‘Beneath the Wage’ with Annie McClanahan
A conversation with author Annie McClanahan on Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Zone Books, 2026). Today, 80 percent of U.S. workers do service work, from delivering takeout to mopping floors to teaching. Do these jobs have anything in common? Who is doing this work? And what kind of labor politics does it generate?
Although service work has often been treated as a footnote to modern capitalism, this talk uses service work to challenge conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated. It explores three paradigmatic types of contemporary service labor—superexploited tipwork, deskilled clerical microwork, and informalized gigwork—and argues that work done “beneath the wage” depends on racialized and gendered forms of economic domination and is often excluded from labor organizing and regulation. Yet service work has also begun to generate a new politics of solidarity, one that rejects the compromises of industrial unionism and attends instead to the problem of reproduction in a low-wage economy.
Annie McClanahan is Professor of English at the University of California–Irvine. She directs the UC Marxist Institute for Research, is Faculty Co-Director for UCI-LIFTED, which offers a bachelors degree to incarcerated students, and is the Vice President for the Council of UC Faculty Associations. She is also the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture (Stanford University Press, 2017).