{"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":130,"pdf_page":138,"physical_index":138,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1851eb63c761fd7377cbabd563eee4f2867bc871fc0e2aa7e2c783580e6657fa"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"The comparison between wage labor and slavery was not just a feature of radical labor ideology and politics, confined to the margins of thought about the problems and dilemmas of early industrial society. Rather, during the nineteenth century, there was very widespread disquiet about the moral status of wage labor, which was felt well beyond the laboring classes. Wage labor was generally thought of as presenting an intellectual and moral problem, one that aroused debate among politicians, political economists, and in legal circles. The moral complexity of wage labor was acknowledged in 1883 congressional hearings on the matter, which, according to Stanley (1998, p. 84), “registered the wider concerns of public debate” about the “enduring ambiguities of the wage contract in free society,” at the core of which lay the question of whether labor should be treated as just another commodity. As a legal matter, the question was eventually settled by the Supreme Court in 1923, in the Adkins vs. Children’s Hospital case (concerning the constitutionality of a minimum wage law). According to the ruling; “In principle there can be no diference between the case of selling labor and the case of selling goods” (Holmes 2010, p. 173). How much a worker should receive for her labor was thus taken to be a matter equivalent to how much a merchant could get for her wares. In both cases, the market alone should decide. That it was necessary for this point to be spelled out in a ruling by the highest court in the land indicates the extent to which it was a matter of contention in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13\n\nBeginning in the years following the end of the Civil War, the mind-set described by the historians of antebellum labor began to change. The focus of American labor shifted from a critique of wage labor and struggles over the length of the working day to increasing the purchasing power of the wage. Labor was not initially unified behind this change of agenda, and, particularly between the late nineteenth century and World War I, radicals and moderates competed for working class support. Howard Kimeldorf, in his analysis of turn of the century labor activism, sees the diferent mottos of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as expressing the main contending ideologies within organized labor. The AFL adopted for its motto “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” while the more revolutionary IWW chose “abolish the wage system” (Kimeldorf 1999). The IWW emerged to fill the vacuum left by the AFL’s move toward a more corporatist vision of industrial politics. According to Kimeldorf: “By the time of the IWW’s formation in 1905, the AFL had come firmly to embrace American values and institutions, including its system of capitalism, which Gompers, the former Marxist radical turned pragmatist, endorsed as ‘the best yet devised’” (p. 2). Kimeldorf sees the first twenty years of the century as a critical turning point, as the radical agendas of the Knights of Labor and the IWW came to be replaced by the workplace-focused syndicalism of the AFL. According to his account, there was a real ideological struggle between the ALF and the IWW, the outcome of which was not a forgone conclusion. But by the end of the First World War, the AFL and its moderate agenda were clearly in the ascendant. The post–World War I era saw the beginnings of welfare capitalism and corporatism, setting the stage for the coalescing of the Fordist regime in the years following the Second World War.\n\n130\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":129,"next_page":131}