How did racial divisions weaken Chinese workers’ ability to bargain over wages?

Racial divisions helped employers keep Chinese workers economically useful while limiting their power to demand equal treatment. Charles Crocker, the Central Pacific Railroad superintendent, threatened to replace white workers with Chinese workers when whites objected to their employment. That threat turned one group of workers into a tool for pressuring another. When Chinese workers demanded equal wages, “Crocker isolated the strikers in the mountains and cut off their food supply” (YPT 150). This says management answered a wage demand by denying workers access to food. It shows that control over supplies gave the employer leverage beyond the wage itself: workers could not sustain a strike while starving. But workplace coercion also depended on a wider argument about who belonged. Takaki describes a view that Chinese immigrants should remain “a permanent class of foreign laborers” (YPT 152). This says some Americans wanted their labor without accepting them as equal members of society. It shows how the label of permanent foreigner could make an unequal labor hierarchy seem appropriate. The foreigner label, a claim about who could belong, attached unequal expectations to Chinese identity. This connects to the Key Idea that race is socially constructed. Employers and other Americans assigned Chinese people a subordinate social position, so unequal treatment reflected choices about power rather than a natural difference in workers’ value. Solidarity required workers to recognize that shared wage demands mattered more than the divisions employers could exploit.