Working for Debt

Banks, Loan Sharks, and the Origins of Financial Exploitation in the United States

By: Simon Bittmann

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Hardcover | 6 August 2024 | Edition Number 1

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Hardcover
376 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 3.18

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In the early twentieth century, wage loans became a major source of cash for workers all over the United States. From Black washerwomen to white foremen, Illinois roomers to Georgia railroad men, workers turned to labor income as collateral for borrowing capital. Networks of companies started profiting from payday and property advances, exposing debtors to the grim prospects of garnishments of their wages and possessions in order to mitigate the risk of default. Progressive and later New Deal reformers sought to eradicate these practices, denouncing "loan sharks" and "financial slavery" as major threats to a new credit democracy. They proposed fair credit as a universal solution to move past industrial poverty and boost consumer freedom-but in doing so, reformers, lenders, and bankers limited credit access to the white middle-class constituencies seen as worthy of protection against extortion.

Working for Debt explores how the fight against wage loans divided the American credit market along class, race, and gender lines. Simon Bittmann argues that the moral and political crusades of Progressive Era reformers helped create the exclusionary credit markets that favored white male breadwinners. The politics of credit expansion served to obscure the failures of U.S. capitalism, using the "loan shark" as a scapegoat for larger, deeper depredations. As credit became a core feature of U.S. capitalism, the association of legitimate borrowing with white middle-class households and the financial exclusion of others was entrenched. Blending economic sociology with business, labor, and social history, this book shows how social stratification shaped credit markets, with enduring consequences for class, race, and gender inequalities.

Industry Reviews

A fascinating social history of wage credit and a powerful contribution to the expanding sociological study of exploitation. -- Christopher Muller, Harvard University
Bittmann's rigorous, deeply insightful account argues that moral crusades against the loan shark "evil" hid an uncomfortable reality - many Americans could not earn enough to survive the merciless demands of capitalism - and illustrates how efforts to stamp out predatory lending ultimately produced new forms of racial inequality and economic stratification that persist to this day. -- Josh Lauer, University of New Hampshire

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