The Split Labor Market and the Origins of Antidrug Legislation in the United States

Edna Bonacich's (1972) theoretical formulation of Split labor market dynamics as underlying the content and process of ethnic antagonism is expanded and applied to an historical analysis of the development of antidrug laws in the United States. The campaigns and resultant legislation against opium, cocaine, alcohol, and marijuana are subjected to a split labor market analysis that incorporates the notion of moral panics and an understanding of the ways in which law may be used as a “weapon” in the furtherance of class interests. The article concludes that each of these campaigns came about as the result of an underlying split labor market dynamic and adds to Bonacich's original formulation the response of criminalization of the threatening labor group by the higher-paid labor group.

Expanding the Split Labor Market Theory: Between and Within Sectors of the Split Labor Market of Mandatory Palestine

Palestine, under British mandatory rule since the end of the First World War, was an arena of confrontation between Arabs and Jews over land, immigration, and political power, as well as over place and position in the labor market. This article will deal with the split labor market of mandatoryPalestineand the actors within it. The analysis will make use of the split labormarket theory of Edna Bonacich. In her theory she posits a situation in whichtwo groups of labor, belonging to different ethnic and national origins, meet in the same labor market. The more advantageous ethnic group has been able, due to its past history and its more advantageous position within world capitalist development, to ensure a higher value for its labor but considers itself threatened by the presence of the less advantageous groups, whose labor has lower value and thus greater attraction to employers who aim to maximize their profits. The theory then goes on to develop the different ways in which cheaper labor might serve to displace and substitute higher-priced labor and the strategies pursued by the latter in recurring attempts to maintain its relative advantage.