David Griffith is Associate Scientist at the Institute for Coastal and Marine Resources and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, East Carolina University.

This book addresses the ways employers in American industries use race, gender, ethnicity, and institutions of the state and the church to manipulate workers' networks and communities, and ultimately, to control the supplies and characteristics of their labor.
Griffith focuses on the labor processes in the seafood and poultry processing industries, paying particular attention to the growing use of new immigrant workers, women, and minority workers. He traces relationships between capitalist expansion overseas in peasant and tribal societies and evolving labor practices of "advanced" capitalism in the United States. As such, his work offers a critique of conventional, neoclassical economic approaches to the study of labor.