Underwriting Labor
How risk is assigned, managed, and profited from in the U.S. economy.
Every paycheck has a history. This month, we trace the economic architecture of American labor: how risk has been systematically assigned to workers and managed to protect capital. We open with one of our own, McKenzie Joseph, who is organizing against it.
Organizer Spotlight
In the video above, McKenzie speaks about incarceration, temp work, and why he joined Beyond the Bars.
McKenzie Joseph is a Haitian American member of the Turf Team and a Fellow in the Organizers-in-Training program. A formerly incarcerated temp worker, he’s been organizing his coworkers at his worksite, building a worker network from the ground up, developing his own leadership, and bringing others along with him. Last week, he traveled to Atlanta with hundreds of workers for the 2026 USSW Annual Summit, “The Future Belongs to Southern Workers,” where he connected with organizers across the South and brought back lessons to strengthen the work at his job.
McKenzie’s story is 400 years in the making. Below, Kat traces how the American economy has always assigned risk downward, and who has been made to bear it.
The Economic Architecture of Control
By Katherine Passley, Co-Executive Director
American labor history is often presented in separate chapters. Slavery. Reconstruction. Jim Crow. The prison boom. The rise of contingent labor. Yet beneath these eras lies a continuous economic structure. When examined closely, a pattern emerges that links them together.
The pattern centers on controlling labor, extracting value, insulating capital from risk, and shifting vulnerability downward onto workers, particularly Black and immigrant workers.
Slavery and the Financialization of Human Life
Under chattel slavery, enslaved people were legally defined as property and fully integrated into the financial infrastructure of the United States.
Enslaved people were assigned multiple layers of value throughout their lives. Their price fluctuated based on age, gender, reproductive capacity, skill, and health. There was “market value,” but also life cycle value and even postmortem value. Enslaved people were appraised repeatedly, their bodies converted into numbers that could be traded, inherited, or leveraged.
Insurance deepened this financialization. Slaveholders purchased life insurance policies on enslaved people, especially those hired out in dangerous sectors such as mining, railroads, and factory work. Insurance companies required documentation of age and physical condition. Premiums were calculated using actuarial tables that estimated life expectancy and occupational risk.
These actuarial tables were built from incomplete data and shaped by racial assumptions about Black health, endurance, and mortality. Companies varied widely in how they assessed risk. Some charged higher premiums for enslaved workers in industrial settings. Others adjusted rates based on age or perceived physical strength. The calculations were inconsistent across firms and often reflected racialized beliefs about biological difference.
Life insurance policies on enslaved people were part of a broader financial strategy that supported southern industrial growth. Insurance reduced uncertainty for slaveholders. If an enslaved worker died while hired out, the owner could recover financial losses. This encouraged investment in riskier but more profitable labor arrangements.
Enslaved people were routinely used as collateral for loans. Banks extended credit backed by human property. Enslaved bodies stabilized lending markets and facilitated territorial expansion. The collateralization of human beings helped fuel the growth of American finance.
What makes this system especially significant is that it merged racial hierarchy with emerging actuarial science. Enslaved people were categorized, measured, and priced according to statistical frameworks that claimed objectivity while reinforcing racial ideology. Risk assessment became a tool of racial ordering. The violence of slavery was translated into the language of underwriting.
Sharecropping and the Redistribution of Risk
Emancipation ended formal ownership of bodies, but it did not end the economic demand for disciplined and controlled labor. Sharecropping emerged as the dominant agricultural system across the South. Freed people worked land owned by white landholders. Credit was extended for seed, tools, housing, and food. At harvest, debts were deducted before any profits were distributed.
The landowner controlled the books. Illiteracy, manipulated accounting, inflated supply prices, and high interest rates were common. Environmental risk such as drought or flooding compounded financial instability. Many families completed the season in debt and were legally or practically bound to the land for another year.
Under slavery, insurance protected the slaveholder’s capital investment. Under sharecropping, risk was transferred almost entirely onto the worker. The landowner retained control of land and credit. The worker bore market volatility and environmental uncertainty. The structure evolved from ownership to indebtedness. Labor remained subordinated.
Criminalization and Permanent Risk Classification
After Reconstruction, Black Codes and aggressive policing restructured racial control through criminal law. Convict leasing transferred incarcerated people to private corporations for labor in mines, farms, and industrial sites. Mortality rates were high, and oversight was minimal. Labor was extracted through state authority while corporations absorbed profit. This system laid groundwork for the modern carceral state.
In the era of mass incarceration, a criminal record shapes access to employment, housing, credit, and insurance. Individuals with records are frequently categorized as high risk by employers and insurers. They may be denied coverage, charged higher premiums, excluded from bonding programs, or screened out of stable employment altogether.
The language of insurability remains strikingly similar to nineteenth century practices. Individuals are evaluated through risk profiles. Categories are applied. Statistical generalizations substitute for individualized assessment. The framework presents itself as neutral while reproducing structural inequality. The underwriting of enslaved bodies has evolved into the underwriting of criminalized status.
Detention and the Structuring of Labor Vulnerability
This economic logic extends beyond prisons. Wherever the state exerts total control over a person’s movement and autonomy, economic vulnerability intensifies. Immigration detention confines individuals in ways that restrict access to stable employment and heighten precarity. Institutionalization of people with disabilities has historically limited autonomy and exposed residents to exploitative labor arrangements under paternalistic frameworks. Veterans are often publicly honored while facing significant barriers to stable housing, employment, and healthcare, treated as instruments of national defense during service and marginalized afterward.
The Temp Industry and the Modern Outsourcing of Risk
Today, the temporary staffing industry reflects this long trajectory of risk shifting. Employers rely on staffing agencies to limit liability and reduce responsibility. Workplace injury, unstable hours, lack of benefits, and sudden termination are absorbed by workers. Formerly incarcerated people, immigrants, and others marked as high risk are disproportionately directed into contingent roles.
The continuity is clear. Slavery converted human beings into insured capital. Sharecropping bound labor through debt. Convict leasing extracted criminalized labor through state power. Mass incarceration produced permanent risk branding. Temporary labor institutionalizes precarity by outsourcing vulnerability.
Portions of the working class are repeatedly categorized as risky, unstable, or disposable. Financial systems price that risk. Institutions normalize it. Workers are denied full control over their labor and full participation in economic security.
At Beyond the Bars, organizing is about challenging this architecture of risk classification and risk shifting. It is about building systems in which workers are treated as human beings entitled to stability, dignity, and power, instead of liabilities to be managed.
Theory is only as good as the organizing behind it. Here's what we've been moving this month.
Since the Last Work Release
Worker Organizing. A lot is happening on this front, and we’re intentionally keeping more of this work close until our official campaign launch. When it does go public, this community will be the first to know. In the meantime, if you’re interested in salting, contact william@beyondthebars.org.
Worker Advocacy. Our bill to strengthen Florida’s Labor Pool Act, SB 1112, passed the Senate floor unanimously (34–0) on March 13th, with nearly two dozen of our members mobilizing to Tallahassee. While the bill ultimately stalled in the House and did not pass this year, our Senate sponsor, Senator Ileana Garcia, has already committed to re-filing next session. We’ll be back.
Worker Support. We’re preparing to launch a clothing exchange in April to meet immediate needs of our members when they’re released from jail or need clothing to attend an interview. Please email info@beyondthebars.org if you have clothing to donate.
Cross-Movement Solidarity. We joined USSW in Atlanta for their 2026 Annual Summit, “The Future Belongs to Southern Workers”, gathering with hundreds of workers across the South for a powerful few days of strategy, culture, and collective vision for a worker-led future.
Here’s what’s coming up this month.
Coming Up
Migration Justice Circle (Thursday, March 26 | 3:30 PM)
Join us for a Migrant Justice Circle, where we’ll come together to share, learn, and support one another. We’ll discuss Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and how to respond collectively, followed by a space for reflection and conversation around immigration justice. Co-hosted with Fanm Saj. Haitian Creole and Spanish translation will be provided, and food will be served.
RSVP: https://www.mobilize.us/flcet/event/924219/
Building power requires both action and analysis. Here’s what’s influencing how we’re thinking about our work.
What We’re Reading
Steven Pitts, Organize… to Improve the Quality of Jobs in the Black Community, Berkeley Labor Center (May 2004)
A foundational report on the crisis of bad jobs in the Black community and the need to shift from service-based responses to organizing that transforms labor market conditions.
Jaz Brizack, Get on the Job and Organize (Apr. 29, 2025)
Drawing on campaigns at Starbucks, Nissan, and Tesla, Brizack makes the case that winning the right to organize is the foundation for everything else, and that worker-led campaigns, not top-down strategy, are what build real power.
Maximillian Alvarez, Is “Salting” the Future of Organized Labor?, In These Times, (Aug. 1, 2025)
A conversation with Jaz Brizack on salting as a strategy for organizing from within: building worker committees quietly, developing leadership on the shop floor, and launching campaigns strong enough to withstand employer retaliation.
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