W. W. Finlay of the Wright Aeronautical Corporation, addressing a 1938 conference sponsored by the American Management Association, urged companies to move voluntarily toward adopting a “scientific” basis for wages, lest the government intervene to do it for them.89 Ironically, by the late 1930s Henry Ford, great advocate of standardized production and standardized products, had turned vehemently against the state and union sponsored project to standardize wages and promote state mediated collective bargaining agreements. Ford characterized this project as tantamount to an efort to impose a “wage dictatorship,” at the root of which lay the machinations of nefarious “financiers.”90
Standardized pay was also one of the demands made by early campaigners for women’s rights. One activist in 1920 was reported as issuing the following cross-partisan rallying call in support of standardizing wages for men and women working for the federal government: “Through the women of the Democratic and Republican committees the women voters of the country are urged to take up the cause of the standardization on an equality with men of the wages of women in the federal services.”91 Some calls to standardize women’s work, however, meant ensuring that the work was appropriate for their gender. During the First World War, for example, some concern was expressed about the kind of work women were being called on to do. In 1918, Miss Goldmark, a representative of the Consumer’s League of New York, called for the work of female railroad employees to be “standardized” according to the supposed characteristics of their sex. She expressed particular concern that women workers were doing hard physical labor.92
In addition to campaigns for standardized pay as a means of combatting inequality, the project of standardizing wages was also adopted as a bureaucratic measure by government. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly at the level of local government, standardization bureaus were set up to rationalize pay scales. These bureaus were stafed by “wage and salary standardization experts.” Los Angeles began in 1916 to classify all city employees according to standardized criteria, with the aim of making its pay scales more rational by adopting a standard salary schedule.93 The city established its own bureau of standards in 1917 to manage the task of standardizing pay scales for salaried workers, and the policy was extended to cover wage workers in 1918.94 Similar eforts were undertaken in the early twentieth century by New York City, San Francisco, and Detroit, as well as Massachusetts and New York State. As in the case of the railroad dispute, the meaning of standardized government pay became a matter of some contention. Part of the issue was concern on the part of salaried workers that they would be placed in the same category as wage earners. They were worried about being classified in a downward social direction.95 But a more significant concern for public sector workers was that the underlying agenda local government had in standardizing wages and salaries was cutting costs and that this would inevitably result in a downward standardization of pay. In New York State, for example, standardization measures were introduced in response to calls for a \$1,500,000 reduction in the state payroll.96 The New York City Bureau of Standardization set itself the task of cutting the city’s annual wage bill by \$20,000,000 by standardizing the wages of eighty thousand workers.97 With such objectives in mind, standards were typically set by the lowest-paid worker in a given category rather than the highest-paid worker, an approach that was naturally very unpopular with government workers. At the same time, public criticism was leveled at bureaus of standardization for failing to successfully cut pay, and indeed for adding significant new costs to local government. The New York City Bureau of Standardization was estimated to cost the city \$100,000 per year.98 While standardization of public sector pay was primarily advocated on the basis of cutting costs, it was also seen as a means to eliminate irrational and often unfair variations in pay for workers. A city auditor in San Francisco in 1918 complained about the “manifest injustice” of diferences in pay for similar work, and advocated “standardization [of salaries] for all [city] departments.”99 Massachusetts, likewise, justified standardization of state pay by asserting that it would eliminate inequalities between people doing the same work. Similar claims were made (almost twenty years later) by the city government of Detroit.100
Standardization of Consumption, Work, and Wages
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