By the third decade of the twentieth century Selig Perlman (1928) was confidently characterizing American labor as, above all else, wage conscious. For Perlman, and other members of the industrial relations school founded by John Commons, the struggle of labor was not over the fundamental legitimacy of wage labor but rather about how well labor is compensated for its labor. While the projection back in time of Perlman’s picture of American labor has been challenged, as has the associated argument that American workers are, for deep cultural and historical reasons, essentially conservative, it is certainly true that by the middle decades of the twentieth century, the legitimacy of wage labor per se (as opposed to particular wage contracts and labor practices) had become largely uncontested. Over the first half of the twentieth century there was thus a reorientation of the politics of labor from a more radical agenda, which questioned the capitalist social order, to a reformist one, presupposing an increasingly corporatist model of industrial relations.
Economic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background
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