You are what you earn: The politics of the wage and western natural resource labor

This dissertation considers the cultural politics of the wage in natural resource labor in the western US. I argue that the wage is a particularly critical form through which cultural and political economic forces shape the lives of workers, and through which workers press alternative social and political economic agendas. The argument is developed through three theoretically informed historical case studies: the wage conflicts of male oil workers in post-World War II Los Angeles, the relations between race and racism and the politics of wages and skill as they affected the experience of African American timber workers in 1920s Northern California, and the political struggles of a Pacific coast fishers' union before and after World War II.;I examine an array of wage theories, demonstrating the extent to which each provides a foundation for the cultural politics of the wage. Arguing that the western wage is not a determinate or one-dimensional political economic relation, I show how it functions as a site of political and cultural interaction and conflict, characterized by an indeterminacy and complexity that belies the reduction of the politics of the wage to the dynamics of wage determination. To provide a more complete theoretical basis to understand the cultural and political significance of the wage, I develop a "culturalized" wage theory founded upon a synthesis of Piero Sraffa's critique of economic theory and Antonio Gramsci's cultural analysis.;While each case has many dynamics, each chapter emphasizes the relation of the wage to particular social structures: citizenship and gender (Chapter 2), class (Chapter 3), and race (Chapter 4). The specific manifestations of each of these concepts both reflect the politics of the wage, and construct those politics. The processes of political and cultural construction of which the wage is a product are substantially influenced by the political economic theories different groups of working people develop to make sense of and evaluate their place in the local and national community, and use to identify opportunities for change.