This corporatist account is not, however, the only one possible from a broadly Marxian perspective. A very diferent interpretation of the historical change Costa charts explains the apparent shift in preferences for free time in terms of class power. As noted in the previous chapter, the power relation between business and labor is unequal, and so perhaps the development of a preference for higher wages over more time was no preference at all on the part of labor but rather expressed the interests of business alone. There is probably something to this view. Juliet Schor (1991) has, as mentioned, drawn attention to the fact that workers are rarely ofered the choice to take productivity-linked compensation either as more income or as fewer hours.
The problem with the class power explanation, however, is that American union membership in the middle part of the twentieth century, when the reduction in work hours more or less ground to a halt and the new corporatist industrial pact emerged, was at an all-time high.25 This followed a period of great labor activism in the 1930s, with union membership increasing from 3.5 million in 1935 to 9 million in 1940. In the years immediately following World War II, 36 percent of all nonfarm workers belonged to a union. After the passing of the Wagner Act of 1935, which recognized the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively, organized labor received an unprecedented degree of support from the state. To be sure, after the war there was a backlash against the pro-union policies of the 1930s, with the passage of the Taft-Harley Act of 1947. Nonetheless, collective bargaining in the postwar period became institutionalized. Moreover, even after Taft-Hartley, union membership remained high, accounting for 35 percent of private sector workers in 1954.26 In addition, the postwar period saw close to full employment in the US economy. Low unemployment greatly bolsters the bargaining power of labor. And yet work hours stayed almost constant in the postwar era, in stark contrast to the period between 1880 and 1940 (and especially between 1880 and 1920), when work hours declined steeply, even though labor was much weaker. If workers continued to be so concerned with reducing their hours, why did they not use their relative advantage in bargaining power during the postwar years to reduce hours, as workers did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Analysis of reported reasons for strikes shows that while shorter hours were very important between the later nineteenth century and the Second World War, the issue dramatically receded as a cause of industrial action after 1945.27 So why, in a period in which unemployment was low and union membership at an all-time high, and in which the collective bargaining rights of labor had been recognized to a greater degree than was the case before the New Deal, did labor not press more strongly for reduced hours? After all, between 1945 and 1970, American wage earners were very successful at increasing their wages. Yet businesses are on the whole not in favor of increasing their wage bill. If business had so much power over labor, how were workers able to win such large increases in real wages in the postwar decades? In fact, wage increases were such that the rate of return to capital, as Thomas Piketty (2014) has shown, was uniquely low during the Golden Age period of capitalism. And it was declining profit rates that contributed to the rise of the neoliberal political agenda in the 1980s—one part of which was aimed precisely at curtailing the power of labor (e.g., Ronald Reagan’s treatment of striking air trafic controllers in 1981).
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Time for Things