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Thinking Labor Rights through the Coolie Question

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2017

Mae M. Ngai  and
Sophie Loy-Wilson
Mae M. Ngai
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Sophie Loy-Wilson
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney
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Extract

In 2014 the conservative Australian Institute of Public Affairs called for the abolition of the minimum wage—at the time AU$16.87, the highest in the industrial world and twice that of the United States. The Australian minimum, enacted in Victoria in 1896, was the first in the world. Other nations copied it, and the International Labor Organization inscribed it as an international convention in 1928. Responding to calls for its abolition, University of Melbourne historian Marilyn Lake reminded Australians that the minimum wage was a “symbol of Australian values.” Envisioned as a “living wage, sufficient to meet the variety of needs of a person living in a civilized community … [it] recognized workers as human beings and equal citizens,” she wrote.

Type
Labor Rights and The Coolie Question
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 91: Thinking Labor Rights Through the Coolie Question , Spring 2017 , pp. 5 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2017 

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References

NOTES

1. http://www.wsj.com/articles/australia-debates-whether-its-minimum-wage-is-too-high-1422210360 (accessed January 12, 2017). In 2016 the Australian minimum increased to AU$17.70 (US$13.25).

2. Marilyn Lake, “Minimum Wage is More than a Safety Net, it's a Symbol of Australian Values,’” Sydney Morning Herald, April 10, 2014.

3. Lake, Marilyn, “Challenging the ‘Slave-Driving Employers:’ Understanding Victoria's 1896 Minimum Wage through a World-History Approach”, Australian Historical Studies 45 (2014): 94–95 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Ibid.

5. http://www.iom.int/news/iom-releases-global-migration-trends-2015-factsheet (accessed January 12, 2017).

6. Adam McKeown, “Global Migrations,” Journal of World History (2004). For purposes of the symposium and this special issue, we do not include regional short-term contract labor, such as Indian migrant labor in the South Asian subcontinent and southeast Asia (27 million) and Chinese migrant labor in southeast Asia and Manchuria (50 million).

7. Sell, Zach, “Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation”, International Labor and Working-Class History 91 (2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: page #.

8. Bahadur, Gaiutra, Coolie Woman, The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago, 2014), xix–xxi Google Scholar.