Illiberal Reformers by Leonard Thomas C.;

Author:Leonard, Thomas C.; [Leonard, Thomas C.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691175867
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2015-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

RACING TO THE BOTTOM

Profoundly illiberal, the living-standard theory of wages was also economically problematic. Why would an immigrant willingly accept wages lower than the value of his or her labor? Plausible economic explanations could be constructed. One was monopsony. The immigrant might be employed in a company town, with both wages and spending at the mercy of his or her employer. Or the immigrant, bound to a religious community, might be unwilling to accept work too far from home, or, even if mobile, might be unaware of better work opportunities.

Yet the living-standard theory posited that inferior workers accepted low wages because their race or other innate debility predisposed them to a low standard of living. Low-standard theorists sometimes slipped from the claim that low standards were innate to the claim that low standards were cultural in cause, “race habits” rather than “race instincts.” But the slippage was rarely noted, and with Lamarckian inheritance, cultural standards of living could become hereditary.

The living-standard theory of wages was vague on key details. Were the inferior workers displacing the American workingman, or were they filling menial jobs created by a growing economy, jobs the American workingman would not consider taking? If Anglo-Saxon workers were more productive, as the theory invariably assumed, why had they not moved up to better jobs, their superior skill justifying higher wages?

The living-standard theory of wages also tended to confuse living standards (which are determined by spending) with wages (which are income). A frugal standard of living, whatever its origins, in no way entailed accepting low wages. Living cheap did not mean working cheap.26 A thrifty immigrant could spend little without accepting wages less than he or she had to, saving the difference to fund a small business, to buy passage for other family members, or to send remittances to the old country.

These theoretical weaknesses proved no bar to popularity. The charge of undercutting American workers was made against nearly every immigrant group trying to gain a foothold in the factories, shops, and mines of industrial America.

Jews fleeing oppression in Russia and eastern Europe were regular targets. Commons argued that the Jewish sweatshop was “the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race.” Like Ross’s Coolie, Commons’s Jew was less productive but lived cheaper than the American workingman. The economic competition of the Jews thus forced American workers to have fewer children. “Competition has no respect for the superior races,” Commons said; so “the race with lowest necessities displaces others.”27

The progressive muckraker and settlement-house worker Jacob Riis was regarded as sympathetic toward working-class immigrants, whose wretched living conditions he documented in his sensational 1890 exposé, How the Other Half Lives. But Riis, himself an immigrant, was decidedly ambivalent about the eastern European Jews living in tenement New York, and he too used race to explain labor market outcomes. The Polish Jew, Riis explained, worshipped money and lived cheap. The “instinct of dollars and cents” was so strong in Jewish children, Riis wrote, they could count almost before they could walk. The Jews had monopolized New York’s garment business by means of their low standards.

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