But 16 months later, the Minnesota Legislature ended its session Thursday without a vote to put Right to Work to the voters. The bill has been attached to, then detached from, other legislation. It’s been introduced, and reintroduced. But Republicans won’t give it an up-or-down vote in either house. Just after 2 a.m. on April 27, Republican Rep. Mark Buesgens made a last-ditch attempt to transfer Right to Work from the Commerce Committee, where it had stalled, to the Rules Committee. But Republican colleagues tabled his motion by a 118-to-9 vote. Republican Sen. Michelle Benson, who pushed for the bill’s passage, says it’s now a lost cause until next year’s session.

What happened? In interviews with the Associated Press last month, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Senate majority leader called right-to-work “such a divisive issue.” GOP state Rep. Tony Cornish cited the prospect of “millions of dollars coming in from other states, and thousands of people. Buses emptying out, banners, people camping.” In other words: the fear of becoming the next Wisconsin.

Minnesota AFL-CIO president Shar Knutson says that the year’s high-profile battles in other states had had “a large impact” in discouraging Minnesota Republicans.  “You’ve seen what’s happened in Wisconsin and Ohio,” says Knutson. “There’s a lot of money that goes in, a lot of volunteers, a lot of people out on the streets working hard. So yeah, I’d be nervous if I were them too.” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s attack on collective bargaining provoked a 17-day occupation of the state capitol and landed him a recall election next month; Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s assault was overturned by voters in a 61-to-39 referendum vote.

Sen. Benson says that the threat of union payback at the ballot box “was enough to divide our caucus.” She attributes her colleagues’ reticence to their “justified concern that the unions, with their massive coffers, will come after people in swing districts.” Asked about the impact of Wisconsin and Ohio, Benson says that “Minnesota is not Wisconsin,” but grants that “Nothing occurs in a vacuum.” Wisconsin and Ohio, says Benson, show that “the unions are afraid of the change that is happening in this country, and they will work vigorously against any attempt to cause them to step back from their current position.”

The ranks of now-reluctant Republicans — call them the Cold Feet Caucus — extends beyond Minnesota. In February, the House Commerce and Energy Committee in deep-red South Dakota voted to kill a bill that would have banned collective bargaining for public workers. The AP reported that Rep. Brian Liss, the bill’s main sponsor in the House, blamed his colleagues’ votes on fears for reelection. Ten days earlier, one of the bill’s Senate sponsors, Republican Stan Adelstein, announced he was withdrawing his support and would oppose the bill instead. “Further study,” Adelstein said in a statement, “has shown me that South Dakota is NOT Wisconsin, and passage of this bill into law would cause grievous harm.” Adelstein may have meant that South Dakota didn’t need the same labor relations “reform” that Wisconsin did. But his constituents could be forgiven for inferring a different message from his all-caps contrast: I’m not a Walker-style Republican.

The presumptive GOP nominee for Washington state governor is also taking pains to send a “What, Me Walker?” message. Last month, in audio obtained by Politico, Attorney General Rob McKenna told a meeting of Puget Sound Carpenters, “Now, unfortunately, because of a couple of governors – particularly Scott Walker – everyone thinks that someone who’s going to be a Republican governor, they’re going to be Scott Walker. I’m not Scott Walker. This is not Wisconsin.” A spokesperson for McKenna’s presumptive Democratic opponent, who has made a point of tying McKenna to Walker, retorted to Politico that McKenna had pushed to privatize workers’ compensation, and “called the unionization of state employees ‘dangerous.’”

After Michigan Republicans passed an “emergency manager” law that allows appointees of Gov. Rick Snyder to throw out some local union contracts, some planned to push their own right-to-work bill. But facing a Wisconsin-style recall effort against Snyder, an Ohio-style referendum effort against the emergency manager law, and a pro-union constitutional amendment drive, the House’s leading right-to-work backer has held off on introducing a bill. Rep. Mike Shirkey told Michigan’s News-Herald last month that he wasn’t dragging his feet on right-to-work because of the pro-union efforts, but declined to say when he would introduce his own bill.

Despite these Republican retrenchments, labor faces a continuing crisis. Witness Indiana, which became the industrial Midwest’s first right-to-work state this year, or New Hampshire, which if not for a gubernatorial veto would have become New England’s. Or Connecticut, where liberal Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy proposed “education reform” that would curb collective bargaining for teachers in “low-performing” schools.

So the Cold Feet Caucus isn’t cause for labor to relax. Rather, it’s a reminder of what’s at stake in higher-profile battles – especially in Wisconsin, where Democratic voters this week nominated Tom Barrett to face down Scott Walker in next month’s recall. Four weeks out, the race is much too close to call. But it’s safe to say either unions or their opponents will emerge emboldened after the June 5 vote – not just in Wisconsin, but around the country.

If Walker ekes out a victory, it won’t represent a decisive mandate for legislative union-busting. But it will be enough to get some Republicans over their cold feet.

So it makes sense that this year’s call for an Occupy general strike—whatever ends up happening on Tuesday—falls on May 1. May Day is a beautifully American holiday, one created by American workers, crushed by the American government incubated abroad, and returned to the United States by immigrant workers.

The history of May 1 as a workers’ holiday is intimately tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the labor movement, and to the long tradition of American anarchism.

Perhaps the first nation-wide labor movement in the United States started in 1864, when workers began to agitate for an eight-hour day. This was, in their understanding, a natural outgrowth of the abolition of slavery; a limited work day allowed workers to spend more time with their families, to pursue education, and to enjoy leisure time. In other words, a shorter work day meant freedom. It was not for nothing that in 1866, workers celebrated the Fourth of July by singing “John Brown’s Body” with new lyrics demanding an eight-hour day. Agitating for shorter hours became a broad-based mass movement, and skilled and unskilled workers organized together. The movement would allow no racial, national or even religious divisions. Workers built specific organizations—Eight Hour Leagues—but they also used that momentum to establish new unions and strengthen old ones. That year, the Eight Hour Movement gained its first legislative victory when Illinois passed a law limiting work hours.

The demand for an eight-hour day was about leisure, self-improvement and freedom, but it was also about power. When Eight Hour Leagues agitated for legislation requiring short hours, they were demanding what had never before happened: that the government regulate industry for the advantage of workers. And when workers sought to enforce the eight-hour day without the government—through declaring for themselves, through their unions, under what conditions they would work—they sought something still more radical: control over their own workplaces. It is telling that employers would often counter a demand for shorter hours with an offer of a wage increase. Wage increases could be given (and taken away) by employers without giving up their power; agreeing to shorter hours was, employers knew, the beginning of losing their arbitrary power over their workers.

The Illinois eight-hour law was to go into effect May 1, 1867. That day, tens of thousands of Chicago’s workers celebrated in what a newspaper called “the largest procession ever seen on the streets of Chicago.” But the day after, employers, en masse, ignored the law, ordering their workers to stay the customary 10 or 11 hours. The city erupted in a general strike–workers struck, and those who didn’t leave work were forced to by gangs of their colleagues roaming through the streets, armed with sticks, dragging out scabs. After several days of the strike, the state militia arrived and occupied working-class neighborhoods. By May 8, employers and the state they controlled had won, and workers went back to work with their long hours. The loss of the eight-hour-day movement led also to a massive decline in unions, and the labor movement would not pick up in such numbers for almost two decades.

The Illinois law and its defeat, however, were not forgotten. By the 1880s, a new labor movement had grown up in Chicago. This one was more radical and was dominated by immigrant workers from Germany. They remembered 1877, when a strike by railroad workers spread around the country. For a brief moment, as strikers took control of St. Louis and Pittsburgh, staring down the national guard and local police, nobody knew what would happen. But President Rutherford B. Hayes called out the army and brutally repressed the strike. They also remembered the state was rarely if ever on the side of the worker. Yet they also remembered the brief shining moment when it appeared that there might be an eight-hour day.

So in 1886, the Chicago Central Labor Union again demanded an eight-hour day. Led largely by anarchists like August Spies and Albert Parsons, this renewed movement demanded “eight for 10”–that is, eight hours’ work for 10 hours’ pay. Throughout the winter of 1886, they successfully organized and won a series of small victories, largely in German butchers’ shops, breweries and bakeries, where owners agreed to recognize unions and grant shorter hours. Then they issued a new demand: that again on May 1, Chicago would go on a general strike and not return to work unless employers agreed to an eight-hour workday.

The demands of the militant Chicago anarchists coincided with a massive upswing in other militant movements. Workers and Texas farmers were rebelling against a monopolistic railroad system. The Knights of Labor were rapidly organizing and spreading their vision of a cooperative, rather than capitalistic, society. “What happened on May 1, 1886,” writes James Green, the most recent and most accessible historian to have written about it, “was more than a general strike; it was a ‘populist moment’ when working people believed they could destroy plutocracy, redeem democracy and then create a new ‘cooperative commonwealth.’”

Four days later, it all came crashing down. On May 3, police had shot to death six strikers at the McCormick Works, where a long-standing labor dispute had turned the factory into an armed camp, and beaten dozens more. On May 4, anarchists held an outdoor indignation meeting at a square called the Haymarket to protest the police murders. Anarchist leader Samuel Fielden was wrapping up his speech when the police, led by the same inspector who had led the charge at McCormick the night before, moved in to disperse the crowd. “But we are peaceable!” Fielden cried, and just then somebody wasn’t. Somebody threw a bomb at the police, the police open fire, and the course of American history changed.

To this day we do not know, nor will we likely ever know, who threw the bomb. Some say it was an agent provocateur. Some say it was an anarchist. If it wasn’t an anarchist, it surely could have been, since there were indeed anarchists who made bombs and would have thrown one given the opportunity. But we also know that many of those who died that night, including police, were felled by the police bullets.

We also know that the effect of the Haymarket bombing was far greater on the labor movement than it was on the police. Eight anarchist leaders were rounded up and put on trial for the murder of a police officer. No evidence was ever given that any of them threw the bomb, and only the flimsiest evidence was presented that any of them were remotely involved. All eight were convicted, and seven were sentenced to hang. Two of these had their sentences commuted, and a third—Louis Lingg, undoubtedly the most radical and militant of them—cheated the hangman by chewing a detonator cap and blowing off his jaw. The remaining four—August Spies, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fischer, and George Engel—were hanged on November 11, 1887. They went to their deaths singing the Marseillaise, then an anthem of the international revolutionary movement, and before he died, Spies shouted out his famous last words: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

Before that happened, the state ensured more silence. The strike collapsed. Police around the country raided radicals’ homes and newspapers. The Knights of Labor never recovered. In the place of the radical industrial labor movement of the mid-1880s rose the American Federation of Labor, the much more exclusive and conservative organization that would dominate the labor movement until the 1930s. Meanwhile, it would take until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to finally enshrine the eight-hour day into federal law.

May 1 would live on, mostly abroad. In 1889, French syndicalist Raymond Lavigne proposed to the Second International—the international and internationalist coalition of socialist parties—that May 1 be celebrated internationally the next year to honor the Haymarket Martyrs and demand the eight-hour day, and the year after that the International adopted the day as an international workers’ holiday. In countries with strong socialist and communist traditions, May 1 became the primary day to celebrate work, workers and their organizations, often with direct and explicit reference to the Haymarket Martyrs. May Day remains an official holiday in countries ranging from Argentina to India to Malaysia to Croatia—and dozens of countries in between.

Yet in the United States, with some exception, the workers’ tradition of May 1 died out. Partially this was because the Knights of Labor had already established a labor day in September. Opportunistic politicians, most notably Grover Cleveland, glommed onto the Knights’ holiday in order to diminish the symbolic power of May 1. In 1921, May Day was declared “Americanization Day,” and later “Loyalty Day” in a deliberately ironic attempt to co-opt the holiday. Even that was not enough, though, and in 1958 Dwight Eisenhower added “Law Day” to the mix, presumably a deliberate jibe at the Haymarket anarchists who declared, “All law is slavery.” Today, few if any Americans celebrate Loyalty Day or Law Day—although both are on the books—but the origins of May Day are largely forgotten. Like International Women’s Day (March 8), which also originated in the U.S., International Workers’ Day became a holiday the rest of the world celebrates while Americans look on in confusion, if they notice at all.

Yet May 1 lives on, and indeed has been rejuvenated in the United States in the past few years. In 2006, immigrant activists organized “a day without an immigrant,” a nationwide strike of immigrant workers and rallies. It was perhaps the largest demonstration of workers in United States history. These immigrants, mostly from Latin America, had brought May 1 back to its birthplace, and in so doing they resurrected its history as a day specifically for immigrant workers.

It is appropriate that when the Occupy L. A. first issued its call for a general strike this May 1, it said the strike was “for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace.” The order was significant, for migrants in the United States have been the ones who have made sure that the voices the state strangled that November day have remained so powerful. And regardless of what happens on Tuesday—and of course an actual general strike, in which cities grind to a halt and workers control what activities occur, is unlikely—we can, through a national day of action for the working class, work toward a new cooperative commonweath. We have a opportunity now to create and renew the labor movement, through new tactics, but ones that pay homage to the generations that preceded us.

Saltsman trots out the old canards against the minimum wage, claiming that research indicates that a minimum wage increase “simply doesn’t help the poor — in fact, it hurts them.” He cites studies which showed that states with their minimum wages between 2003 and 2007 found no associated decline in state poverty rates. Saltsman gives three reasons for this:

1. A majority of working-age individuals who live in poverty don’t work and thus cannot benefit from the raise.
2. A clear majority of those who do earn the minimum wage live in households that aren’t in poverty.
3. Less skilled and less experienced employees lose employment opportunities when the cost to hire and train them rises as a result of a minimum-wage increase.

Let’s take these arguments in turn. Implicit in the first point is that a majority of working-age individuals don’t work because they choose not to (that is, they are lazy scroungers), or because unemployment is caused by laziness or lack of training. The argument they often use is that “I can get a job; therefore all the unemployed could get jobs if only they tried harder or got better education and training.”

The way I go about demonstrating that fallacy is a dogs-and-bones example. Say we have 10 dogs and we bury nine bones in the backyard. We send the dogs out to find bones. At least one dog will come back without a bone.

We decide that the problem is lack of training. We put that dog through rigorous training in the latest bone-finding techniques. We bury nine bones and send the 10 dogs out again. The trained dog ends up with a bone, but some other dog comes back without a bone (empty-mouthed, so to speak).

The problem is that there are not enough bones and jobs to go around. <!–The “bones” in the jobs discussion are insufficient spending power in the economy.–> It is certainly true that a well-trained and highly motivated job seeker can usually find a job. But that is no evidence that aggregate unemployment is caused by laziness or lack of training. And besides, we could easily determine how much unemployment is truly voluntary. The government could serve as the “employer of last resort” under a job guarantee program modeled on the WPA (the Works Progress Administration, in existence from 1935 to 1943) and the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942). The program would offer a job to any American who was ready and willing to work at the federal minimum wage, plus legislated benefits. No time limits. No means testing. No minimum education or skill requirements.

It’s hard to believe that reducing or even eliminating the minimum wage (which is the corollary of Saltsman’s point), would enhance employment, when the problem is a basic lack of demand. Business will not hire more workers until it has more sales. Consumers will not spend more until they’ve got more jobs. A private-sector recovery requires 300,000 new jobs every month. But the private sector doesn’t need 300,000 new workers per month until there exists sufficient spending power in the economy to induce them to hire those workers. How is retaining a static, or reduced minimum wage, going to achieve this?

Higher wages means higher income and thus higher consumption spending, which induces firms to employ more labor. So the truth is that economic theory does not tell us that raising the minimum wage will lead to more unemployment; indeed, theory tells us it can go the other way — raising the minimum wage could increase employment. That’s one of the reasons Henry Ford believed in paying his workers a decent wage: so that they could buy his product.

To be sure, even an increase in the minimum wage to $12 or $15 an hour is not going to provide the means to purchase a Ford (or GM) today. And so what if, as Saltsman argues, the workers earning this minimum wage are not living in poverty? Does that mean they wouldn’t spend the money derived from an increased minimum wage? I wonder if Saltsman would also argue that tax cuts across the board are unnecessary because most of the people who receive them are not living in poverty?

That argument is a red herring. The truth is, if you earn your money through wages (unlike many of the 1 percent, who earn through things like investments and a tax system biased in favor of capital gains over income) then a higher wage, minimum or otherwise, would mean that you’d spend the additional dollars, creating jobs for other workers. You’d pay down your mortgages and car loans, getting yourself out of debt. You’d pay more taxes — on sales and property, mostly — thereby relieving the fiscal crises of states and localities. More teachers, police and firefighters would keep their jobs. America would get a virtuous cycle toward higher employment and, more importantly, the cycle would be based on a policy that creates higher incomes, not higher debt via credit expansion.

Then there’s the common belief that minimum wages cause unemployment, which relates to Saltman’s third point – namely that less skilled and less experienced employees lose employment opportunities when the cost to hire and train them rises as a result of a minimum-wage increase. It is at least partly true that for an individual firm, higher wages reduce the number of workers hired. But we cannot extrapolate that to the economy as a whole. The issue of eroding wage competitiveness, which allegedly follows from a higher minimum wage, doesn’t really apply to jobs that offer the minimum wage. It might apply to areas such as manufactured goods and traded services like insurance and banking. But these are sectors in which most people already earn far more than the minimum wage.

As far as the minimum wage goes, the jobs we’re talking about are in non-traded services like checkout clerks, hair cutters, domestic help and food-service workers. When checkout clerks and cooks earn more in wages, then businesses start getting the sales required to induce them to hire more workers. And if sales are robust enough, then guess what? Even more workers will be hired, or wages will be increased.

The point is that wages are a source of demand, as well as a cost input. Reduce wages and demand plummets, which more than overrides any cost savings derived from paying less to workers (especially given today’s paltry minimum wage, which is hardly a living wage for any American).

Let’s be clear: Americans have never embraced welfare. For better or worse, our nation has always preferred a more libertarian path: self-help, personal responsibility, individual initiative. As a result, our welfare programs have always been stingy, temporary and purposely demeaning. But maintaining the minimum wage at today’s ridiculously depressed level does not enhance anybody’s employment prospects. In fact, it makes things worse, because it sucks demand out of the economy and minimizes the chances of those now receiving unemployment benefits or other assistance to quickly get back into the workforce, to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps,” as conservatives like to say. They cannot do that when our politicians continue to focus on policies that merely enhance the incomes of the top 1 percent.

Harms works at the National Benefits Center (NBC) office in Lee’s Summit, Mo. She’s not directly employed by the federal government but is, instead, a contractor. She is one of about 800 workers there employed by the British company Serco, or Serco’s subcontractors, to process immigration paperwork under Serco’s contract with the federal government ($190 million a year, as of 2009). Penn, meanwhile, is a partner at the anti-union firm Crossroads Group. According to the most recent contract he filed with the Department of Labor (for a different client), his services cost $350 an hour. Serco presumably paid for Penn’s time out of its own pocket. But taxpayers paid for the facilities — from office space to audiovisual equipment — he used to campaign against the union.

Like Harms, many Americans would resent the prospect of taxpayer dollars, or taxpayer-funded resources, being deployed to bust a union drive. President Obama once seemed to be against it, as well. In his first month in office, President Obama signed an executive order apparently aimed at similar situations. Obama’s order forbids government reimbursement for “the costs of any activities undertaken to persuade employees … to exercise or not to exercise … the right to organize and bargain collectively.”

But as Serco and its subcontractors fight to stay union free at the NBC, workers and union staffers say the order has meant less than they’d hoped. And despite Obama’s order, the government says that Serco can use government facilities to fight unionization without breaking the law. Now, some union activists are questioning whether Obama’s support for them is as firm as it once seemed. “We have an executive order that sounds good,” says Chris Townsend, the political action director for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). “But I am yet to be convinced that [it] amounts to anything.”

Serco isn’t the only company to aggressively combat unionization while reaping a taxpayer-funded windfall. A 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office found that the federal government had awarded over $6 billion in contracts in fiscal 2009 to contractors that had been cited for violating federal labor laws, from wage and hour rules to organizing rights. Earlier in 2010, the New York Times reported that the White House was planning to implement a “high road” contracting policy that would direct more government contracts to companies with better labor and environmental records. But by 2011, Obama OMB nominee Heather Higginbottom told senators in a confirmation hearing that there were no such plans afoot.

The current Serco fight began in January, when workers at the Lee’s Summit NBC – an arm of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — began organizing with UE. Workers say they were spurred to unionize when Serco demoted them en masse in order to avoid expected raises.

The UE director of organization, Bob Kingsley, says Obama’s executive order “has not slowed Serco in its effort” to mount “a classic union-busting campaign.” UE has filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board alleging that Serco’s campaign broke the law, by — among other things — illegally monitoring union activisim and forbidding workers from talking about the union at work. (Serco and Michael Penn did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

In February, workers say managers required them to watch an anti-union film during work hours. By April, Serco had brought in Penn. UE says that most of the contract employees at the Lee’s Summit NBC site were sent to anti-union sessions led by Penn during the first week in April. One of them, Erica Yount, says Penn emphasized that with a union, “we could lose a lot of the benefits that we have now … the company doesn’t have to give us anything, that they could take stuff away.” Another, who requested anonymity based on fear of retaliation, says it felt like a cult meeting: “It was like being locked in a room with Jim Jones, without the Kool-Aid.”

Reached via e-mail, USCIS spokesperson Tim Counts said that USCIS is in compliance with the executive order, and that the government “will not be billed for the time Serco employees spent” in anti-union meetings, including managers. Some workers say Serco scheduled them for “administrative overhead training” time during the April meetings, presumably so that time would not be billed to the government. But others question the accuracy of the accounting. Harms says that while she attended a meeting at 6:30 a.m., a copy of her schedule showed regular hours in the morning and “overhead” hours in the afternoon. The union also questions whether Serco is accurately tracking time that Penn spent with its own managers, coaching them on their role in the anti-union campaign. (Salon has made a Freedom of Information Act request to USCIS for relevant documents.)

But even if Serco paid all the wages for anti-union meetings on its own, the government is still implicated in them. The government, not Serco, owns the property used for the meetings, including furniture and audiovisual equipment (UE says that Serco also sent workers anti-union memos that employees would be able to access only on their government-provided computers). Asked whether Serco and its subcontractors were required to pay a rental fee or ask permission before using government property to hold mandatory anti-union meetings, Counts responded, “Under the terms of the contract, the contractor is permitted to use government facilities to communicate with its employees without obtaining government permission.”

Serco doesn’t own the NBC office space where Penn held his “captive audience” meetings either. The government rents it from a local technical college. Asked whether Serco paid the government, or the college, to use the space for anti-union meetings, Counts said that under current contracting regulations, “contractors may use facilities rented by the government for activities allowed by the contract but not directly related to services performed for the government.”

But the space isn’t open to everyone – workers note that security guards kicked UE organizer Karen Hardin off the property when she came in hopes of talking to off-duty workers about the union. Asked whether the government, as the lessee of the space, would grant a hypothetical request from UE to meet with off-duty workers in nonwork areas on-site, USCIS’ Counts replied that doing so would not be “consistent” with the requirement that agencies “remain impartial concerning any dispute between labor and contractor management.”

To some workers who were required to attend Penn’s sessions, the government’s role seems anything but impartial. They say the mandatory meetings, which would be intimidating in any setting, had a greater impact on workers because government facilities were involved. “You just want to go up and chew them all out for even thinking that they had the right to do this,” says an employee of one of Serco’s subcontractors, who requested anonymity. But according to USCIS, nothing in the 2009 executive order prevents a professional union-buster from running mandatory anti-union meetings for federal contractor employees using government facilities.

Salon’s inquiries to the White House (regarding whether USCIS’ view is consistent with the executive order), and to the chair of the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council (regarding how the executive order has so far been enforced), were both referred to a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget. In an e-mail, she wrote that the “allowability of costs under cost-reimbursement contracts is governed” by “cost principles,” one of which had been amended to “make unallowable the costs for any activities undertaken to persuade employees” whether to organize. In other words, it’s now government policy to reject requests to reimburse union-busting expenses. But that may not contradict USCIS’ statement, which implied that companies can use government-provided facilities for union-busting purposes. As for the order’s track record, the spokesperson wrote, “The Office of Federal Procurement Policy does not monitor or track the disallowance of claimed costs for which the contractor seeks reimbursement.”

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside.  All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses or manufacturing textiles, shoes and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance — unless, that is, you traveled back to the 19th century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide.  Indeed, a sentence of “confinement at hard labor” was then the essence of the American penal system.  More than that, it was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy — at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.

A Yankee Invention

What some historians call “the long Depression” of the 19th century, which lasted from the mid-1870s through the mid-1890s, was marked by frequent panics and slumps, mass bankruptcies, deflation and self-destructive competition among businesses designed to depress costs, especially labor costs.  So, too, we are living through a 21st century age of panics and austerity with similar pressures to shrink the social wage.

Convict labor has been and once again is an appealing way for business to address these dilemmas.  Penal servitude now strikes us as a barbaric throwback to some long-lost moment that preceded the industrial revolution, but in that we’re wrong.  From its first appearance in this country, it has been associated with modern capitalist industry and large-scale agriculture.

And that is only the first of many misconceptions about this peculiar institution.  Infamous for the brutality with which prison laborers were once treated, indelibly linked in popular memory (and popular culture) with images of the black chain gang in the American South, it is usually assumed to be a Southern invention.  So apparently atavistic, it seems to fit naturally with the retrograde nature of Southern life and labor, its economic and cultural underdevelopment, its racial caste system and its desperate attachment to the “lost cause.”

As it happens, penal servitude — the leasing out of prisoners to private enterprise, either within prison walls or in outside workshops, factories and fields — was originally known as a “Yankee invention.”

First used at Auburn prison in New York State in the 1820s, the system spread widely and quickly throughout the North, the Midwest and later the West.  It developed alongside state-run prison workshops that produced goods for the public sector and sometimes the open market.

A few Southern states also used it.  Prisoners there, as elsewhere, however, were mainly white men, since slave masters, with a free hand to deal with the “infractions” of their chattel, had little need for prison.  The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery would, in fact, make an exception for penal servitude precisely because it had become the dominant form of punishment throughout the free states.

Nor were those sentenced to “confinement at hard labor” restricted to digging ditches or other unskilled work; nor were they only men.  Prisoners were employed at an enormous range of tasks from rope- and wagon-making to carpet, hat and clothing manufacturing (where women prisoners were sometimes put to work), as well coal mining, carpentry, barrel-making, shoe production, house-building and even the manufacture of rifles.  The range of petty and larger workshops into which the felons were integrated made up the heart of the new American economy.

Observing a free-labor textile mill and a convict-labor one on a visit to the United States, novelist Charles Dickens couldn’t tell the difference.  State governments used the rental revenue garnered from their prisoners to meet budget needs, while entrepreneurs made outsized profits either by working the prisoners themselves or subleasing them to other businessmen.

Convict Labor in the “New South”

After the Civil War, the convict-lease system metamorphosed.  In the South, it became ubiquitous, one of several grim methods — including the black codes, debt peonage, the crop-lien system, lifetime labor contracts and vigilante terror — used to control and fix in place the newly emancipated slave.  Those “freedmen” were eager to pursue their new liberty either by setting up as small farmers or by exercising the right to move out of the region at will or from job to job as “free wage labor” was supposed to be able to do.

If you assumed, however, that the convict-lease system was solely the brainchild of the apartheid all-white “Redeemer” governments that overthrew the Radical Republican regimes (which first ran the defeated Confederacy during Reconstruction) and used their power to introduce Jim Crow to Dixie, you would be wrong again.  In Georgia, for instance, the Radical Republican state government took the initiative soon after the war ended.  And this was because the convict-lease system was tied to the modernizing sectors of the post-war economy, no matter where in Dixie it was introduced or by whom.

So convicts were leased to coal-mining, iron-forging, steel-making and railroad companies, including Tennessee Coal and Iron (TC&I), a major producer across the South, especially in the booming region around Birmingham, Alabama.  More than a quarter of the coal coming out of Birmingham’s pits was then mined by prisoners.  By the turn of the century, TC&I had been folded into J.P. Morgan’s United States Steel complex, which also relied heavily on prison laborers.

All the main extractive industries of the South were, in fact, wedded to the system.  Turpentine and lumber camps deep in the fetid swamps and forest vastnesses of Georgia, Florida and Louisiana commonly worked their convicts until they dropped dead from overwork or disease.  The region’s plantation monocultures in cotton and sugar made regular use of imprisoned former slaves, including women.  Among the leading families of Atlanta, Birmingham and other “New South” metropolises were businessmen whose fortunes originated in the dank coal pits, malarial marshes, isolated forests and squalid barracks in which their unfree peons worked, lived and died.

Because it tended to grant absolute authority to private commercial interests and because its racial make-up in the post-slavery era was overwhelmingly African-American, the South’s convict-lease system was distinctive.  Its caste nature is not only impossible to forget, but should remind us of the unbalanced racial profile of America’s bloated prison population today.

Moreover, this totalitarian-style control invited appalling brutalities in response to any sign of resistance: whippings, water torture, isolation in “dark cells,” dehydration, starvation, ice-baths, shackling with metal spurs riveted to the feet, and “tricing” (an excruciatingly painful process in which recalcitrant prisoners were strung up by the thumbs with fishing line attached to overhead pulleys).  Even women in a hosiery mill in Tennessee were flogged, hung by the wrists and placed in solitary confinement.

Living quarters for prisoner-workers were usually rat-infested and disease-ridden.  Work lasted at least from sunup to sundown and well past the point of exhaustion.  Death came often enough and bodies were cast off in unmarked graves by the side of the road or by incineration in coke ovens.  Injury rates averaged one per worker per month, including respiratory failure, burnings, disfigurement and the loss of limbs.  Prison mines were called “nurseries of death.”  Among Southern convict laborers, the mortality rate (not even including high levels of suicides) was eight times that among similar workers in the North — and it was extraordinarily high there.

The Southern system also stood out for the intimate collusion among industrial, commercial and agricultural enterprises and every level of Southern law enforcement as well as the judicial system.  Sheriffs, local justices of the peace, state police, judges and state governments conspired to keep the convict-lease business humming.  Indeed, local law officers depended on the leasing system for a substantial part of their income.  (They pocketed the fines and fees associated with the “convictions,” a repayable sum that would be added on to the amount of time at “hard labor” demanded of the prisoner.)

The arrest cycle was synchronized with the business cycle, timed to the rise and fall of the demand for fresh labor.  County and state treasuries similarly counted on such revenues, since the post-war South was so capital-starved that only renting out convicts assured that prisons could be built and maintained.

There was, then, every incentive to concoct charges or send people to jail for the most trivial offenses: vagrancy, gambling, drinking, partying, hopping a freight car, tarrying too long in town.  A “pig law” in Mississippi assured you of five years as a prison laborer if you stole a farm animal worth more than $10. Theft of a fence rail could result in the same.

Penal Servitude in the Gilded Age North

All of this was only different in degree from prevailing practices everywhere else: the sale of prison labor power to private interests, corporal punishment and the absence of all rights including civil liberties, the vote and the right to protest or organize against terrible conditions.

In the North, where 80 percent of all U.S. prison labor was employed after the Civil War and which accounted for over $35 billion in output (in current dollars), the system was reconfigured to meet the needs of modern industry and the pressures of “the long Depression.”  Convict labor was increasingly leased out only to a handful of major manufacturers in each state.  These textile mills, oven makers, mining operations, hat and shoe factories — one in Wisconsin leased that state’s entire population of convicted felons — were then installing the kind of mass production methods becoming standard in much of American industry.  As organized markets for prison labor grew increasingly oligopolistic (like the rest of the economy), the Depression of 1873 and subsequent depressions in the following decades wiped out many smaller businesses that had once gone trawling for convicts.

Today, we talk about a newly “flexible economy,” often a euphemism for the geometric growth of a precariously positioned, insecure workforce.  The convict labor system of the 19th century offered an original specimen of perfect flexibility.

Companies leasing convicts enjoyed authority to dispose of their rented labor power as they saw fit.  Workers were compelled to labor in total silence.  Even hand gestures and eye contact were prohibited for the purpose of creating “silent and insulated working machines.”

Supervision of prison labor was ostensibly shared by employers and the prison authorities.  In fact, many businesses did continue to conduct their operations within prison walls where they supplied the materials, power and machinery, while the state provided guards, workshops, food, clothing and what passed for medical care.  As a matter of practice though, the foremen of the businesses called the shots.  And there were certain states, including Nebraska, Washington and New Mexico, that, like their Southern counterparts, ceded complete control to the lessee.  As one observer put it, “Felons are mere machines held to labor by the dark cell and the scourge.”

Free market industrial capitalism, then and now, invariably draws on the aid of the state.  In that system’s formative phases, the state has regularly used its coercive powers of taxation, expropriation and in this case incarceration to free up natural and human resources lying outside the orbit of capitalism proper.

In both the North and the South, the contracting out of convict labor was one way in which that state-assisted mechanism of capital accumulation arose.  Contracts with the government assured employers that their labor force would be replenished anytime a worker got sick, was disabled, died or simply became too worn out to continue.

The Kansas Wagon Company, for example, signed a five-year contract in 1877 that prevented the state from raising the rental price of labor or renting to other employers.  The company also got an option to renew the lease for 10 more years, while the government was obliged to pay for new machinery, larger workshops, a power supply and even the building of a switching track that connected to the trunk line of the Pacific Railway and so ensured that the product could be moved effectively to market.

Penal institutions all over the country became auxiliary arms of capitalist industry and commerce.  Two-thirds of all prisoners worked for private enterprise.

Today, strikingly enough, government is again providing subsidies and tax incentives as well as facilities, utilities and free space for corporations making use of this same category of abjectly dependent labor.

The New Abolitionism

Dependency and flexibility naturally assumed no resistance, but there was plenty of that all through the 19th century from workers, farmers and even prisoners.  Indeed, a principal objective in using prison labor was to undermine efforts to unionize, but from the standpoint of mobilized working people far more was at stake.

Opposition to convict labor arose from workingmen’s associations, labor-oriented political parties, journeymen unions and other groups which considered the system an insult to the moral codes of egalitarian republicanism nurtured by the American Revolution.  The specter of proletarian dependency haunted the lives of the country’s self-reliant handicraftsmen who watched apprehensively as shops employing wage labor began popping up across the country.  Much of the earliest of this agitation was aimed at the use of prisoners to replace skilled workers (while unskilled prison labor was initially largely ignored).

It was bad enough for craftsmen to see their own livelihoods and standards of living put in jeopardy by “free” wage labor.  Worse still was to watch unfree labor do the same thing.  At the time, employers were turning to that captive prison population to combat attempts by aggrieved workers to organize and defend themselves.  On the eve of the Civil War, for example, an iron-molding contractor in Spuyten Duyvil, north of Manhattan in the Bronx, locked out his unionized workers and then moved his operation to Sing Sing penitentiary, where a laborer cost 40 cents, $2.60 less than the going day rate.  It worked, and Local 11 of the Union of Iron Workers quickly died away.

Worst of all was to imagine this debased form of work as a model for the proletarian future to come.  The workingman’s movement of the Jacksonian era was deeply alarmed by the prospect of “wage slavery,” a condition inimical to their sense of themselves as citizens of a republic of independent producers.  Prison labor was a sub-species of that dreaded “slavery,” a caricature of it perhaps, and intolerable to a movement often as much about emancipation as unionization.

All the way through the Gilded Age of the 1890s, convict labor continued to serve as a magnet for emancipatory desires.  In addition, prisoners’ rebellions became ever more common — in the North particularly, where many prisoners turned out to be Civil War veterans and dispossessed working people who already knew something about fighting for freedom and fighting back.  Major penitentiaries like Sing Sing became sites of repeated strikes and riots; a strike in 1877 even took on the transplanted Spuyten Duyvil iron-molding company.

Above and below the Mason Dixon line, political platforms, protest rallies, petition campaigns, legislative investigations, union strikes and boycotts by farm organizations like the Farmers Alliance and Grange cried out for the abolition of the convict-lease system, or at least for its rigorous regulation.  Over the century’s last two decades, more than 20 coal-mine strikes broke out because of the use of convict miners.

The Knights of Labor, that era’s most audacious labor movement, was particularly exercised.  During the Coal Creek Wars in eastern Tennessee in the early 1890s, for instance, TC&I tried to use prisoners to break a miners’ strike.  The company’s vice president noted that it was “an effective club to hold over the heads of free laborers.”

Strikers and their allies affiliated with the Knights, the United Mine Workers and the Farmers Alliance launched guerilla attacks on the prisoner stockade, sending the convicts they freed to Knoxville.  When the governor insisted on shipping them back, the workers released them into the surrounding hills and countryside.  Gun battles followed.

The Death of Convict Leasing

In the North, the prison abolition movement went viral, embracing not only workers’ organizations, sympathetic rural insurgents and prisoners, but also widening circles of middle-class reformers.  The newly created American Federation of Labor denounced the system as “contract slavery.”  It also demanded the banning of any imports from abroad made with convict labor and the exclusion from the open market of goods produced domestically by prisoners, whether in state-run or private workshops.  In Chicago, the construction unions refused to work with materials made by prisoners.

By the latter part of the century, in state after state penal servitude was on its way to extinction.  New York, where the “industry” was born and was largest, killed it by the late 1880s.  The tariff of 1890 prohibited the sale of convict-made wares from abroad.  Private leasing continued in the North, but under increasingly restrictive conditions, including Federal legislation passed during the New Deal.  By World War II, it was virtually extinct (although government-run prison workshops continued as they always had).

At least officially, even in the South it was at an end by the turn of the century in Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi.  Higher political calculations were at work in these states.  Established elites were eager to break the inter-racial alliances that had formed over abolishing convict leasing by abolishing the hated system itself.  Often enough, however, it ended in name only.

What replaced it was the state-run chain gang (although some Southern states like Alabama and Florida continued private leasing well into the 1920s). Inmates were set to work building roads and other infrastructure projects vital to the flourishing of a mature market economy and so to the continuing process of capital accumulation.  In the North, the system of “hard labor” was replaced by a system of “hard time,” that numbing, brutalizing idleness where masses of people extruded from the mainstream economy are pooled into mass penal colonies.  The historic link between labor, punishment and economic development was severed, and remained so… until now.

Convict Leasing Rises Again

“Now,” means our second Gilded Age and its aftermath.  In these years, the system of leasing out convicts to private enterprise was reborn.  This was a perverse triumph for the law of supply and demand in an era infatuated with the charms of the free market.  On the supply side, the U.S. holds captive 25 percent of all the prisoners on the planet: 2.3 million people.  It has the highest incarceration rate in the world as well, a figure that began skyrocketing in 1980 as Ronald Reagan became president.  As for the demand for labor, since the 1970s American industrial corporations have found it increasingly unprofitable to invest in domestic production.  Instead, they have sought out the hundreds of millions of people abroad who are willing to, or can be pressed into, working for far less than American workers.

As a consequence, those back home — disproportionately African-American workers — who found themselves living in economic exile, scrabbling to get by,  began showing up in similarly disproportionate numbers in the country’s rapidly expanding prison archipelago. It didn’t take long for corporate America to come to view this as another potential foreign country, full of cheap and subservient labor — and better yet, close by.

What began in the 1970s as an end run around the laws prohibiting convict leasing by private interests has now become an industrial sector in its own right, employing more people than any Fortune 500 corporation and operating in 37 states.  And here’s the ultimate irony: Our ancestors found convict labor obnoxious in part because it seemed to prefigure a new and more universal form of enslavement.  Could its rebirth foreshadow a future ever more unnervingly like those past nightmares?

Today, we are being reassured by the president, the mainstream media and economic experts that the Great Recession is over, that we are in “recovery” even though most of the recovering patients haven’t actually noticed significant improvement in their condition.  For those announcing its arrival, “recovery” means that the mega-banks are no longer on the brink of bankruptcy, the stock market has made up lost ground, corporate profits are improving, and notoriously unreliable employment numbers have improved by several tenths of a percent.

What accounts for that peculiarly narrow view of recovery, however, is that the general costs of doing business are falling off a cliff as the economy eats itself alive.  The recovery being celebrated owes thanks to local, state and federal austerity budgets, the starving of the social welfare system and public services, rampant anti-union campaigns in the public and private sector, the spread of sweatshop labor, the coercion of desperate unemployed or underemployed workers to accept lower wages, part-time work and temporary work, as well as the relinquishing of healthcare benefits and a financially secure retirement — in short, to surrender the hope that is supposed to come with the American franchise.

Such a recovery, resting on the stripping away of the hard won material and cultural achievements of the past century, suggests a new world in which the prison-labor archipelago could indeed become a vast gulag of the downwardly mobile.

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