For a recent interview in Public Seminar, Annie McClanahan speaks with Lina Moe about her new book, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full conversation. An excerpt from McClanahan’s commentary appears below:

“Our entire image of what constitutes an employee, and what constitutes management, basically derives from master-servant common law—essentially the first version of labor law invented under nascent capitalism. That’s where we get the word “servant” used as a legal equivalent for “employee.” The master’s total control over the servant is the origin of our understanding of management itself. But then, very quickly, with industrialization, those original categories of workers get excluded from the framework, even though all the terms derive from them. And that has a lot to do with gender and, in the United States, with race—this work is increasingly done by women of color, in the context of battles between Northern and Southern legislators over how to regulate labor under two very different economic systems.”