Define Free Labor Contract

The competing notion of free labor that would prevail in British and American laws was essentially the idea of unlimited employment, where employees and employers can terminate their relationship at any time and employment contracts are not enforced by criminal or other non-financial sanctions. The triumph of unlimited employment has ruled out many contracts that could have been concluded voluntarily by both parties, thus restricting contractual freedom. This is a no-brainer, as a line in the New York Times article on non-compete obligations shows, which casually states, „Companies have always owned the labor of their employees, but today`s employment contracts often also cover general knowledge.“ One could say with a little exaggeration that the workers in America, supposedly the land of the free, are actually crawling down the path of serfdom, who are subject to corporate employers as Russian peasants were once bound to the land of their masters. And the people who push them down this path are the very people who shout the loudest for „freedom.“ The meaning and legal origins of „free labor“ in Britain and the United States are the themes of Robert Steinfeld`s important new book. Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century enriches and expands the story that began in its previous volume, The Invention of Free Labor (1991). In the new book, Steinfeld moves from America to England and moves forward in time to focus on nineteenth-century developments in labor contract law. Despite the profitability of sugar cane plantations in the British West Indies, Adam Smith believed that free labor was more productive than slaves. Abolitionists adopted his theory to promote the emancipation of slaves in the British colonies. After emancipation in the 1830s, sugar production in the West Indies declined. In his chapter, Seymour Drescher discusses attempts to reconcile Smith`s theory with the decline of production and its ideological implications for the abolitionist movement in the United States.

Steinfeld points out the tension between two concepts of freedom in the working relationship. Freedom of contract would mean that employers and employees should be free to set the terms of the employment contract, such as duration, and to accept contracts that could be performed with criminal penalties for violations. Such an interpretation of free labour actually governed the law of employment contracts in Britain for much of the nineteenth century. In Steinfeld`s words: „Freedom of contract meant that workers were not obliged to conclude only revocable agreements, but that they were also free to irrevocably bind their work“ (p. 9). For white workers in the North, where such sanctions were usually unavailable, employment contracts could still be enforced through lower wages. According to Steinfeld, written contracts for workers in northern factories often included a provision requiring a worker to terminate in advance or lose their wages owed to the employer. The sting of the confiscation of arrears clearly depended on the amount due, which in turn depended on the length of the salary period. In some states, wage cuts would be regulated by restrictions on the length of pay periods. The concept of freedom is not without contradictions.

Laws prohibiting slavery and debt bondage restrict contractual freedom. By submitting to the dictates of employers, workers temporarily give up their freedom in exchange for a wage. Laws designed to promote the interests of work, such as laws on eight-hour or child labour, often restrict their use. Economics (and economic history) is the study of choice. But are decisions really free when choice is severely limited? If hunger is the only alternative to work, is free labor just another form of slavery? Terms of Labor, edited by Stanley Engerman, is a volume of articles dealing with the importance of free labor in Europe, the United States, and the West Indies. The contributions to this volume represent many different disciplines and are intended to appeal to a wide audience (a tribute to the beautiful edition of Engerman). Engerman`s introduction and Robert Steinfeld`s chapter on the evolution of the legal and economic concept of free labor are particularly noteworthy. Criminal sanctions were effectively abolished in Britain with the passage of the Employers and Workers Act in 1875. Steinfeld suggests several factors that help explain this change in the law. First, the extension of the right to vote to certain segments of the working class and the growing militancy of workers in the early 1870s increased the influence of the working class and its supporters in parliament. Second, somewhat ironically, the abandonment of reciprocity by the courts made it increasingly difficult for workers to sign long contracts because the contracts no longer offered them protection against wage or employment cuts. Employers were therefore divided on the desirability of reform, with many arguing that the lifting of criminal sanctions was necessary to prevent the massive displacement of employment contracts through unlimited employment in the form of „tiny“ contracts.

In contrast, Marxists recognize that in a society divided into antagonistic classes, based on exploitation and governed by capital, there are and cannot be „absolute“ freedoms. We expose the abstract pseudo-freedom offered by the bourgeoisie because what we want is real concrete freedom. Northerners viewed their system of free labor as fairer than slavery, which was the ideology that one could work for a wage and have the opportunity to elevate their position in society through ambition and hard work. Any union or worker who joins Trump`s „America First“ agenda will find that – rhetoric aside – Trump will put them last. The ultimate goal of Marxism, socialism and the struggle of the working class is freedom. The bourgeoisie, of course, strives to proclaim its commitment to freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the freedom of the individual to do what he wants with his money, and so on. They know very well that as long as they control the means of production and therefore wealth, the media and the state, these freedoms remain extremely limited and almost meaningless to the vast majority. They also know that they have the power to restrict these freedoms or even trample on them whenever they deem it necessary. Intersectionality is defined very differently, but the concept as developed by black feminists can help advance Marxist theory and practice. For Marxists, this goes to the heart of the functioning of the capitalist system.

Employers do not buy a certain amount of labor, but a certain number of hours of labor – and their profits come from the value of the goods produced for them beyond the costs they pay in the form of wages. In this way, Marx argued that workers are free in a „double sense“ – free to work or starve to death freely. As he wrote in Wage Labor and Capital: Clayne Pope, he examines the economic progress of Americans in the age of free labor. According to Pope, there is „no necessary theoretical link between free labor institutions, strong economic growth, and social labor mobility“ (P. . . .