An alternative explanation of Costa’s findings, also from a standard economic perspective, is that people in the late nineteenth century chose to turn higher hourly wages into more time rather than higher consumption, because there simply weren’t very many enticing consumer goods to buy. According to this explanation, when new commodities appeared, especially after the consumer durables revolution of the early twentieth century, the utility commanded by the wage increased and so, consequently, did the demand for income. Making this argument involves positing a counterfactual—that if a contemporary array of goods had been available to workers in the later nineteenth century, then the supply curve of labor would not have been backward sloping. There is something intuitively convincing about this explanation. However, against it is the thought that at low levels of income, consumption of quite basic goods, which were available yet scarce in the late nineteenth century, should yield relatively more utility than increments of consumption at higher levels of income. In addition, as mentioned earlier, the generally low wage levels and absence of a safety net in Costa’s earlier period are reasons to expect that higher income would be at least as attractive to workers as less work time.
Admittedly, all of this is quite conjectural. It is ultimately very hard to know what exactly underlies the apparent diference in time / income preference that Costa discovered between the later nineteenth and later twentieth centuries. However, a more historical explanation than those thus far discussed is that there was a shift in the legitimacy of wage labor between the two periods. Attitudes to wage labor were quite hostile in the nineteenth century, with waged work often characterized as a form of bondage. It is not implausible, therefore, that the preference for less work reflected very negative attitudes toward wage labor—a resistance on the part of waged workers to the commodification of their time. Perhaps a better explanation than the one Costa suggests for the backward-sloping supply curve of late nineteenth-century labor is, therefore, that the waged workforce in that period had not yet fully internalized work-time discipline, having more in common with E. P. Thompson’s (1967) agrarian and protoindustrial workers than with a fully socialized capitalist workforce. This group of workers, to a far greater extent than was the case of later generations, regarded wage labor with a great deal of ambivalence, suspicion, and not infrequently outright hostility. Wage labor was felt by a significant part of the working population to be an external imposition, often compared to slavery, to be reduced as much as possible (Glickman 1997). A good deal of research by labor historians has characterized the postbellum nineteenth century as a liminal period, stretching between the craft-centered agrarian capitalism of the earlier part of the century, and the emergent full-blown industrial capitalism of the early twentieth century (Gutman 1973; Glickman 1997; Montgomery 1987; Rosenzweig 1985). Herbert Gutman breaks the process of proletarianization into three periods: an agrarian and protoindustrial period between 1815 and 1843, a proletarianizing phase between 1843 and 1893, and a period between 1893 and 1919 that witnessed the emergence of a mature industrial working class. During the middle, transitional phase, Gutman (1973 p. 540) writes, “a profound tension existed between the older American preindustrial social structure and the modernizing institutions that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism.” Over the entire period between 1815 and 1919: “That state of tension was regularly revitalized by the migration of diverse premodern native and foreign peoples into an industrializing or a fully industrialized society.” Thompson, Gutman, and Hobsbawm thus present a classic Marxian narrative in which workers begin as undisciplined creatures of habit and tradition; enter the crucible of the factory, where they are subjected to the rigors and endure the trauma of industrial life; and then emerge transformed into a modern industrial proletariat. In Hobsbawm’s (1964) terms, this fully formed working class had learned “the rules of the game” of capitalism. Prominent among those rules is that time is money. How much time is exchanged for how much money thus became the central focus of industrial struggle, pushing aside broader challenges to the institution of wage labor (Foner and Roediger 1987). According to the account given by labor historians, the waning of the struggle over hours, which had historically been framed as a matter concerning the very legitimacy of wage labor, marked the degree to which workers had become incorporated into the capitalist system (in Chapter 5, I go into a more detailed discussion of this history). To the extent that wage earners came to equate time with money, they might well have become less attuned to the diference in value between the two, and so less inclined to trade increasing income for more free time.
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Time for Things