{"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":133,"pdf_page":141,"physical_index":141,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8cf8901292baed4d94948e9d645b2dfafaa881c0b781f0277d56f5860039b872"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"The ebbing of older concerns about wage labor being tantamount to a form of bondage coincided with the emergence of mass consumption—a correlation which, according to the argument of this book, is not without significance. The change in focus of the labor movement from work time to purchasing power was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather was part of a broader reorientation of politics away from production and toward consumption. Lizabeth Cohen has noted that in the late nineteenth century, the public good was thought about primarily in terms of the health of production. But, beginning in the Progressive era, the interests and welfare of the consumer came increasingly to represent the public good. By the early 1930s, FDR could declare without risk of stirring controversy: “we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought [such] that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer” (L. Cohen 2003, p. 24). The rights of wage earners were, in line with this, increasingly tied to their emerging identity as consumers.\n\nAs alternatives to wage labor increasingly vanished, the picture of wage labor as a form of bondage began to fade, and in its place, there emerged not so much a set of arguments as a largely unspoken assumption that a wage could, at the right level, be fairly exchanged for a given quantity of work. Indeed, historian Glickman (1997) notes that as the general concept of wage slavery declined, an alternative metaphor involving slavery appeared—the “wage slave.” The term wage slave referred to a person who toils for low levels of compensation—who works, that is, without, being given a commensurate amount of purchasing power in return for her labor. For wage laborers to have a status akin to that of slaves, thus, became contingent on the buying power of their wages.\n\nThe increasing acceptance among workers of wage labor as a de facto reality was in part a response to the consolidation of the power of business and to a state that was increasingly hostile to labor. Howard Kimeldorf (1999) and Kim Voss (1993) have shown in their studies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labor activism that there were also considerable organizational impediments to carrying out a more radical agenda. These dificulties added to the impetus to accept wage labor as, more or less, a fact of life. As Glickman (1997, pg. 2) puts it: “In the period between the Civil War and World War One workers learned to accept wages and to identify themselves as wage earners because they had no alternative.” But this did not mean that their conception of what made wage labor legitimate was the same as that of liberal political economists. Part of how workers came to conceive of wage labor as a justifiable institution was by a consumerist reorientation of class consciousness. The toil of work became justifiable in terms of the supposed fruits of consumption, measured by the concept of purchasing power.\n\nEconomic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background\n\n133","previous_page":132,"next_page":134}