Roediger's research interests primarily concern race and class in the United States, although he has also written on radicalism in American history and politics.
The authors argued that debate over the length of the work-day or work-week has been the central issue of the American labor movement during periods of high growth.
Roediger claims that the social construction of the concept of a white race in the United States was a conscious effort by slave owners to gain distance from those they enslaved, who were generally non-European and non-Christian.
[citation needed] Weaving together economic theory, psychology, and the histories of immigration, industrialization, class formation and slavery, Roediger in this work addressed what has become a common question in labor history, specifically, and American political culture more generally: why, historically, have working class blacks and whites not found common cause in their shared suffering at the bottom of the social ladder?
Du Bois also posed this question in his seminal work, Black Reconstruction (1935), as he saw a failure of labor in creating connections across racial lines.)
[citation needed] This idea that "whiteness" holds enormous value for the working class has influenced a generation of scholars including, most recently, cultural critic Thomas Frank.
Most immediately, it was considered by scholars to have contributed to what analysts had observed to be the splitting of the civil rights consensus of the national Democratic Party and the shift among many of the white working class to vote for Republican Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, pushing him to victory.
[citation needed] Wages of Whiteness won the Merle Curti Award in 1992 from the Organization of American Historians, for the best work of social history in 1991.
Roediger is researching the interrelation between labor management and the formation of racial identities in the U.S. An ill founded fear of seditious combination between outnumbering Negro slaves and landless whites led the dominant whites to foster and augment race distinctions just as many modern employers maintain a definite proportion of representatives of different races and nationalities as a bulwark against labor organization and as others, more ruthless, exploit race antipathy upon the theory of divide et impera[6]Also from Allen: “the opposition to slavery which emanated from the Northwest and the eastern wage-earners was caused by their recognition of a fundamental antagonism of interest between the slavery system and free labor rather than by their humanitarism.