Margot Canaday on Queer Workers in Modern America

Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

In today's episode, Margot Canaday reveals the not-so-hidden history of LGBT workers in modern America. In the absence of state protections, she finds, some employers actually appreciated queer workers precisely because they were contingent, unattached, and exploitable. In many ways, that employment relationship augured the way all workers would come to be treated in the era of post-Fordism. And it would set the terms for queer peoples’ struggles for recognition and protections on the job in the closing decades of the twentieth century.