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American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor Hardcover – December 1, 1998

by Jacqueline Jones (Author)

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Hardcover, December 1, 1998

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This book travels through 350 years of history to tell the epic, often tragic story of success & failure on the uneven playing fields of American labor. Here is the story of how virtually every significant social transformation in American history (from bound to free labor, from farm work to factory work, from a blue-collar to a white-collar economy) rolled back the hard-won advances of African Americans who had managed to gain footholds in various jobs & industries. Shows how racially divided workplaces developed, & how efforts to gain or preserve group advantages in certain jobs helped to foster racial hatred & contradictory stereotypes. A brilliant indictment.

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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Jones (history, Brandeis Univ.) has written a massive study of black working people in the United States from the first arrival of slaves in the early 1600s until the present. Running throughout the narrative is the theme that in the long history of work in America, blacks have always suffered disproportionate burdens and received unequal rewards. Jones argues that emphasizing employer discrimination downplays the role of the state, which, from earliest colonial times, has given white workers advantages over their black counterparts. Blacks, however, have always pressed hard against employment discrimination. In the 20th century their struggle for decent jobs has taken the form of lawsuits, grassroots boycotts of retail stores, and protests against racially discriminatory labor unions. The writing is often turgid. Recommended for labor and Afro-American collections of academic libraries.?Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Jones, who chairs Brandeis University's history department, is author of The Dispossessed (1992) and Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (1986), which won the Bancroft American History Prize. In the section titled "Insubordinates," Jones surveys the colonial era, when black, red, and white servants and slaves, in every colony, received "hard usage" from employers/masters who recognized that human labor, the source of their wealth, could also challenge their control. The period from the Revolution to the Civil War is the topic of "Workers and Overworkers"; the years since that conflict are the topic of "The Rise and Decline of the Racialized Machine." No single "racial division of labor" explains this history, Jones notes, but African Americans were largely excluded from improvements in labor's status owing to contradictory stereotypes ("lazy/shiftless" versus "stealing our jobs") held by employers and/or government and/or white workers. A heavily documented and nuanced study of relationships between black and white workers in the U.S., of particular interest to larger libraries. Mary Carroll --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product details

Hardcover: 543 pages
Publisher: Norton, W.W. (December 1, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0788195042
ISBN-13: 978-0788195044
Package Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
Average Customer Review: 2 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,681,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8152 in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Labor & Industrial Relations
- #8201 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Labor & Industrial Relations
- #25700 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Specific Demographics > African-American Studies

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I meant 5 stars Capitalism versus workers white, workers Black, immigrants too

February 2, 2007

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a history of working people in American. While it focuses on on Black/white racism has been used, it provides important information about the conditions of all working people since the earliest days of settlement. I found Jones' discussion of attempts to exploit Native Americans as slaves and indentured servants to be particularly illuminating. Jones also talks about the extensive systems of limiting the freedom of working people through contracts of indenture, peonage, and other forms that limited freedom of whites and black as well, as the continued manipulation of the image of what labor Blacks could accomplish to divide workers and deepen the exploitation of all.

While I believe Jones' strength is her discussion of the colonial period and the AnteBellum North, her discussion of the selective urbanization and industrialization of African Americans since World War II is outstanding. She shows how the system of defacto segregation and continued discrimination is the based for African American poverty today.

Most interestingly, she discusses the similarity between the ways that current immigrants, with and without papers, are oppressed and colonial systems of binding labor.

From this well-documented history, you understand that throughout its history, Capitalism in America has never allowed any real freedom to workers that wasn't taken in struggle, and how crucial racism is to both the past and present of this country.

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Amazon Customer

May 10, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Nice buy, nice service

English United States

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