The Global Business of Work: fur trade to fair(?) trade and AI

Catalog description

In this survey course students will explore the history of work in America from prehistoric times up to present and beyond. In each module work is defined and examined through the lens of the worker in social, political and economic perspectives with a central question on the impact of workers and their labor contracts with who was perceived as a "manager"/ "owner" of the worker. We target the 400 year period that brought the United States of America from a colonized nation to one of the largest global trading powers in the world. Some of the core topics of discovery that marked pivotal points in American labor include: - the early Native American fur traders and their relationship with the Jesuit missionaries - the Indian Wars that pushed the Native American fur trader to reservations - the rapid expansion of the cotton and sugar industries that depended exclusively on slave labor and brought the USA to a global power - the impact of immigrant labor on farms in the Midwest that produced the bread basket of the world - the impact of Chinese immigrants that built the railroads - the history of the auto industry from the unrepresented assembly line worker to unionization - the service industries contracts for a minimum wage versus a livable wage - AI and the impact on creative ownership At the end of the course students will produce their position papers and what could and should be an equitable contract with a worker in a global developed economy.