{"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":206,"pdf_page":214,"physical_index":214,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0f7031efe5977b9ac21e4d1ec2212d3a284aa2f19e0e363ff8c6895b2bc8d04b"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"1.2. Depoliticization\n\nAs Consumer Reports expanded, it rapidly shed the political agenda it had been committed to in the 1930s. Early issues of the magazine had paid considerable attention to the working conditions under which consumer commodities were produced. Each issue featured a report on conditions of work in particular parts of the consumer goods industry. Readers were encouraged to assess products both from the standpoint of the consumer and from that of the workers who made the products. This reflected Consumers Union’s explicit political and ethical objective to make connections between the concerns of consumers and those of workers, a goal which was clearly set out in the first issue of the magazine, published in May 1936. The justification given for this goal was that consumers are always at the same time also workers— and so it made no sense for consumer organizations to restrict their concerns to consumer interests alone. This point was made repeatedly in the magazine during its early years, becoming something of a mantra. For example, an editorial in July 1936 complained of the widespread tendency to fall “into the old confusion of treating consumers and workers as separate beings.”19 Helping consumers was taken to mean improving their material conditions as workers, following the logic that “the only way in which any organization can aid them materially as consumers is by helping them in their struggle as workers to get an honest wage.”20 At the same time, the editors of CR noted that “fighting for higher wages is not enough. Workers must fight also for fair prices and good quality in the products they buy.”21 Consumer and worker were thus seen as two sides of the same coin, both subject to the exploitative tendencies of the business class in America.\n\nThe prewar consumer movement thus took a holistic approach to assessing the welfare produced by industrial capitalism, considering the conditions under which goods were manufactured, as well as the properties of the goods themselves. In the postwar period, this holistic, political perspective was gradually replaced by a much narrower concern with testing—with an emphasis on the objective material characteristics of consumer products. The change in CR was reflective of a shift in the wider consumer movement in the middle part of the century. The 1950s witnessed what historian Gary Cross (2000, p. 135) characterizes as a “narrowing of scope of the consumer movement” as it came to focus solely on the “pricing and attributes of goods.” Most significantly, in the late 1940s Consumer Reports ceased reporting on working conditions. In the postwar period, its parent organization, Consumers Union, took on a more technocratic perspective and became much less critical of the general contours of industrial capitalism.\n\n206\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":205,"next_page":207}