The New American Serfdom, Part Two

This essay is a follow-up to Walmart and the New American Serfdom

One of several stadiums built for the Qatar World Cup, which cost thousands of lives

In the independent Persian Gulf states, a stark and unbridgeable gap exists between the wealthy and the masses. Sort of like everywhere, really. Because of deals brokered by the retreating British and French colonial empires after WWII, a minority of people, descended from those who collaborated with the colonial masters, own the land. We know now, as Europe didn’t in the 1940s, that owning the land means owning oil-drilling rights.

The colonial collaborators who received this massive largesse are now, mostly, dead. Their children and grandchildren own the stakes and, because the empires created make-do monarchies, also own the government. No popular vote will ever compel Gulf States oil aristocrats to pay better taxes or share the abundance created by exhaustive oil drilling. Gulf States’ per capita GDP is among Earth’s highest, yet most Gulf States residents are chronically poor.

Uneven wealth distribution forces Gulf States potentates to do something, anything, with their money. These countries have become synonymous with grotesque passion projects. Dubai’s man-made “Palm Islands,” golf resorts in the Saudi Arabian desert, and the Burj Khalifa are world-renowned, and mostly abhorred. Most recently, the rush-build stadiums for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar killed nearly 7,000 migrant workers, because money distorts the value of human life.

Those dead workers have haunted my imagination since that news reached world audiences. Migrants, mostly Indians and Pakistanis from rural agrarian backgrounds, rushed to Doha seeking work, because their homelands didn’t provide it. They, and their families back home, needed money, and Qatar had it. But Qatar had no incentive to protect workers, their skills, or their future productive value. Better to squeeze them now, even if it kills them.

Dedicated readers of American history—real American history, not the Florida version—will recognize this pattern. After the United States abolished slavery in 1865, several states, mostly former Confederate states, utilized a loophole in the 13^th Amendment to arrest poor, and mostly Black, residents. These arrestees would be remanded into labor as payment for their “crimes,” which often involved being unemployed or not carrying arbitrary government ID.

Because the “buyers” for these convicted laborers didn’t own them (most buyers were former slaveholders, or their children), they had noincentive to keep their laborers alive and healthy. Shane Bauer and other writers describe taskmasters who literally worked leased convicts to death, denying them food, medical care, watertight lodgings, and other necessities. The mortality rate among leased convicts greatly exceeded that among antebellum slaves.

A photo of leased convicts in the American South, from the Smithsonian collection

Qatari migrant workers and American leased convicts had price tags set upon their lives. Their price threshold was so low that therewas no material incentive to keeping workers alive. Although they did highly valued work, including cane cutting, coal mining, and stadium construction, they didn’t own the product they made. And whatever work they did exceeded the price of their own lives, making human life a net sum loss.

Last time out, I described Walmart cutting workers wages while artificially inflating stock prices as evidence of “serfdom.” Under medieval feudalism, peasants owned their own land, but paid their lord a portion of their yield as taxes. Serfs, however, belonged to the land, which their lord owned directly; instead of paying their lord taxes, their lord paid them wages, drawn from the land’s yield. Also, serfs weren’t free to leave.

This new serfdom, for which I lack a meaningful name, resembles medieval serfdom much as convict leasing resembles slavery. Just as convict buyers had no incentive to keep workers alive and healthy, so mass employers like Walmart, or the Qatari government, don’t have to pay living wages or provide basic protections. Unlike slaveholders or medieval lords, modern serf-masters outsource the unpaid labor of raising new workers to working age.

Therefore, modern serfdom creates innovative pressures on women, the disabled, and—ironically enough—convicts, who have difficulty getting public-facing jobs. As stated before, employment (rather than work) has become not only a fiscal necessity, but a moral imperative. Those who can’t work outside the home because they have responsibilities, impairments, or a spotty personal history, are characterized as not only lazy, but morally deficient.

Again, for American history readers, demagogues and dog-whistlers have always used “moral deficiency” to justify crackdowns on minorities. One common charge against Black Americans who later became leased convicts, was “vagrancy.” Nor is this an historical outlier, as Florida’s newest public schools curriculum asserts that chattel slavery taught Black people job skills, that is, that slavery taught late-capitalist morality, whether anyone wanted to learn or not.

The New American Serfdom, Part Three