Gabriel Winant's paper inquires into the conception of employment as the vehicle for social rights during the interwar period, exploring in particular the way that social policy debates culminating in the Social Security Act conceptualized unemployment. Winant argues that concerns about the long term consequences of technological displacement, as much as the new crisis of stock market failure. Those interwar debates had lasting effects on social insurance.

Documenting the development of unemployment compensation administration from the New Deal to the 1958 recession, Maia Silber shows how state efforts to transform the wage from an intermittent source of support to a continuous and permanent relationship through social insurance confronted both the failure of firms to offer year-round work and industrial workers’ corresponding reliance on alternative forms of security. New Deal institutions designed to promote job security functioned to delegitimize the very ways workers coped with its lack.

A transnational focus brings the role of the state in generating unemployment into even greater relief. Comparing the processes of mechanization and modernization that pushed rural workers into urban centers unable to absorb them in both Mexico and the United States, Joel Suarez argues that the creation of agrarian “surplus populations” was not an inevitable tragedy but a product of capital strategy and policy design. The postindustrial city, often seen as a singular icon of the New Deal order’s decline, emerges as a node in a landscape of labor still shaped by the state.

Together, these papers and the comment by Ruth Milkman will illuminate wagelesness as a dynamic and contested historical process at the center of 20th-century U.S. labor history.