Beneath the Wage - (Near Futures) by Annie McClanahan (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Beneath the Wage retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated

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.

Review Quotes

"McClanahan's inquiry and cogent analysis make for an extraordinary read. . . . We can't unfeel the real degradation of the conditions of our labor. But we can--and this is the part of the book McClanahan so beautifully offers us--organize against it. To do so, we need to recognize our labor as work and ourselves as workers, living together beneath the wage."---Flora Arnold and Lauren Hough, Protean Magazine

"The field of analysis is so full that we are ready for a history of the nearly twenty years of Marxist thought. . . . Annie McClanahan would have to figure prominently as a key voice among those taking on the dynamics of capitalism's long crisis. . . . It is rare that a book manages to pull off both a major intervention in Marxist theory and an important piece of cultural analysis. Beneath the Wage does just this."---Sarah Brouillette, Spectre

"Intelligent and timely, [Beneath the Wage] illuminates the often-hostile economic and cultural landscape of modern capitalism. An eye-opening look at today's service work and the forms of solidarity that have emerged to meet it."-- "Kirkus Reviews"

About the Author

Annie McClanahan is an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture.