{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":128,"pdf_page":136,"physical_index":136,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"28d34fed3e367d6fce3124bf7f526d39a473b6d6ee305a6d3b482b85a97ac1a6"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"The spread of wage labor in the United States, and indeed elsewhere in the capitalist world, was a gradual and complex process, the result of incremental moves on the part of business and labor away from customary arrangements that determined pay and work conditions and toward more explicit contracts.10 Amy Stanley (1998) has charted the cultural, intellectual, and legal complexities of the early history of wage labor in the United States. She shows how in the first half of the nineteenth century, contracts were predominantly informal and tended to serve the interests of employers, at least with respect to who controlled the labor process. In taking a job, a worker was presumed to have consented to all rules imposed by the employer, even those unstated in the contract itself. It was not uncommon for piece rates to be decided by foremen and subcontractors on an ad hoc basis, on terms that rarely favored the worker. Early labor struggles were often directed at making contracts more explicit, as well as at establishing the principle of collective bargaining. According to Stanley, it was “[labor’s] eforts [that] altered the wage contracts from an oral promise full of ambiguities to a precisely worded written document” (p.  68). The picture drawn by Stanley broadly accords with Eric Hobsbawm’s (1964) sweeping account of the history of industrial relations across the capitalist world during the nineteenth century, in which he shows how the proletariat became increasingly savvy in its dealings with employers. But Stanley argues that the more explicit written contracts that emerged in the wake of older customary arrangements, while having some advantages for employees, at the same time struck many workers as uncomfortably close to a form of bondage. While, in Hobsbawm’s terms, American workers had, by the later decades of the nineteenth century, learned to play “the [capitalist] rules of the game,” they nonetheless remained deeply ambivalent about those rules.11 In Stanley’s nuanced argument, wage labor embodied a contradiction. On the one hand, a wage-labor contract is notionally freely entered into by the worker, but at the same time, it legally inscribes a relation of domination and subordination. This contradiction was expressed in contract law. According to what Stanley (1998, p.  83 [emphasis added]) describes as the “modern definition,” set out in an 1886 “plain statement” on labor law, a “hireling” is: “one who, by reason of contract . . . becomes subject to the authority and control of another in some trade.” Wage labor amounted, therefore, to a kind of voluntary bondage.\n\n128\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":127,"next_page":129}