Binding wage labor contracts offered nineteenth-century English employers significant economic benefits, but contracting was only a useful strategy for reducing turnover and monitoring costs if employers were able to enforce contracts quickly and cheaply. But for this ability to enforce contracts simply and cheaply, employers would have had to pursue cost reduction in other ways, and the contract system would not have assumed the importance it did in English wage labor relations. In the northern United States, a summary criminal remedy to enforce labor contracts was not normally available against native-born white adult wage workers at any time during the nineteenth century. This very real constraint, however, did not eliminate the value to northern employers of using binding contracts with wage workers, largely because they had available a reasonable substitute for penal sanctions, wage forfeiture. Wage forfeiture made labor contract enforcement inexpensive and effective. Because wage forfeiture was available in the United States, contracting could play a role in nineteenth-century American wage labor relations not completely unlike the one it played in English wage labor relations. The American practice had the added virtue that it was less vulnerable to the charge that it turned contracts of service into contracts of slavery, even though it confronted wage workers, depending on the circumstances, with a very disagreeable alternative to continued performance.

ENTIRETY

In England, the system of penal sanctions had been established by Parliament. In the United States, state legislatures were not prepared in most cases to follow a similar course, perhaps because of the broadened suffrage legislators confronted.