Free Labor, Free Exploitation

Sure, the Trump administration’s use of forced labor clauses in American law to justify Trump’s tariff obsession is pure, unadulterated cynicism by people who don’t care one whit about free labor. No question about that. And then you see the hypocrisy, as the same people do everything they can to eviscerate the nation’s labor protection laws so that workers have the freedom to die of heat stroke on the job, getting rid of OSHA heat protections.

But, in a sense, this is a return, like everything else about the Trump administration, to the Gilded Age. It’s useful to remember the contract doctrine era of the late nineteenth century, when the nation’s elites held to an idea of freedom that was enshrined in the contract between employer and worker. See, the idea is that these were just two men freely coming to an agreement between them. No one made a worker take a job. Sure, the employer might offer starvation wages. Sure, the employer might create unsafe working conditions. Sure, the employer might force you to be paid in company scrip, use employer-hired doctors who would fire you on any pretext of unhealthiness, make your kids work so you can eat, etc. But no one made you take that job. You were free to go to a different employer and take what he offered. And you know what was a real violation of freedom? Unions. After all, employers don’t form unions to make you take jobs. Unions are a violation of freedom because it’s not fair to the employer if you workers come together as a collective to make universal demands and then enforce them by getting in the way of the factory operating.

All of this is of course risible, completely ignored the reality of power, and was a perversion of the initial ideas of Republican free labor ideology from the Civil War era that believed that capitalism would spread its wealth reasonably equally to those who deserved it through hard work. By the 1870s, capital was being controlled by just a few people, the American working class was confused and trying to figure out what was going on and why this perfect system had failed, and the courts were doing everything in their power to rule that any legal improvements to workers’ lives or any actions by unions that succeeded were ruled illegal. Glad none of that is happening again today!

So in a sense, this is just another return to the late 19th century. No one is making those workers labor in 110 degree temperatures without proper shade. It’s their freedom to do so. It’s not forced labor like those prison laborers in China have to do. You can starve. You can die. That’s also your freedom. Just don’t get in the way of my freedom to exploit you until to keel over. Now that’s America!