"Beneath the Wage is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the evolving forms of labor exploitation and workers’ resistance. Annie McClanahan doesn’t just offer a vital historical account of how we came to pay workers in tips or by the task. Her book also illuminates the political and cultural landscape of contemporary service worker activism.”
–Saru Jayaraman, President, One Fair Wage

★Beneath the Wage retheorizes 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 labor 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 retheorizes 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 labor: superexploited tipwork, deskilled clerical microwork, and informalized gigwork. She shows how work done “beneath the wage” depends on racialized and gendered forms of economic domination, is often excluded from labor organizing and regulation, and yet has begun to generate a new politics of social reproduction and solidarity.

Annie McClanahan is an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture.