The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History by David R. Roediger and Elizabeth M. Esch (review)

This important book places “race,” migration, and empire at the center of US management praxis in a period stretching from the days of slavery to the present era (though the time frame mostly concerns the period from 1830 to 1930). The raw material for this estimable work is the vast literature on management and a bountiful secondary literature that has focused on labor.

As the authors see it, an essential aspect of US productivity has been the deft manipulation of racial and ethnic antagonisms among workers, which has hindered the development of powerful unions of the type that are commonplace in France, South Africa, Germany, Brazil, and other competitor nations. Slavery and the forced labor of Africans were instrumental in this process. “By the end of the colonial period,” they write, “one sailor in six was African or African American, with even the crews on slave ships including Africans as labor as well as cargo” (13).

US management practice was forged in a crucible of imposing compulsory labor on conscripted Africans, which sheds light on its tendency toward draconian heavy handedness. Unfortunately, this practice did not just infiltrate management handbooks. “Even in Texas,” it is reported, “where Mexico had abolished slavery in 1830, more than 28 percent of white families owned slaves on the eve of the Civil War and Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana all exceeded 30 per cent. For the entire Confederacy nearly one white family in three owned slaves” (25). “Management,” they conclude “was thus military and biological as well as directed toward production by slaves” (27).

An important aspect of compulsory labor was “the U.S. slave patrol, a cross-class mobilization of whites policing slaves’ behavior and movements at night …” (23). Obviously, these fraught points raise disturbing questions not only about the trajectory of management but, as well, how “inter-racial relations” may continue to be infected by the bacillus that was slavery.

Disentangling this conflicted skein has been made all the more problematic by the stubborn persistence of mythologizing and fictionalizing, which could fairly be viewed as condition precedent to mass enslavement.

Thus, “among male slaves, a light skin generally decreased value as managerial ‘common sense’ dictated that mixed-race slaves were less capable of withstanding hot and backbreaking labor in sugar production and were more likely to be unmanageable workers prone to running away” (35–36). It is useful to speculate about the connection of such praxis with the existence of contemporary management practices that virtually mandate that African American women straighten their hair: might this be a lineal descendant of slave management practices that policed the outward appearance of the enslaved?

For the end of slavery did not necessarily mean the end of what the authors call “race management.” “The Klan sought political power,” they say, “but also disciplined black labor, acting at times as an employers’ association, prefiguring later open shop, anti-union efforts in the South” (62). It is striking that the most antiunion bastions in this nation are disproportionately sited in the region where a bloody war was fought rather than surrender to antislavery.

It was also during this postslavery era that US productivity jumped, a trend facilitated by the building of a transcontinental railway. Their point here is that the laying of rails was viewed then as a critical component of subduing the indigenous population, in that trains were crucial in transporting armed troops (72). Likewise, though Chinese workers were viewed widely as being the most productive workers, “race management” dictated that they be paid less than their non-Chinese counterparts, which simultaneously boosted the profit taking of the robber barons (76).

The philosophy of “race management” followed the flag, arriving in Manila by the turn of the twentieth century. Herbert Hoover earned his spurs abroad as an engineer who displayed a...