For an interview featured on the Princeton University Press Ideas Blog, Zone author Annie McClanahan speaks about her new book, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work. Click here to learn more about it. Click here to read the full interview. An excerpt appears below:

“The idea for this book really began the moment I realized that most histories and theories of wages presume the regulated, hourly wage as a norm. But as someone who has worked a lot of jobs where I mostly earned tips, I knew that wasn’t the full picture. The hourly wage is associated primarily with manufacturing work, where labor time is very rationalized and output can be determined by the machine itself. Service work, by contrast, tends to be much less predictable, much less technologically mediated, and with less quantifiable “output.” Non-hourly methods of wage payment like tips—a form of compensation that dates back to eighteenth-century domestic service—were thus perceived as necessary to ensure that service workers would “self-manage” effectively. In the US, tipworkers were excluded from the minimum-wage provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act and instead are still paid a “subminimum wage” supplemented by customer tips. Those exclusions were possible in part because service work had been racialized and feminized: from the Black Pullman porters who were central to early-twentieth-century debates about tipping to the migrant workers who increasingly perform app-based gigwork today, female workers, non-white workers, and non-citizen workers have always been more likely perform un- or under-regulated in-person service work.”