The decrease in the attention given to the working conditions under which consumer goods are produced in part reflected the changed political environment in postwar America. Against the backdrop of McCarthyism, CU leaders were very eager not to be seen as tarnished by the brush of communism. Yet after the McCarthy witch hunts had receded into historical memory, there was no return to the more explicitly political agenda of the 1930s. A more politicized version of consumer activism did emerge in the 1960s, with Ralph Nader’s campaign against corporate negligence in product design and manufacture. But the environment- and health-and-safety-centered agenda of Nader’s new incarnation of the consumer movement was quite diferent from the concerns about labor that had animated the movement in the 1930s.
The change in orientation of CR, away from politics, to some degree reflected the changing socioeconomic profile of its subscribers. In the early years after the war, the expansion of CU’s membership was predominantly middle class, and these new members were not very interested in labor issues of the sort that preoccupied consumer activists in the prewar period. Yet it would be wrong to take the middle-class perspective of CU in the postwar period as reason to think that the organization no longer had any relevance to the concerns of labor. For, as seen in earlier chapters, those concerns shifted in the postwar era. Although self-identified consumer activists tended to be middle class, consumer consciousness became incorporated into the labor movement. This was reflected in the reorganization of labor politics around the concept of purchasing power, which brought together labor and consumer interests.22 Meg Jacobs (2005) and Lizabeth Cohen (2003), among others, have argued that over the course of the twentieth century the identity represented by “consumer” became universal in a way that transcended diferences of class. But the universality of consumer identity (and of the supposed interests of the consumer) was itself an indirect consequence of mass participation in the labor market, against the backdrop of widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of wage-labor exchange and emergent corporatism in industrial relations. To a significant extent, the American public converged in the postwar decades on an acceptance of what could be described as an afluent compact. In exchange for working hard and accepting the broad parameters of American political economy, wage earners would be ensured decent and improving living standards. That this exchange appeared to be self-evidently reasonable and fair depended, in part, on a particular understanding of what consumer commodities are and how they relate to use—one in which use became to some degree abstracted from concrete, socially embedded practice, instead becoming a hypothetical function of the narrowly material use powers of products. The growing prominence of this understanding is evinced by the changing history of Consumers Union and Consumer Reports. The approach to consumer products expressed and promoted by CU, and by the broader practice of product testing, played an important role in relieving some of the attendant tensions of the contradictions of labor under capitalism, if not fully resolving them.
Product Testing and Product Regularization
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