Have It Their Way

In Thomas Frank’s Easy Chair column on low wages for employees of the fast-food industry [“Home of the Whopper,” November], a reference to the plantation owned by a corporation that also operates several Hardee’s franchises was particularly evocative. In the 1970s, after the publication of Time on the Cross, an economic evaluation of slavery in the United States, there was a debate over the degree of wage expropriation in the institution. The authors calculated that slaves had “earned” roughly 90 percent of what their labor had produced through the provisions of lifetime upkeep and expenses. Whether or…