The toil of the common laborer is the most elementary form of wage dependence and one that has largely escaped the attention of historians. Seemingly in defiance of industrial society's celebration of incessant change and of mechanical power, the men who wielded shovels and pushed wheelbarrows on twentieth-century construction projects bore an uncanny resemblance to those who had dug canals and erected fortifications two hundred years earlier. Their work gangs were totally male, as those not constituted of slaves or serfs had long been in western Europe and North America. They had shoveled between sixteen and nineteen tons per day when they were studied by Sébastienne Vauban in seventeenth century France, by early Victorian contractors of English navvies, and by Frederick Winslow Taylor at the dawn of the twentieth century. They exchanged simple physical force for a daily wage, whose level changed only gradually over the course of the nineteenth century. What changed, and changed significantly, was the place of origin of America's laborers. Both the timeless quality of laborers' work and the changing geography of their recruitment profoundly influenced their relationship to the nation's labor movement.

Laborers seldom formed durable unions. Their life-style made a mockery of social reformers' efforts to promote habits of “thrift, sobriety, adaptability, [and] initiative.”