{"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":171,"pdf_page":179,"physical_index":179,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d6d1d859ad1d2266d7be777ceb99ed5b6cd6d985077c6ee750a05ca3d6265862"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"The best-known early experiment with standardized wages is surely Ford’s decision in 1914 to pay his automobile factory workers five dollars per day. The logic of standardization in that case was that wages should be set at levels that would permit workers to aford the mass-produced commodities they made while also encouraging quiescence and greater intensity of efort in the labor force (Raf 1988; Meyer 1981; Gartman 1986).77 Although Ford’s experiment was relatively short-lived, it indicated the establishment of a normative connection among production, product, work, and wage. Standardized production, yielding a standardized product, was linked to standardized pay, with the value of the wage measured by its purchasing power over the goods produced by the labor given in exchange for it. In advocating the five dollars a day Ford also showed some understanding of the importance of mass buying power in an era of industrialized mass production. For this reason, Ford’s policy is often seen as presaging the postwar era of industrial capitalism, with its technocratic management of demand and supply (Aglietta 2000).\n\nFord’s version of standardized wages was, however, not the only one in the early twentieth century. The labor movement called for “standardized wages” in order to improve the conditions of its members. Labor leader Samuel Gompers, for example, speaking to the Senate in 1918, made an impassioned plea for the “standardization of wages.”78 To some extent labor activists used the term standardized wages in ways that made it interchangeable with other terms frequently used in this period—family wage, fair wage, American wage. All these terms were intended to mean higher real wages. Indeed, it is surely no coincidence that calls by unions for the standardization of wages took place at the same time as the question of the American standard of living became a central concern for American labor. Yet the term was often used in a more particular sense to mean rationalizing wages in an upward direction, by increasing the pay of all workers within a given category to match that of the highest-paid worker in that category.79 In that sense it meant something distinct from calls for a more general increase in real wages. For some political economists and management scientists, standardization of pay, in the sense of making wages uniform for a given category of worker, stood in some tension with the standardization of inspection methods used to assess the product of labor (Dunaway 1916). Their suggestion was that piece rates should be adopted, only adjusted to take account of the quality of a worker’s output. For once standardized inspection regimes were introduced, new means became available for diferentiating the quality of work done by different workers in the same job. The introduction of systematic assessment of product quality would thus facilitate more accurate assessments of quality of work, which should, according to this line of reasoning, then be reflected in compensation. In a spirit somewhat like Ford’s, progressive technocrats, who supported the welfare capitalism that many in the 1920s viewed as the key to resolving industrial strife, approached the issue of standardization from the angle of work conditions, as opposed to pay. The argument was that for a given wage, conditions of work ought to be standardized. Doing so would have the beneficial efect of “steadying labor,” thus ensuring that employers would get “a fair return in work for the wage they pay, from a non-shifting, contented, and physically fit working force” (Erskine and Roach 1917, p. 82).\n\nStandardization of Consumption, Work, and Wages\n\n171","previous_page":170,"next_page":172}