Our Daily Bread

A wage is more than a simple fee in exchange for labor, argues Geoff Mann. It is also a political arena in which working people's identity, culture, and politics are negotiated and developed. Mann examines struggles over wages to reveal ways in which the wage becomes a critical component in the making of social hierarchies of race, gender, and citizenship. Taking three wage disputes in the natural resources industry as his case studies, Mann demonstrates that wage negotiation is not simply emblematic of economic conflict over the distribution of income but also represents critical contests in the cultural politics of identity under capitalism.