Uncovering the attitudes of wage earners toward the relation among work, wages, and consumption is a dificult endeavor. It involves the reconstruction of popular mentalities buried in the past from often fragmentary and indirect evidence deposited in the archive. Disinterring past attitudes to work, spending, and saving demands intense social historical investigation of a kind that, for practical reasons, is most easily undertaken in empirically quite delimited contexts. For that reason, social histories that investigate the work-life nexus often take the form of local studies or microhistories. One example is Roy Rosenzweig’s (1985) detailed historical investigation of work and leisure in Worcester, Massachusetts, between 1870 and 1920. The present book, however, has objectives diferent from those of local histories such as Rosenzweig’s. Its aim is to develop a general theory of the relation between wage labor and mass consumption under industrial capitalism, based in the first instance on abductive inferences made from large-scale historical patterns and trends. Finding evidence that is, on the one hand, rich enough to use to reconstruct attitudes to the relationship between work and consumption and, on the other, representative of wage earners under industrial capitalism is, to say the least, challenging.
There are, nonetheless, some historical sources that present suggestive evidence about the relation between understandings of work and the meaning of consumption. In particular mid-century qualitative research on wage earners provides at least some sense of the ways in which wage labor was justified, during the first half of the twentieth century, in terms of the accumulation of consumer commodities. To be sure, ethnographies written in the past should be approached with caution, because the interpretations they contain are inevitably refracted through the commitments and biases of their authors. Nonetheless, they provide at least something for us to go on. In the remainder of this chapter, I examine a number of studies of industrial wage workers conducted between the 1920s and the 1950s that touch on the interrelated meanings of work, wages, commodities, and leisure. In particular, I consider the evidence presented in sociological investigations by Robert Straughton Lynd and Helen Lynd in the 1920s and early 1930s and by Eli Chinoy, Robert Guest, and Bennet Berger in the 1950s. The Lynds’ analysis of work, consumption, and leisure in Middletown and Middletown In Transition provides some suggestive, albeit often oblique, evidence about the relationship between the meaning of work and consumption. The ethnography of autoworkers in Lansing, Michigan, conducted in the 1950s by the industrial sociologist Ely Chinoy (1955), is especially informative because Chinoy was specifically interested in how wage earners justified their labor, to themselves and to others. Research on autoworkers by Richard Guest (1954) and Bennet Berger ([1961] 1970), also conducted in the 1950s, helpfully supplements Chinoy’s study. Of course, these ethnographies are very far from being based on a representative population sample for the United States, let alone for industrial capitalism in general. Both the Lynds and Chinoy investigated very particular contexts—a small, Midwest nonunion town in the Lynds’ studies and unionized autoworkers in a small midwestern factory town in Chinoy’s case. Nonetheless, what these studies lack in breadth they make up for in depth. Moreover, the research on postwar autoworkers by Chinoy, Guest, and Berger focuses on a group of workers who, following the UAW’s landmark 1948 collective bargaining agreement with GM, had tremendous influence on wage setting and industrial relations in the economy at large (Piore and Sabel 1986; Katz 1985). How autoworkers in this period understood the meaning of their work, and its relationship to their wages and to the consumption aforded by those wages, reflected, but also informed general conceptions of wage and work standards.18 To reiterate, however, the objective of this brief survey is just to provide some evidence in light of which the notion that mass consumption is in part explained by wage-labor commensuration becomes at least plausible. It goes without saying, therefore, that my discussion amounts to an opening note, rather than the last word, on the topic.
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Time for Things