{"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":302,"pdf_page":310,"physical_index":310,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d37cff8365add417f0211f6eb665855758603b06942de6403602c4efd81b698b"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"14. In the 1930s, the issue of work time was more about reducing unemployment by redistributing work hours than curtailing subjection to wage slavery. During the Depression years, the state also sought to limit the length of the working week or, at least, to ensure that overtime rates were paid for time at work in excess of forty hours, which would have a similar efect. This objective lay behind the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. But the goal of ensuring overtime pay and, at the same time, limiting work time had for the New Deal state a macroeconomic rationale. At one and the same time, it boosted the purchasing power of labor, stimulating demand, and spread employment more evenly across the population. Following the same logic, during the Depression the AFL pushed for a thirty-hour work week, in order to redistribute scarce work and provide relief for the unemployed.\n\n15. Although Cutler suggests that the issue of hours remained of great importance for workers in the postwar period, it should be noted that his study rests heavily on inconclusive evidence from just one factory, so provides a very limited basis for generalization. As noted in Chapter 3, note 27, after 1945 there is a dramatic decline in shorter hours as a reported reason for strikes.\n\n16. Of course, absolute conceptions of decent living standards—those deserved in exchange for labor—were very vague. What exactly is it for a home to be “comfortably furnished”? What does it mean to “maintain” a family?\n\n17. The general historical pattern in the United States, from debate over the legitimacy of wage labor and struggles over the length of the working week, to a corporatist industrial politics based on purchasing power, is evident elsewhere in the industrial capitalist world.\n\n18. The broader influence of autoworkers’ attitudes was mediated by well-publicized industrial negotiations.\n\n19. Status-centered accounts of consumption, such as Thorsten Veblen’s, arguably assimilate all social positions to that of the Weberian capitalist. Conspicuous consumption involves the semiotic conversion of commodity objects back into their money value. The value of those objects is then read as indexical of the value of their owner, by virtue of what ownership of the objects demonstrates about the owner’s capacity to generate money.\n\n20. According to an automobile finance oficer interviewed by the Lynds (1929, p. 255), between 75 percent and 90 percent of cars were purchased on an installment plan.\n\n21. The fascination with cars among the industrial workers studied by the Lynds and Chinoy might in addition reflect a dialectic between the subjection of industrial workers to the discipline of the machine during the labor process (on a production line), which made workers into mere appendages of technology, and an urge to invert this relation by becoming masters of technology in leisure. If that is right, then as production becomes ever more technological, and as humans become ever more subjected to technology in the workplace, then the desire to dominate machines—to use them to express agency—in consumption should increase. The consumption of technological objects then counterbalances subjection of human beings to technology in the workplace.\n\n22. The relatively more prominent place given by Chinoy’s informants to accumulation as justification for work, when compared to Lynds’ workers, is all the more surprising because the American working classes in the postwar years were significantly more afluent than in the interwar period.\n\n302\n\nNotes to Pages 132–143","previous_page":301,"next_page":303}