledging that a spe-cial set of historical circumstances is needed inorder to create an atmosphere in which theunion idea might fully re-emerge.

This is an important, timely book whose fo-cus on ideas and ideology offers a fresh perspec-tive that is sure to generate useful debate over

labors historical choices and current status. Attimes, however, Lichtenstein gives too muchweight to ideological influences in explainingthe erosion of working-class solidarity, an inte-gral element in his conception of the unionidea. For example, it was not industrial plural-ists or the courts that prompted workers tothink of themselves as homeowners, taxpayers,and consumers rather than as industrial citi-zens. When private sector workers have seentheir interests as antithetical to those of publicsector workers or unionists have allowed racialor ethnic identifications to trump their union

or working-class sensibilities, intellectuals andpolicy makers were by and large not responsiblefor this unwillingness to demonstrate solidarity.Although Lichtenstein recognizes these tensionswithin the working class, his eagerness to blameintellectuals and social critics for the decline ofthe union idea understates the complicatedways in which American workers have histori-cally processed the issue of class and approachedthe practice of solidarity.

Another area where Lichtenstein seems tooverreach is his analysis of the postWorld War

II era. He minimizes labors collective bargain-ing achievements, regards grievance and arbi-tration machinery as suffocating to rank-and-file activism, and chides unions for failing toaggressively pursue a social democratic agenda.Yet collective bargaining was often a creative,dynamic force during this period that helpedpropel many unionized workers into the middleclass and also benefited workers in related non-union sectors. Although the grievance/arbitra-tion system could be cumbersome and bureau-cratic, it was still seen by many workers as avehicle by which managements hand could be

stayed on the shop floor. Finally, to accuselabor of a strategic error of the first order fornot pressing for government-provided benefits

seems unduly harsh in light of Lichtensteinsacknowledgment, a page later, that the revivalof postwar conservatism had blocked any ex-pansion of the welfare state. To be sure,Lichtenstein is right to point out the limits ofcollective bargaining and the postwar accord.However, by undervaluing labors achievementsduring this period and the genuine differencethey made in many working-class lives, he pre-sents too bleak a picture of the unionmovements standing and impact during thiscritical period.

Still, Lichtenstein has performed a most valu-able service in his astute delineation of thespecific historical circumstances that have bothadvanced and eroded the union idea during the

twentieth century. State of the Unionshould berequired reading for those who share his con-viction about the social necessity for a stronglabor movement and are attempting to makethe labor question a matter of mainstream con-cern.

Robert BusselDirector, Labor Education and

Research CenterAssociate Professor of HistoryUniversity of Oregon

From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Trans-formation of the Social Question. By RobertCastel; translated and edited by RichardBoyd. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction,2003. xxvii, 468 pp. ISBN 0-76580-1493,$49.95 (cloth).

Robert Castel, Director of Studies at the coledes hautes tudes en sciences sociales in Paris, haswritten a monumental study that reconstructs

the development of the social question fromthe fourteenth century to the present day. Inthe style of Marx, Durkheim, and Foucault,Castel uses the disaffiliated vagabond to showhow our concept of social worth has come to beassociated with work and with wage labor.He argues that as capitalist society emergedfrom feudalism, it established a clear line sepa-rating the worthy poor, those who worked aswage laborers, from the unworthy, who choseidleness over disciplined wage work. Thissocial standard supported capitalist growth andprofitability by forcing the poor to choose be-

tween wage labor and starvation. But the mix ofcapitalism and compulsory labor has been un-stable. As wage labor has become the social


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158 INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS REVIEW

norm, it has produced a working class able todemand social protection through a strong wel-fare state; but this has led employers to seekcheaper labor elsewhere, ultimately undermin-ing employment for a growing part of the laborforce. Now, Castel argues, France faces a crisis.The return to full employment is almost cer-tainly impossible, he argues, but one cannotfound citizenship on social uselessness (pp.425, 403).

Castel begins his investigation of the natureof wage labor in modern capitalism with thetransition from feudalism and the establish-ment of free wage-labor and free access tolabor. The decline of serfdom and, later, thecollapse of rural industry and the urban artisanal

crafts freed workers from the ties of proximitythat connected them to social support in theirlocal communities. By dissolving these old con-nections and old forms of social solidarity, capi-talism freed workers to seek employment wherethey could be most productive and best com-pensated. But it also freed them from the socialsupports and security that sustained them out-side of wage labor.

Modern society, Castel argues, was built on awage-earning proletariat, workers bound to workunder the management of others because theylacked any other forms of support. Castel ex-

plores the creation of modern labor relations byinvestigating the treatment of vagabonds andother paupers, individuals who sought subsis-tence outside of wage contracts. Quoting Alexisde Tocqueville, he observes that poverty in nine-teenth-century Europe was least common in thepoorest countries and most common in thewealthiest (page 196). He finds that this was nocoincidence, because the basis of industrial pro-ductivity under modern capitalism is the pre-cariousness of jobs that drives the working classto labor. The concept of class struggle, he adds,

was invented not by collectivists, but by conser-vatives and moderates who recognized that thewage-earning proletariat formed a nation withinthe nation located outside of society by itspoverty and unemployment but at the center ofmodernization (page 206).

Castel interprets nineteenth- and twentieth-century social policy as an attempt to reinte-grate the proletariat into society by reducingthe insecurity and consequent dependency ofworking-class life. Employer paternalism of-fered increased security but at the cost of a formof tutelage in which workers accepted a subordi-

nate role. Paternalist efforts foundered on thedemocratic aspirations of modern polities andthe working class itself. More successful were

the state-sponsored relief and insurance pro-grams now associated with the modern welfarestate. Castel dates the new integration of laborin France to the establishment of paid holidaysunder the Popular Front of the mid-1930s. Sym-bolically, this meant that for some days eachyear, workers were now living outside of theindignity of wage labor. On this narrowbeach of time, Castel writes, the working liferecovers an essential characteristic of bour-geois existence, a freedom to choose what to door whether to do nothing (p. 316).

This, Castel concludes, began the relativeintegration of the working class into modernliberal society. The rising wages and socialprotections won during the glorious 30 years

after World War II would gut the working classof its historical potentialities that had givenbirth to the workers movement. But Castelargues they did not abolish working-class dis-tinctiveness. Rather than creating a new formof society, labor accommodated itself to a sub-ordinate position in a wage-earning society (p.326). This left it vulnerable to the next capital-ist maneuver, the globalizing of labor and prod-uct markets that has now created a crisis ofunemployment and a deficit of occupiableplaces. Instead of an exploited proletariat,France now has a supernumerary class of nearly

3.5 million unemployed workers whose jobs arefilled by foreigners earning a fraction of whatworkers have come to expect in modern France.Globalization has thus exposed the flaw in so-cial democracy in any one state or even in agroup of states. Rising wages and social insur-ance have not changed the fundamental insecu-rity inherent in wage labor.

High unemployment challenges establishedwelfare states, threatening both the financingof entitlement benefits and workers place withinsociety. But behind his analysis of the crisis of

the welfare state, Castel makes claims aboutglobalization that are familiar to American la-bor economists and may be as overstated assimilar claims made for the United States. InEurope, as in the United States, I suspect ob-servers are much too quick to attribute socialproblems to foreign trade, problems that arelargely due to other government policies. Highunemployment reflects weak domestic demandfor labor that is really due to the restrictivepolicies of European governments, theMaastricht Accord, the Stability and GrowthPact, and the monetary policies of the new

European Central Bank. Globalization andimports from the Third World only contributeto unemployment to the extent that national


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governments and the EU allow cheap importsand maintain an over-valued Euro. I suspectthat Europes unemployment problem could besolved by an expansionary monetary and fiscalpolicy combined with some targeted relief aimedat pockets of high unemployment. Europeansocial democracy did not fail; it was abandoned.

Robert Castel takes no joy in seeing moderndemocracy struggle to reintegrate a growingnumber of its members whose only crime is tobe unemployable (p. 406). I suspect he wouldbe delighted if we could return to the glorious30 years when growth helped conceal the con-flicts and strains inherent in a wage-earningsociety. Whether we can return to those years ofhigh employment and rising wages remains an

open question. But this challenging study showsclearly how important it is that we try.

Gerald FriedmanAssociate Professor of EconomicsUniversity of Massachusetts

at Amherst

Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical In-spection and the Shaping of the Modern Indus-trial Labor Force. By Amy L. Fairchild. xiii,

385 pp. Baltimore: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8018-7080-1, $48.00 (cloth).

From 1891 (when the federal governmentfinally assumed exclusive responsibility for thedesign and implementation of the nations im-migration policies) until 1924 (when the Immi-gration Act of 1924 shifted the issuance of allentry visas abroad to U.S. Consular offices), amedical inspection was required of all would-beimmigrants to the United States at the time of

entry. During these years, 70% of all entriesoccurred at Ellis Island, N.Y. (which opened in1892). There was no annual ceiling on immi-gration over this time span, but there were anumber of exclusions that prohibited desig-nated categories of immigrants from entering.The relevant mandatory exclusions applied toany person with dangerous diseases (for ex-ample, trachoma or tuberculosis) or loathsomediseases (for example, fovas, syphilis, or lep-rosy), as well as to insane persons and idiots.There were also discretionary exclusions thatpertained to conditions that might affect the

ability to work (for example, heart disease, poorphysique, varicose veins, or senility). In Scienceat the Borders, Amy Fairchild analyzes the role

that this mandatory medical examination playedboth as a negative screening device and as apositive socializing tool to foster the assimila-tion of the immigrants into the American laborforce.

It fell upon the U.S. Public Health Service toconduct the examinations and the ImmigrationService (the name of which changed severaltimes during this period) to render the enforce-ment decision as to whether any certified medi-cal condition rose to the level of requiringexclusion. Given the massive scale of immigra-tion during this period (over 25 million per-sons), most of these procedures had to be con-ducted in a perfunctory manner. Most immi-grants at all ports of entry received little more

than a medical gaze lasting less than 40 sec-onds. Some were moved aside for more thor-ough examinations; some were treated for theirconditions and held in detention until theycould pass. All of this occurred at a time whenthe science of identifying and assessing thesignificance of physical and mental disabilitieswas in its infancy. The facilities where the initialinspections were conductedespecially thoseperformed along the Mexican-U.S. border, theGulf Coast, and the West Coastwere typicallyspartan. Inadequate funding and the lack ofpolitical clout of the two agenciesproblems

that bedevil immigration enforcement to thisdaymade the actual deportation of immigrantsdifficult. To the immigrants themselves, how-ever, who had little or no knowledge of theImmigration Services limitations and fearedthe consequences of a negative decision, pass-ing was of vital concern.

The major contribution of this study, how-ever, is not its disclosure of the immigrantsmedical status, or of inspectors differentialtreatment of different immigrant groups (al-though such information is provided). It is,

rather, the authors case for her contention thatthe medical inspection was intended to controlrather than to exclude (p.106) immigrants.The inspection, she argues, was meant to focusthe attention of would-be immigrantsmost ofwhom were from rural peasant backgroundson the primacy of good health and hygienepractices if one was to become an efficient andself-sustaining worker in an urban industrialeconomy.

Despite the severe wording of the laws, there-fore, the medical examination was not centeredon ascertaining the general health of the immi-

grants. Rather, it concentrated on detectingthose diseases that might disable the body and,therefore, impair the ability of the individual to

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From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers- Transformation of the Soci