{"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":46,"pdf_page":54,"physical_index":54,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"4c1636130bd36c3e3cb2c83216c87281e7f764002634e64387132fb187c020b7"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"2. Wages\n\nOf course, raw productivity figures tell us little about the distribution of the benefits conferred by per capita economic growth. Increased productivity can be realized either as higher profits or as increased hourly real wages. The general pattern for the twentieth century is that at least some part of the increase in wealth generated by productivity improvements has been captured by wage earners, although the degree to which that was the case varied over the course of the century, and also between diferent parts of the economy. In the United States, real wages per hour in manufacturing increased on average by 1.43 percent per annum from 1900 to 1929, by 2.35 percent from 1948 to 1973, and by 0.46 percent after 1973 (Goldin 2000). The average hourly wage in 1909 was \\$3.80 (in 1999 dollars). By 1999, it had risen to \\$13.90. However, this underestimates the real increase in compensation because it does not take into account the added value of benefits, which barely existed in the early part of the century. Benefits as a fraction of compensation continued to rise over the course of the twentieth century. By 1999, they amounted to a further \\$5.58 per hour. With benefits taken into account then, hourly compensation for manufacturing work in 1999 was \\$19.48—a fivefold increase in real terms since 1909 (Fisk 2001).8 For all work, the average hourly wage, including benefits, was \\$21.16 in 2000 (Moehrle 2001).\n\nIt should be noted then that the tendency for improvements in productivity to be turned into increases in wage earnings greatly diminished toward the end of the twentieth century. Economists Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz (2011) found that between 1979 and 2009, while productivity increased by 80 percent, the hourly wage of the median American worker increased by only 10.1 percent, and most of this increase took place during the economic recovery between 1996 and 2002. From the late 1970s onward, growth in productivity and wages evidently became quite disconnected. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the owners of capital captured the lion’s share of the increase in productivity. By contrast, during the Golden Age period of American capitalism, between the Second World War and the mid-1970s, real income per annum increased at a rate quite close to increasing labor productivity—2.35 percent for wages and 2.77 percent for labor productivity.\n\nThat productivity should be linked to increasing real wages is in line with basic economic theory. In the neoclassical theory of the production function the worker is a paid a wage equivalent to her added marginal product. As the productivity of labor improves, the theory predicts that wages should increase commensurately. The argument is quite straightforward. If workers’ wages are lower than their marginal product, then firms would gain by taking on additional workers, which increases demand for labor, leading to a rise in wages. If, on the other hand, workers’ wages are higher than their marginal product, then the firm gains by shedding workers, increasing the supply of labor, which puts downward pressure on wages.9 So at equilibrium, wages are set by marginal added product. In reality, of course, wage rates are determined not just by economic rationality narrowly conceived but also by a complex of sociocultural and institutional forces. Regardless of whether the theory itself is correct, however, the connection between wage levels and productivity under mid-century Fordist industrial capitalism became an institutional fact. In the postwar period, manufacturing wage levels were to a significant extent set by collective bargaining arrangements underwritten by the state (Zeitlin 1987). As the institutional and normative framework underpinning Fordism fell apart, so too did the linking of real wages to productivity.\n\n46\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":45,"next_page":47}