There were eforts to fix fair compensation in absolute terms, pegged to a specified set of goods. For example, AFL leader Samuel Gompers argued that wages should be set at levels capable of supporting an “American standard of living,” which he defined as “the neat convenient well fitted bathroom . . . food in good quantity and quality, presentable clothes, a comfortably furnished home,” a wage “suficient to maintain an average-sized family.” (Shergold 1982, p. 90).16 This absolute conception of fair wages is somewhat similar to feudal norms of economic exchange, according to which the landed elite was obligated to provide basic security for their serfs in exchange for services rendered. At the same time, the absolute conception of fair compensation for work reflected a presupposition that labor can be fairly compensated by wage goods and that the two are therefore commensurable. Conceptions of a fair wage in absolute terms, however, could not deal with the very dynamic situation created by rapidly increasing productivity. For organized labor also made the argument that increasing productivity should, on grounds of fairness, be rewarded by increasing real wages. As noted in the last chapter, anchoring fair wages to a fixed basket of goods makes it unclear on what moral grounds labor can press for higher wages in exchange for its contribution to increasing productivity. The absolute version of a fair wage, set out by Gompers and others in the early twentieth century, is, then, better conceptualized as specifying minimal standards of living that any wage should secure. It provided necessary, but not suficient, conditions that must be met in order for a wage to qualify as being fair and decent. It did not provide general criteria for determining whether the exchange of a given wage for a given amount of labor is fair. In the second half of the twentieth century, the absolute conception of fair wages became supplemented by a more dynamic notion, which linked increases in productivity to increases in the purchasing power of the wage. The background to this was the development of a mass consumer economy focused on standardized consumer goods.17
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Time for Things