The American labor movement defined itself around whiteness as a bulwark against wage slavery

Evidence

Initially, American workers resisted the concept of wage labor, finding it antithetical to freedom and self-sufficiency. But as industrialization forged ahead while white indentured servitude declined, paying workers’ wages became, according to historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar, “the preferred labor system.” As some of the world’s first white industrial proletarians searched for a language to voice their grievances, they found traction in analogies to chattel slavery. Mill hands worked hours similar to those imposed on enslaved field hands, from dawn to dusk, and were dependent on factory owners for sustenance. In 1845, a labor newspaper referred to mill workers as “white slaves of capital.” An immigrant from Germany, a shoemaker, put it this way: “We are free, but not free enough.” At inception, the American labor movement defined itself as a movement of and for white workers, a bulwark against their downward slide into “wage slavery,” Blackness, and un-freedom. “Do not let them make niggers out of you,” a machine stitcher told a crowd of mill workers in 1860, encouraging them to strike and demand a higher wage. Whiteness colored the American labor movement’s initial identity and governed its boundaries of solidarity, ultimately limiting its power. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 585

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reframing thesis the reader is tracking: labor’s origins as a white-only movement is a specific empirical claim distinct from the broad ‘1619 as origin’ argument. Also echoes the ‘immodesty/moral panics as class-identity signaling’ pattern from the reader’s article 2. — connects to: White workers cemented segregation to protect their labor advantages — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1459
• SEED: Angle: ‘White slaves of capital’ — the labor movement founded itself on an analogy to slavery that then had to exclude actual enslaved people; tracing how an analogy defines a movement’s membership boundaries.
• SHARE: The 1845 ‘white slaves of capital’ phrase and the 1860 machine stitcher’s ‘do not let them make niggers out of you’ would land with someone studying labor history or race and class formation.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘wage slavery’ as the founding self-conception of the American labor movement — a crucial definitional term for distinguishing workers’ reframing from actual chattel slavery.