Overview
 

Lesson Readings & Activities

By the end of this lesson, make sure you have completed the readings and activities found in the Lesson 3 Course Schedule.

Major Themes

Dominant kinds of economies elevated certain types of labor relations over other types of labor systems in a given time in a given society.

• Economies and labor relations are historical; they emerged, developed, ascended or declined in importance, and disappeared or transformed.

Moral economies stressed labor relations of obligations and customs. All parties involved have rights and reciprocal duties.

• Examples of moral economy labor systems are serfs working for feudal lords and apprentices working for master artisans. Serfs expected their feudal lords to protect them from enemies, and feudal lords expected their serfs to fulfill their work duties for the fiefdom.
• Slavery was a devolved form of moral economy. Slave labor ultimately rested upon coercion and fear of coercion. Slaves had no legal rights. Their mutual obligations to slaveholders were one-sided in favor of the slaveholders. Slaveholders, not social institutions like religious organizations and government, had final authority to determine rights and mutual obligations without "legal" input from slaves.

Market economies that include the free wage labor system stress relations of exchange values. All parties involved have rights and contractual obligations.

• An example of a market labor economic system is the modern capitalist labor market like the one in the United States where wage/salary employees work for their employers. Employees sell their labor power in exchange for wages or salaries. Under ideal working conditions, employees have the right to make and break labor contracts and the freedom of mobility to look for desirable employment.

A market economy-dominated society can have labor systems that are not labor markets.

• For example, from mid-seventeenth century to mid-nineteenth century, the chattel slave labor system coexisted with the free wage labor system in what is now the United States.
• Another example, from mid-seventeenth century to mid-eighteenth century, indentured servitude coexisted with the free wage labor and slave labor systems. Indentured servants had contracts and rights that in theory received protection from religious and political institutions.

The market economies that emerged as early as the fourteenth century in Western Europe and that evolved into capitalism from late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries profoundly clashed with civilizations rooted in moral economies.

• For example, English and English American expansionism clashed with Native Americans who practiced communal or cooperative forms of moral economies. From early-fifteenth to late-seventeenth centuries, market economies developed a global reach; these economies were early forms of modern globalization. English-speaking colonies stressed developing market economies while using an array of labor systems. Non-English-speaking colonies stressed moral economies in labor systems, especially upon indigenous inhabitants
• For example, the Spanish colonial encomienda and repartimiento were labor systems colonial authorities maintained as ways to extract labor from indigenous Americans. Market economies tend to compromise or break down moral economies.
• Market economies of capitalist societies tend to stress freedom of action and thought of individuals who are philosophically and legally their own "sovereign" individuals, not units of obligation tied to moral economic relationships
• Market economies, though reinforcing social hierarchies, create possibilities for expanding political rights and attaining political and economic equality.

Gender has shaped the world of work and played a significant role in the division of labor.

• Economic production in many preindustrial societies generally centered on the household or its equivalent, and women had a significant, if not dominant, role in that production.
• Women's economic production had higher "legal" value in a number of traditional Native American and African societies than in many traditional European and Asian societies.
• For example, women were the primary farmers in traditional African and Native American societies and often possessed authority and ownership over their property and the fruits of their labor.

From a legal point of view, labor systems exist on a spectrum from no freedom to much social, political, and economic freedom.

• Self-employment or ownership of capital (wealth that creates wealth) is near or at the pinnacle of total freedom. Free wage labor, despite its variations, has been a mix of low and high levels of freedom. "Free" in free wage labor means freedom to make or break contracts as individuals; free wage labor does not mean that the employee is free to make the final decisions about the nature or process of work at his or her place of employment.

Most English-speaking North American colonies began as commercial adventures that demanded considerable economic development through various forms of "non-freedom" and "restricted-freedom" labor.

• Slave labor was non-freedom, and indentured servitude, convict labor, and apprentice labor were forms of restricted-freedom labor. Although backed by commercial interests, the colonies in New England and Pennsylvania were essentially non-commercial enterprises where family labor and artisan labor were the dominant forms of labor relations.

Since the 1970s, the dominant viewpoint among most historians of work in America has been that the history of work in America is about the expansion of freedom.