{"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":90,"pdf_page":98,"physical_index":98,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"50e3826a70f979c0770d665101483844a48104332427c715d4badef518c3cb7b"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"Moreover, as noted in Chapter 2, the tendency for the working population to be at least indiferent to whether increasing productivity is turned into more free time or more wage goods formed an important background condition for the success of Keynesian macroeconomic techniques in stabilizing the economy. Where labor comes to be regarded as commensurable with the wage by virtue of the notional activity power of wage goods, increases in income will tend to be used to increase consumption rather than being used to reduce work hours. This tendency for people to spend added increments of income means that demand-side macroeconomic policies, devised to ensure that aggregate efective demand is suficient to absorb output, are more likely to be efective. For example, fiscal policies aimed at stimulating the economy by putting more dollars in people’s pockets, such as tax credits for wage earners, presuppose that those dollars will add to aggregate demand rather than being used to reduce the amount of time spent working. If increases in income were used to reduce the length of the working week at constant real income, then the whole project of macroeconomic demand management would become much less feasible. The same is true of eforts on the part of government to increase aggregate demand by way of prolabor industrial relations policies. The strategy followed, for instance, in the United States during the New Deal, to shore up demand by bolstering union power (the idea behind the Wagner Act of 1935), operated under the assumption that unions would use that power to increase their members’ real wages, which would subsequently be spent, thus stimulating the economy. If union power, backed by government-sponsored collective bargaining rights, had been used to force reductions in work time at constant levels of real income, rather than to increase real income (and therefore boost aggregate demand), then that strategy would have failed.\n\nAt the same time, without the availability of mass produced, and importantly, standardized consumer commodities, endowed with stable properties and framed in such a way as to signify reserves of potential free activity, the exchange of labor for a wage would not have been so readily construable as a legitimate practice. For the standardized product notionally entailed a predictable duration of product use, which made it easier to envisage the accumulation of (standardized) commodities as representing an increasing store of potential free time. The creation of a certain kind of commodity—the standardized mass-produced consumer durable—understood as a material repository of free activity in potentia, thus made possible a form and magnitude of demand capable of supporting the system of production required for its manufacture. The moral economy that underpinned Fordism thus had both demand and supply sides—a demand for commensuration between labor and its wage, as a condition on its legitimacy, and a supply of wage goods framed in such a way as to make this commensuration seem possible.\n\n90\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":89,"next_page":91}