Coercion and Wage Labour

Exploring work relations through history and art

Edited by Anamarija Batista, Viola Müller, Corinna Peres

Publication date:

25 January 2024

Publisher

UCL Press

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781800085404

Coercion and Wage Labour presents novel histories of people who experienced physical, social, political or cultural compulsion in the course of paid work. Broad in scope, the chapters examine diverse areas of work including textile production, war industries, civil service and domestic labour, in contexts from the Middle Ages to the present day. They demonstrate that wages have consistently shaped working people’s experiences, and failed to protect workers from coercion. Instead, wages emerge as versatile tools to bind, control, and exploit workers. Remuneration mirrors the distribution of power in labour relations, often separating employers physically and emotionally from their employees, and disguising coercion.

The book makes historical narratives accessible for interdisciplinary audiences. Most chapters are preceded by illustrations by artists invited to visually conceptualise the book’s key messages and to emphasise the presence of the body and landscape in the realm of work. In turn, the chapter texts reflect back on the artworks, creating an intense intermedial dialogue that offers mutually relational ‘translations’ and narrations of labour coercion. Other contributions written by art scholars discuss how coercion in remunerated labour is constructed and reflected in artistic practice. The collection serves as an innovative and creative tool for teaching, and raises awareness that narrating history is always contingent on the medium chosen and its inherent constraints and possibilities.

Praise for Coercion and Wage Labour

This is a pioneering volume. It makes a well-founded break with the widespread misconception that wage labour is by definition free from coercion. The 14 historical case studies cover a vast geographical area and review a long time period. Together, they lead to the conclusion that wage labourers too were subject to many forms of coercion and that usually their “freedom” was and is only relative. But something else makes this book special: throughout the text there are artistic illustrations that enter into a dialogue with the individual chapters and create an inspiring interaction that complements the volume’s interdisciplinary nature.'
Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

List of figures
List of diagrams
List of contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1 Coercion and wage labour in history and art
Anamarija Batista, Viola Franziska Müller and Corinna Peres

Part I: Binding the workforce
Chapter frontispieces – collages © Tim Robinson, 2021

2 In the name of order: (im)mobilising wage labour for the Ottoman naval industry in the nineteenth century
Akın Sefer

3 Contracts under duress: work documents as a matter and means of conflict in the Habsburg Monarchy/Austria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Sigrid Wadauer

4 Working for the enemy: civil servants in occupied Serbia, 1941-1944
Nataša Milićević and Ljubinka Škodrić

5 Exploitation and care: public health aspirations and the construction of the working-class body in the Budapest Museum of Social Health, 1901-1945
Eszter Őze

Part II: Confronting coercion
Chapter frontispieces – digital drawings with watercolours © Dariia Kuzmych, 2021

6 Subdued wage workers: textile production in Western and Islamic medieval sources (ninth to twelfth centuries)
Colin Arnaud

7 ‘One gets rich, one hundred more work for nothing’: German miners in Medici Tuscany
Gabriele Marcon

8 Entangled dependencies: the case of the runaway domestic worker Emine in late Ottoman Istanbul, 1910
Müge Telci Özbek

9 The dilemma of being a ‘good worker’: cultural discourse, coercion and resistance in Bangladesh’s garment factories
Mohammad Tareq Hasan

10 Border plants: globalisation as shown to us by the women living at its leading edge
Eva Kuhn

11 Negotiating the terms of wage(less) labour: free and freed workers as contractual parties in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro
Marjorie Carvalho De Souza

12 Constructing debt: Discursive and material strategies of labour coercion in the US South, 1903-1964
Nico Pizzolato

13 Obligatory contributions to society: student foreign-language guides as seasonal wage workers in socialist Bulgaria, 1970–1980s
Ivanka Petrova

14 To put a human face on the question of labour: photographic portraiture and the Australian-Pacific indentured labour trade
Paolo Magagnoli

Afterword

15 Word and image in communication: ‘translation loop’ as a means of historiographical research
Anamarija Batista

Index

'This is a pioneering volume. It makes a well-founded break with the widespread misconception that wage labour is by definition free from coercion. The 14 historical case studies cover a vast geographical area and review a long time period. Together, they lead to the conclusion that wage labourers too were subject to many forms of coercion and that usually their “freedom” was and is only relative. But something else makes this book special: throughout the text there are artistic illustrations that enter into a dialogue with the individual chapters and create an inspiring interaction that complements the volume’s interdisciplinary nature.'
Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam