3.3. “Getting a Living” and “Getting Ahead”
A very important topic in the Lynds’ analysis, one that comes up repeatedly, is attitudes to the business of “getting a living.” The phrase itself is telling, in that it suggests a separation between the business of living and the business of working—work is a means for living rather than a part of living. The Lynds tell us that for their working informants, “living” is something that occurs in their leisure time. Given limited social mobility, it is not surprising that, according to the Lynds, Middletown’s wage earning class attached much more importance to direct leisure than to occupational attainment. Members of Middletown’s “business class,” on the other hand, saw the point of work not as simply “getting a living” but as “getting ahead,” which meant social advancement.
Two decades after the second Middletown study, Eli Chinoy (1955) paints a somewhat diferent picture of his working-class informants. For Chinoy’s autoworkers, the key concept was not “getting a living” but, like the business class of Middletown, “getting ahead.” On Chinoy’s interpretation, the importance of “getting ahead” for the autoworkers he studied indicated that they had embraced some version of what he calls the “American dream”—a vague vision of life as defined by opportunity, agency, self-making, and progress. But, significantly, for Chinoy’s autoworkers “getting ahead” did not mean occupational mobility but rather the accumulation of material commodities—what Chinoy describes as “a quantitative increase in things within the reach of everyone” (p. 134). Unlike the workers of Middletown, Chinoy’s autoworkers were unionized. The union was seen primarily as a means for increasing purchasing power, in order to fund more commodity accumulation. While the labor organizers interviewed by the Lynds saw workers’ preoccupation with material objects as a distraction from the kind of class consciousness that would inspire them to join unions, Chinoy’s workers embraced labor politics precisely because they saw their union as an efective means to the end of higher wages and increasing material accumulation. This change in attitude fits with Meg Jacobs’s (2005) history of the ascent of the politics of purchasing power in the postwar period.22
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Time for Things