Today, 80 percent of U.S. workers do service work, from delivering takeout to mopping floors to teaching. Each time we are handed a bag of groceries or a cup of coffee, call for a cab or have our homework graded, we confront both the enormity and the intimacy of the contemporary service sector.
Do these jobs have anything in common? Who is doing this work? And what kind of labor politics does it generate?
If service work has often been treated as a footnote to modern capitalism, Beneath the Wage reveals it as crucial to understanding how exploitation functions today. Uncovering a history that runs from eighteenth-century servants to present-day gig workers, Annie McClanahan retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated.
Assembling a diverse set of sources for understanding and reimagining service work—from reality television and conceptual poetry to novels and workers’ own descriptions of what they do—McClanahan explores three paradigmatic types of contemporary service labor: superexploited tipwork, deskilled clerical microwork, and informalized gigwork. She shows how work done “beneath the wage” depends on racialized and gendered forms of economic domination, is often excluded from labor organizing and regulation, and yet has begun to generate a new politics of social reproduction and solidarity.
“An outstanding contribution to humanities scholarship as well as to the social sciences, Beneath the Wage’s unusual focus on three aspects of service labor at once—how it is paid, how it is controlled, and how it can generate new solidarities—makes its economic analyses far more systematic than others, giving us nothing less than a new theory of wages and of the tie between wage and class forms. At the same time, there are few books that do as rigorous a job of unpacking economic developments without reducing culture to its merely passive ‘reflection.’ From its analyses of reality television to the writing of contemporary gigworkers at Uber and Amazon, it is no exaggeration to say that Beneath the Wage is the first book of its kind.”
— Sianne Ngai, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English, University of Chicago
“Beneath the Wage is a brilliant exploration of what work and resistance have become in a digitally transformed service economy. Historically situating both capital’s algorithmically driven labor processes and the boundary-pushing responses of workers, McClanahan reminds us (in beautifully crafted prose, no less) that although service work (driving, clicking, sexing, and teaching) has been restructured, the exploitative formations of and resistance to wage labor remain.”
— Veena Dubal, Professor of Law, University of California/Irvine
“Beneath the Wage is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the evolving forms of labor exploitation and workers’ resistance. Annie McClanahan doesn’t just offer a vital historical account of how we came to pay workers in tips or by the task. Her book also illuminates the political and cultural landscape of contemporary service worker activism.”
— Saru Jayaraman, President, One Fair Wage
