The running and maintenance of a military installation requires more than just military personnel.  At both Fort Snelling and Guantánamo, the relationship between the military and the laborers took on a racial dynamic as the military aimed to meet its labor needs.

In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. Army compensated officers for keeping servants in order to discourage officers from using soldiers to perform domestic work. The rate was commensurate with the monthly wage of a private, with additional allowances provided for food and clothing.  In the first two decades of Fort Snelling some officers employed the spouses of soldiers.  Others employed Selkirk refugees (members of a failed colony in Canada) who had settled just north of Fort Snelling, and still others utilized slave labor.  The Missouri Compromise, an act of Congress passed in 1820, prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ N.  This area included the site of Fort Snelling.  Why exactly the Army allowed slavery to exist in this territory is unknown.  However, the record reflects that not only were officers utilizing slave labor but were also compensated for it.  Through the allocation of funds for the keeping of servants, the U.S. Army financed the institution of slavery at Fort Snelling.

In order to receive compensation for keeping a servant, an officer was required to report the servant on his pay voucher.  The pay vouchers from Fort Snelling for the period from 1820 to 1858 reflect different methods of reporting an enslaved person. Some describe the servant as “slave.”  Others only describe the complexion of the servant as “black”, “mulatto”, or “negro,” although their enslaved status is known through other sources. The last known instance of an enslaved person appearing in an Army pay voucher from Minnesota was in August 1858, several months after Minnesota became the 32nd state.

As the naval base at Guantánamo expanded, the labor needs increased proportionally.  Without a local source of American labor, the Navy turned to the local Cuban population.  Many Cuban men and women served in domestic roles in the homes of military personnel, and others worked for military and private contractors.  Following the Cuban Revolution, Cubans who already held positions on the base were permitted to keep their jobs, but no more were hired.  The Navy determined that replacing the Cuban labor pool with U.S. civilians would be unfeasible, due to the fact that the average salary for Americans was three times that of the local average at Guantánamo.  Instead the U.S. Navy hired Jamaican and later Filipino contract workers.  Third-country nationals continue to be the primary source of non-military labor at Guantánamo.  As with the detainees imprisoned at Guantánamo, the base workers fall into Guantánamo’s legal black hole.  Base workers are protected neither by the labor laws of their home countries nor by those of the United States.