Beneath the Wage

Beneath the Wage retheorises 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 labour 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 retheorises 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 labour: superexploited tipwork, deskilled clerical microwork, and informalised gigwork. She shows how work done 'beneath the wage' depends on racialised and gendered forms of economic domination, is often excluded from labour organising and regulation, and yet has begun to generate a new politics of social reproduction and solidarity.