 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, and we're going to talk about where America got its workers. And when I say workers, I don't mean slaves who came from Africa, as we've talked about, and we'll talk about more. And I don't mean independent crafts people, college professors like me who basically set our own schedule. Now, I mean wage workers working for capitalists under the supervision of capitalist hierarchy. Where did these come from? Now, in the orthodox theory, there's no issue. If a capitalist workplace is more productive than an independent farm or craft shop, then we'll be able to pay more wages, higher wages, and higher wages will lower people to work more for them. At the higher wages, the capitalist factory will attract workers away from farms, fields, or independent shops. It doesn't really work that way, because people really don't like working for someone else, and they really don't like working in the hierarchy. So if you start paying wage workers more, they'll just say, hey, I can, at higher wages, I can make enough money to live on faster. So I'll actually be able to work less. So what you need to do as a capitalist is what we call unbending the supply curve. The labor supply curve bends back because at higher wages, people can take more leisure. You want to unbend that. Find a way to get these workers to take more work instead of more leisure in response to higher wages. Now, in practice, this has almost never happened for free people, truly free people. Left to their own devices, free people, people who came out of the American Revolution, they want to control their own destinies. They don't, they work for other people only when necessary. Abraham Lincoln describes this process when he says how you start out working as a wage worker, accumulate enough money to set up your own farm or your own business. That's the American way. Well, what happens if your wages are higher? You accumulate that money faster. So higher wages, paid wage workers, results in less work, less wage work. The workers go off on their own. Now, when it came to staple crop production, the Europeans were old hands at this. They knew that nobody would work very much growing sugar or cotton. This works too hard. Nobody wants to work under a slave driver. Only slaves would work this hard. So they went and got slaves. The early American factories were different. They were in the North. We had already ended slavery. And nobody would take a valuable slave and put them into a Northern cotton mill. It didn't pay enough. So who are you going to get to work there? The answer is daughters. Not sons. Farmers wouldn't send their sons. They needed their sons to keep working on the farm. They needed their sons because it's undignified to work a Northern, a Yankee, working under supervision, working as a wage worker in a factory that's undignified. But you'll send your daughters to do it. You want your son to be an upstanding citizen. He has to be independent. Daughters don't need to be independent. So farmers throughout New England, you know, they could use the money. Their daughters could use the money. The daughters actually often appreciated the chance to get away from dad. The daughters would be sent off into the factories. Not slaves, but sort of a form of indentured. Patriarchal authority was transferred from the farmer to the mill owner who would discipline the girls, require that they attend church, require that they learn to play the piano, and make sure that they worked hard. Early factory production depended on this patriarchal authority. It wasn't a wage market. It was authority that created capitalism because capitalism depends on authority. As it is, these mill girls were too independent anyway. They started complaining. They formed a union, several unions. They had strikes and protests. The mill owners started pulling their hair out. It's like, God, we thought we finally found people who would obey orders, and they won't. And they couldn't use slaves. There were experiments with Chinese indentured servants, but then the Irish. The Irish were desperate. The English had concentrated land ownership in Ireland. The Irish had no land. Irish Catholics were not allowed to own land. The English raised cattle in Ireland for export to Britain to England. They didn't need very many workers. And then the potato blight was the last straw. Starving. The Irish got on the boats came to the America. In the south, they would put the work digging canals in places where these slave owners wouldn't even risk their own slaves. Too dangerous for slaves. We used the Irish. They built railroads in the north and they went to work in the factories. Desperate, they obeyed orders. They replaced the mill girls. Eventually, the Irish got to be too independent and the mill owners started looking for, who are we going to get next? The Italians. Desperate because of changes in land ownership rights in Italy. Southern Italians flocked to America desperate for work. They went into the factories. The sloths, the polls, as capitalism spread throughout the world, land ownership patterns became more concentrated. People in one country after another lost access, independent access to the means of production desperate. They came to America to work in factories. Nowadays, we're getting people from China. Of course, we get Mexicans. It's all the same old story. And these are the not entirely free workers on whom capitalism depends in the United States and elsewhere. So thank you very much and have a nice day. Bye-bye.