The Pros And Cons Of Paid Labor

Associating the word “freedom” with American values is a widely accepted ideology. However, the application of “freedom” to the people who have lived and worked within the United States is spotty, inconsistent or non-existent throughout U.S. labor history. In consequence, it is an obligation to ask: what is freedom? Merriam Webster gives several definitions for “freedom”. The first two are“ the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action and “liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another.” As Orestes A. Brownson wrote in the Boston Quarterly Review in 1840 that, “The laborer at wages has all the disadvantages of freedom and none of its blessings, while the slave, if denied the blessings, is freed from

economy. In order to understand why paid laborers faced conditions close to slavery, there ought to be a characterization of what Brownson meant when he said that paid laborers held the “disadvantages of freedom”. The first form of paid labor in the United States was indentured servitude, where “Europe’s surplus laborers signed contracts of indenture with future employers (masters) in the colonies or with ships’ captains”. Many indentured servants were kidnapped, paid and promised freedom (usually in seven years)- it is important to note that only forty percent of servants ever actually survived this long. Moreover, the way in which indentured servants lived and were treated provide some important baselines to gauge how free the typical laborer was throughout these time periods. As Brownson pointed out, paid laborers were food insecure since their diet mostly consisted of variable amounts of pork and corn. Paid laborers, like indentured servants had no control or choice over their professions. John Harrower, an indentured servant, proves to be an early example of this phenomena as he only became an indentured servant after he could not find work as a merchant in Europe. Paid laborers were not slaves, but, their conditions as working class people who had to answer to a master also meant that these people had to answer to the harsh punishments of the master. In fact, “whipping, branding and beatings” were common to punish the supposed transgressions of these workers. These trends of food insecurity, harsh punishments and deathly working conditions would continue for those who were not indentured servants. It is important to note that the reason why workers faced such abjectly poor conditions were because their labor was held captive to cultivate and extricate the resources from the colonies of the