Our approach to informal economic relations isn’t reducible to a singular space but as a paradigmatic examination of the role of exploitation within the political economy writ large. Only an encounter erotic/affective economy can address the true nature of exploitation and alienation.
(Annie McClanahan and Jon-David Settell ’21McClanahan is Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches contemporary American literature and culture, Marxist theory, and interdisciplinary approaches to economic crisis. Mahindra Humanities Center Postdoctoral Fellow in 2010-11, and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in 2012-13. Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for 21st Century Studies in 2013-14. Humanities Center, Harvard University, Postdoctoral Fellow, 2010-2011 B.A. in English and World Literature, Pitzer College, M.S.W. in Clinical Social Work, Columbia University, M.A. in Comparative Literature, San Francisco State University EG)
In fact, however, distinctions in the method of wage payment—the different forms that wages take, the different means by which they are paid, and the different measures of output they represent—have been central to the history of service work. Attention to the systemic feminization and racialization of various wage systems not only lets us connect sex work with other forms of service work but also links service work to longer and more global histories of hyper-exploitation within informal labor markets. Attention to the history of waitressing in the United States, for instance, reveals an intimate connection between tipping and the feminization of certain professions. Early twentieth-century union activists and Progressive Era feminists who believed tipping would encourage female immorality even sound rather like Fleming; thus, one reformer argued “the tip establishes between [the male customer] and the girl [waitress] a relation of patronage which may easily be made the beginning of improper attentions,” while the Industrial Workers of the World claimed that tipping would make female service workers “servile, slavish . . . and [likely] to succumb to ‘the easier way’ of loose morals” (qtd. in Cobble 1991: 42). Such accounts suggest that tip work was feminized because tips elicited excessive feminine “servility” and “slavishness.” In fact, however, tip wages were the result of a hyperexploitative labor arrangement already yoked both to racialization (one of the first US companies to force employees to rely almost entirely on tips was the Pullman Company, which hired only Black men from the South because “the southern negro is . . . more adapted to serve with a smile”) and to gender (Seagrave 1998: 17–18; see also Cobble 1991; Oat- man 2016). Meanwhile, the connection between waitressing and sex work ran the other way, too, as sex workers caught by police with cash in their pockets and in danger of arrest often claimed it was tips from their waitressing job (see Cobble 1991: 24–25). All these workers—the Pullman porters, the waitresses, and the sex workers who claimed to be waitresses—have been left out of traditional working-class organization not because cash is sleazy, and not because those who rely on tips have “loose morals” or are somehow more abject than those who punch a time clock for their wage, but rather because these forms of work and these methods of wage payment have been so effectively racialized and feminized