Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods by Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant (review)

Abstract

Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, Volume 19, Issue 3 © 2022 by Labor and Working-Class History Association refusing to recognize it as work. Graduate students rely on faculty for their wages (often labeled stipends), their degrees, and the letters of recommendation that future employers require. That support, like an athletic scholarship, is usually tied to a specific academic year, which robs these vital producers of research and revenue for universities of any real economic security. Highlighting the parallel precarity of people, whose labor currently goes unrecognized as work, makes it much easier to see the status coercion running throughout the American labor market today. As such, like so many compelling books, Coerced raises new questions to understand the present and past, especially in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling in favor of paying student athletes and the University of California recognizing a large portion of members of Student Researchers United. Coerced, for example, indicates that there’s more work for historians to do to interrogate the links between government disinvestment, declining labor standards, and the dramatic erosion of workplace rights since the 1940s. Less taxing and spending has, over time, left Americans paying more out of pocket for basic needs. So it seems almost logical that there would be a need to extract labor from graduate students expected to produce research that campuses can patent; from student athletes whose performances can help with ticket sales and recruiting feepaying students; from workfare parents, assigned the filthiest tasks needed to keep public spaces up; and from prisoners, whose labor maintains correctional facilities that also, as historian Heather Thompson has noted, marketed their labor to businesses eager to cut their payroll costs and pressure their labor forces not to unionize. Hatton’s work, then, also adds a new perspective on the many legal, legitimate ways that employers could threaten the status of supervisors and workers to quash union campaigns. Finally, this book invites more historical scrutiny of the kind of status coercion that gave rise to today’s gig economy.