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# Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption

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3.3. “Getting a Living” and “Getting Ahead”

A very important topic in the Lynds’ analysis, one that comes up repeatedly, is attitudes to the business of “getting a living.” The phrase itself is telling, in that it suggests a separation between the business of living and the business of working—work is a means for living rather than a part of living. The Lynds tell us that for their working informants, “living” is something that occurs in their leisure time. Given limited social mobility, it is not surprising that, according to the Lynds, Middletown’s wage earning class attached much more importance to direct leisure than to occupational attainment. Members of Middletown’s “business class,” on the other hand, saw the point of work not as simply “getting a living” but as “getting ahead,” which meant social advancement.

Two decades after the second Middletown study, Eli Chinoy (1955) paints a somewhat diferent picture of his working-class informants. For Chinoy’s autoworkers, the key concept was not “getting a living” but, like the business class of Middletown, “getting ahead.” On Chinoy’s interpretation, the importance of “getting ahead” for the autoworkers he studied indicated that they had embraced some version of what he calls the “American dream”—a vague vision of life as defined by opportunity, agency, self-making, and progress. But, significantly, for Chinoy’s autoworkers “getting ahead” did not mean occupational mobility but rather the accumulation of material commodities—what Chinoy describes as “a quantitative increase in things within the reach of everyone” (p. 134). Unlike the workers of Middletown, Chinoy’s autoworkers were unionized. The union was seen primarily as a means for increasing purchasing power, in order to fund more commodity accumulation. While the labor organizers interviewed by the Lynds saw workers’ preoccupation with material objects as a distraction from the kind of class consciousness that would inspire them to join unions, Chinoy’s workers embraced labor politics precisely because they saw their union as an efective means to the end of higher wages and increasing material accumulation. This change in attitude fits with Meg Jacobs’s (2005) history of the ascent of the politics of purchasing power in the postwar period.22

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Defining “getting ahead” as material accumulation rather than occupational mobility made sense in a context in which there were limited opportunities for advancement at work. Autoworkers in the 1950s were under no illusions about the constraints of their class position. The diferent groups of workers interviewed in the 1950s by Chinoy—and, in separate studies, by Guest, and Berger—all expressed pessimism about their chances of upward occupational mobility. In research, conducted in the mid-1950s, on attitudes of autoworkers, Richard Guest found that while workers aspired to improve their jobs, at the same time they had little faith that it would happen. Some 60.7 percent of young workers and 81.5 percent of older workers rated their chances of occupational mobility as “poor or no chance” (Guest 1954, p. 158). Indeed, Guest concludes his article by commenting on the degree to which the findings of his survey echo those of Chinoy’s ethnographic study. Guest’s workers, like Chinoy’s, were in general quite negative about their jobs and bleakly realistic about their chances for upward occupational mobility. Chinoy notes that workers often mentioned their long-term plans to escape the factory and go into business, yet he observes that these plans typically did not lead to action. Bennet Berger’s ethnography of a suburban community of autoworkers in the late 1950s, like Guest’s research, also echoes Chinoy’s findings on attitudes to social mobility. Berger found that the workers he interviewed were very much resigned to spending their lives in the factory. Of his interviewees, 94 percent reported that they thought of their jobs as “permanent,” and only 3 percent reported “keeping their eyes open for something better” (Berger [1961] 1970, p. 16).

Like the workers described by the Lynds, Chinoy’s informants tended to find meaning not in their work but in their leisure time activities. One thing shared by Chinoy’s workers and those of the Middletown studies is a sense of profound alienation from their work. “The things I like about my job are quitting time, pay day, days of, and vacations,” lamented one of Chinoy’s (1955, p. 85) informants. Another informant, whose opinion, according to Chinoy, was quite representative of those of the workers he spoke with, commented that his satisfactions came from “the things I do when I get home” (p. 132).23 “Their main interests lie in the things they do in their leisure hours” notes Chinoy (p. 115). Yet, unlike the Lynds’ workers, those interviewed by Chinoy associated the idea of “getting ahead” with the project of using the wage to accumulate commodities. On Chinoy’s assessment, “advancement has come to mean the progressive accumulation of things as well as the increasing capacity to consume.” As one worker interviewed by Chinoy explained: “A lot of people think getting ahead means getting to be a millionaire. Not for me though. If I can just increase the value of my possessions as the years go by instead of just breaking even or falling behind, if I can keep adding possessions and property, . . . I’ll figure I got ahead quite a bit” (p. 126). Similarly, another worker averred, “We’re all working for one purpose—to get ahead,” continuing, “I don’t think a person should be satisfied. My next step is a nice modern home of my own. That’s what I mean by bettering yourself—or getting ahead” (p. 126). The definition of getting ahead was, then, to a large extent couched in terms of the accumulation of material possessions. Chinoy summarized the attitude as follows: “If one manages to buy a new car, if each year sees a major addition to the household—a washing machine, a refrigerator, a new living room suite, now probably a television set—then one is getting ahead” (p. 126).

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Chinoy (1955, p.  126) saw this attitude as indicating a tension between the constraints of class and the valorization of ambition and social mobility: “American culture encourages men to seek both occupational advancement and the acquisition of material possessions. But workers who respond to both of these admonitions use the second to rationalize their failure to achieve the first.” His interpretation is thus essentially psychological: “Workers .  .  . try to maintain the illusion of persisting ambition by extending the meaning of advancement to include the acquisition of personal possessions” (p. 130). According to Chinoy: “In order to convince themselves that they are getting ahead and that they are not without ambition, workers apply to the ends they pursue the vocabulary of the tradition of opportunity. They extend the meaning of ambition to include the search for security, the pursuit of small goals in the factory, and the constant accumulation of personal possessions” (p. 124). Despite expressing deep dissatisfaction with their jobs, Chinoy’s informants regarded them as basically acceptable to the degree that, in exchange for their alienated labor, they were able to accumulate consumer commodities.

But what might it mean to “get ahead” by way of the accumulation of commodities? One interpretation would be that “getting ahead” was about status competition by way of conspicuous consumption. On this understanding, the urge to “get ahead” is a more competitive version of the imperative to “keep up” with the Joneses. What workers sought, perhaps preemptively, to “get ahead” of were their friends, workmates, and neighbors. Yet a status-focused interpretation of the acquisition of commodities seems odd, because the setting of Chinoy’s study was a community in which occupational status was relatively fixed. While a few autoworkers harbored dreams of eventually going into business for themselves in some capacity, most felt that all they could hope for was social mobility for their children. In contexts in which everyone is stuck in more or less the same kind of job, the only thing conspicuous consumption is going to index is likelihood of being in debt.

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Of course, a person’s occupational status is not necessarily public knowledge. Perhaps, therefore, workers acquired goods in order to use them to project higher status than they actually had. However, status display of that sort only works in certain kinds of settings. In their Middletown studies, the Lynds ofer the very general Veblenesque speculation that as cities grow in size, so conspicuous consumption becomes more important. This is because increasing anonymity entails that “personal means of placing oneself in the group, involving considerations of the kind of person one is, yield to more quickly determinable, shorthand symbols, namely what one owns” (Lynd and Lynd 1929, p. 467).24 But the informants in Chinoy’s and in the Lynds’ studies inhabited relatively small towns (Lansing was smaller than Muncie, but both had populations of less than 100,000) with fairly cohesive communities, one major employer, and social and spatial segregation along class lines. In that kind of setting, it is likely that people would have a good sense of what others do for a living, making it dificult to successfully “fake” high status through ostentatious display of goods. Moreover, none of the workers interviewed in the Lynd and Chinoy studies say anything to indicate that the motivation for accumulating commodities is to shore up or improve their status position. To be sure, informants would perhaps not care to admit as much, even if it was true. Yet Chinoy emphasizes the marked degree to which his autoworkers had low self-esteem and were in general quite self-deprecating and resigned to their station in life. As noted, the industrial workers he interviewed felt very much fixed in their status and saw only very limited opportunities for social mobility. While they spoke of “getting ahead” to describe the accumulation of goods, there is no suggestion that they felt that accumulating things would improve their status in any deep and meaningful sense. It does not, therefore, seem likely that the point of the preoccupation with material accumulation that Chinoy draws our attention to was simply to gain position in the status hierarchy.

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In addition, research in the 1950s by the sociologist William H. Whyte presents some evidence that a new mode of consumption was emerging in the 1950s, the point of which was precisely not to stand out from neighbors but rather to conform to the appropriate group standard. Whyte (1954) claimed, in his work on social life in the suburbs, to have discovered a tendency toward inconspicuous consumption. This style of consumption reflected a desire to fit in with prevailing consumption norms rather than one-upmanship. Supporting Whyte’s analysis, David Riesman and Howard Roseborough (1955) note the extent to which, by the mid-1950s, consumption was organized into “standard packages,” the contents of which varied by social class. According to Riesman and Roseborough, for most people consumption was about acquiring a set of material objects that conforms to the standard package appropriate to their class rather than making a symbolic claim to a status higher than others in their reference group. Of course, class standards for consumption were dynamic rather than fixed. As real income increased for a social stratum, new commodities would be added to its standard set. In line with this collective, class-organized picture of consumption, Chinoy notes that unions were seen as a means for gaining access for the entire group of workers to an improved set of consumer commodities. The objective was the collective advancement of all workers represented by the union. “Getting ahead,” then, could mean at least two diferent things. For individuals, it could mean acquiring the set of goods that comprises the standard package for their class. But it could also mean a whole group increasing its wages so that its standard package of wage goods could be upgraded. As an aside, one precondition for standard packages of consumption goods is that products themselves are standardized—a point I will explore at greater length in the next chapter.

An alternative interpretation of what it means to “get ahead,” already touched on in this chapter, is that it was understood in intergenerational terms, as the accumulation of capital that could then be used to support upward mobility in workers’ ofspring. There is evidence in these studies that to some degree this was the case. Chinoy’s informants, as do the Lynds’, tell him of their desire to not have their children enter the factory. Similarly, the autoworkers interviewed by Berger mention their ambitions for their children to attend college. But, as we have seen, aggregate spending and saving patterns in the United States do not lend strong support to that interpretation. If the motivation to “get ahead” was to ensure intergenerational mobility, then surely savings rates would be higher than they in fact were in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Moreover, the ethos expressed by Chinoy’s workers was much more “work to spend” than “work to save.”

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The materialist aspirations underlying the preoccupation with “getting ahead” are consistent with the theory developed in this book. As we saw in Chapter 3, by the 1950s, work hours per week had become fairly stable—yearon-year, they were dropping little, if at all. At the same time real wages and spending were steadily increasing, with a good proportion of the spending directed toward consumer durables. What “getting ahead” via commodity accumulation might have meant for wage workers in that context was improving the ratio between subjection to labor and ownership of goods that represented the opposite of labor. If goods roughly translate into congealed free activity time, then, as workers acquire more of them, the amount of free time stored in their accumulated wage goods increases relative to the time given up as work. “Getting ahead,” seen this way, means accumulating an ever-greater surplus of potential use power, stored in wage goods, over the ongoing loss of time to work. Even at low levels of income, this kind of accumulation could seemingly progressively diminish the diference between the loss of time to work and the activity time represented by the goods aforded by the wage.

Chinoy and the Lynds describe worlds within which the accumulation of consumer commodities justifies, or at least rationalizes, otherwise alienating work. For Chinoy’s autoworkers, the accumulation of commodities, to a significant extent, defines what it is to “get ahead.” This would suggest that the exchange of labor for a wage had become acceptable by virtue of the increasing purchasing power of that wage. As long as the purchasing power of the wage allowed workers feel that they were making “progress” by increasing the quantity and improving the quality of the commodities they own, the underlying exchange was at least arguably legitimate and potentially fair. This certainly does not mean that work was enjoyable. There is, as noted, plenty of evidence of alienation among workers in Chinoy’s and in the Lynds’ ethnographies. Yet the attitude of wage workers in both cases is one of resignation. Wage labor, by comparison with earlier periods, had become a quasi-naturalized “fact of life,” one that was tolerable to the extent that it allowed for material “progress,” by way of commodity acquisition. This is in stark contrast to the attitudes to wage labor described by labor historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—which, as described earlier in this chapter, called into question the very legitimacy of wage labor as an institution. The data on nineteenth-century wage earners analyzed by Dora Costa suggest that “getting ahead,” for them, meant using increases in wages to progressively reduce the temporal duration of their subjection to work (Dora Costa 2000a). It seems likely that what those earlier wage earners had sought to “get ahead” of was a capitalist system that would extract as much labor power from them, and therefore as much of their time and energy, as possible.

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Standardization of Consumption, Work, and Wages

In Chapter 4, I suggested that if consumer objects had been thought about in a more contextual, practice-centered fashion, then wage earners would have pushed harder for increasing productivity to be realized as more free time rather than focusing primarily on higher real income. I went on to argue that the apparent absence of strong consideration of the contextual conditions on commodity use makes more sense when seen in relation to the emergence of a particular understanding of wage labor. On this understanding, the wage relation is potentially fair, and therefore fundamentally legitimate, only insofar as it represents an exchange of commensurable substances. However, it is not at all obvious on what grounds the life activity sold as labor and the wage received in return, are commensurable. Indeed, as discussed in the last chapter, for much of the nineteenth century the popular criticism of wage labor was that it involves the sale of something that is essentially inalienable and for that reason has something in common with slavery. I suggested that the wage is rendered commensurable with labor by virtue of an interpretation of consumer commodities as congealed quantities of potential utility (use power), imagined as durations of free activity. As wage labor took on increasing legitimacy through this particular mechanism of commensurability, wage earners became primed to view the use value of commodity objects in a relatively decontextualized manner. Objects of consumption began to index durations of hypothetical free activity, with the question of the availability of time to actually realize their use value pushed into the background. Thus the availability of

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“congealed time” in the form of consumer durables obscured the question of real free time.

Change in understandings of wage labor is, however, only one side of the picture. The other side, which is the topic of the present chapter and the two that follow, concerns the ways in which commodities were presented to the consumer. Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, a set of developments took place that had the efect of reframing objects of consumption, focusing attention on the commodity-in-itself, as opposed to the commodity-in-use. These developments both reflected and at the same time fed into the tendency for utility to be thought of primarily as a property of objects rather than as a product of real practices, in the course of which objects are actually put to use. The set of developments were quite large in scale. They include the stabilization of the physical properties of products so that products became more uniform, the rise of product brands, changes in the legal (and underlying moral) framing of the entitlement of consumers to useful products, and the emergence and institutionalization of consumer product testing. These developments took place against the background of the rapid standardization of the economy—a complex and multifaceted process that became a subject of intense discussion, especially during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It was the standardization of consumer products (as well as work and the wage) that made it possible to think of the wage as commensurable with the time and efort given up in exchange for it. Standardization in part reflected the coalescing of a new moral economy under industrial capitalism, in which wage-labor exchange was rendered fair by virtue of the purchasing power of the wage over consumer commodities that signified stores of potential activity.

Standardization is typically taken to refer to eforts to coordinate production in an industrial economy, with the objective of reducing the costs of production. Although originating in the sphere of production, however, standardization also came to have a significant impact on consumption, with implications for the meaning of consumer goods. It was standardized goods that drove the early mass consumer market—the model T Ford being the paradigmatic example. In addition to standardized consumer products, standardization in the sphere of consumption was manifested in the development of consumer brands, which indexed regular and predictable product characteristics, and the emergence of warranties for consumer durables, which signaled commitments on the part of firms to ensure that goods would perform as advertised. Those who promoted standardization often described its benefits in terms of higher-quality and more reliable consumer products. This was reflected in the early years of the twentieth century in the emphasis marketing campaigns put on the mechanical properties of products. The standardized commodity was supposed to be a transparent and stable container of utility, even as the increasing technological complexity of consumer goods rendered them ever more black-box like. As goods themselves became standardized, so too did the means of their distribution, as the chain store model of retail spread rapidly across the economy in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Standardization also came to influence consumption through the regulation and testing of consumer goods. Systematic product testing has its origins in the work of early corporate laboratories. Independent testing was first conducted by state agencies such as the National Bureau of Standards, the Bureau of Chemistry, and the Federal Drug Administration, followed by various nongovernmental consumer advocacy organizations. The results of product testing eventually became regular content in a wide range of periodicals and other kinds of media, coming to perform a watchdog function, by working to ensure that manufactured products lived up to acceptable levels of functionality. Somewhat orthogonal to these developments were fundamental changes in the legal regulation of consumer transactions, with a gradual shift, over a period of about a century, in the locus of risk bearing from consumer to producer. These legal developments established contractual entitlements for consumers, in the form of the implied warranty, to what was considered fair and reasonable amounts of use value from the commodities they purchased.

In concert, these developments had the efect of presenting consumer goods as congealed quantities of potential utility, to which consumers were viewed as being entitled. Yet the exact nature of the entitlement is unclear. It did not follow automatically from the general ethical precepts that developed with markets—or from the noncontractual moral framework within which market contract became possible—because the strong version of consumer entitlement emerged only in the twentieth century. That was much later than the emergence of market society itself, which is typically dated to the eighteenth century in England, and the early nineteenth century in the United States (Polanyi 1957; Stanley 1998; Larson 2009). Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century the legal principle governing market transactions in the

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