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

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The diference in notions about how wages should be standardized came into particularly sharp focus in a series of industrial actions by East Coast railroad workers in support of standardized wages, which took place over the first two decades of the twentieth century. This protracted industrial struggle turned on the issue of whether and how wages should be standardized, and the public relations battle waged by the two sides took the form of a debate about the logic according to which standardization of wages should proceed.80 For the rail unions, standardized pay meant the same nominal wage for the same position, with standards set by the highest-paid worker in a category. For example, in 1909, just after the campaign for standardized wages had been launched, rail unions demanded the “standardization” of conductors’ pay on all railroads east of the Mississippi.81 Standardization of wages, for the unions, also meant uniform pay scales across geographical areas. In 1910 unions called for the ending of wage diferences across diferent regions of Pennsylvania, in the name of standardizing wages.82 The railroad companies and their sympathizers, however, had a diferent conception of the logic that should underlie the standardization of pay. For them, standardized pay meant equivalent real buying power (that is, the same real wage) for equivalent labor inputs. Since the cost of living varied considerably across diferent localities, and because the intensity of at least some kinds of railroad work depended on how busy on average things were, the railroad companies argued that wage scales ought to be flexible, to take into account the particulars of local situations.83 What the railroad workers meant by “standardized wages” was essentially uniform nominal wages for equivalent jobs (by adjusting all wages to match the highest ones in the category), whereas what their employers understood by the term was equivalent wage purchasing power for equivalent intensities of labor power. The issue of which logic should determine the standardization of pay scales of railway workers proved to be an ongoing source of contention, as employers claimed the union version would produce unsustainable increases in costs and was in any case irrational given diferences in the cost of living across the country.

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The views of Judge Anderson, former member of the Interstate Commerce Commission and of the Massachusetts Public Service Commission, and a figure broadly sympathetic to the railroad companies, are typical of those who argued against nominal (and upward) wage standardization from a business perspective. Anderson complained that the railroad union’s concept of wage standardization was an “utterly unsound and unjust standardization,” denouncing as “absurd” the “scheme of paying the same wages all over the country, regardless of living conditions and of the work required.” He condemned the “artificial standardization of wages on a mere money basis, that is, regardless of money purchasing power in various sections and of the quality and quantity of service,” noting, furthermore, the diference between the workload of an employee toiling in a busy city station and one working in a quiet rural station. Anderson ended his comments on the matter by urging “in the interest of the workingmen themselves” the abandonment of the standardization of wages.84

In the public relations battle, the railroads repeatedly suggested that the union’s version of standardized wages would threaten the economic wellbeing of railroad companies.85 Having ceded some ground on the issue of wage standardization to the unions before the First World War, the railroad companies launched a counterattack in the postwar period, arguing that standardized wages put the whole industry in peril.86 This point echoed an analysis of the initial wave of strikes, of 1909, by economist William J. Cunningham. Following the first big push by unions for standardized wages, Cunningham published an article, in 1910, in which he argued that standardization, far from ending inequalities, permitted them to remain, and even led to their accentuation. On the political right, some commentators, pursuing an antilabor agenda, came up with a harsh, probusiness version of standardized wages, a rhetorical counter to the union version. R. A. Gill-Smith, writing in the Wall Street Journal, suggested that wage rates be standardized around a “maximum rate . . . fixed by law.” “This,” he said “would not only put a stop sometime to increasing costs of living, but would go far to regulate most labor troubles. This would prove a boon to labor itself, as it would put in operation there the law of the survival of the fittest, whereby good and bad workmen would each receive their due reward.”87 The state eventually intervened in the 1909 dispute, to impose what it took to be a balanced approach to standardized wages. The Erdman Act of 1898 had given the federal government powers to take an active role in the arbitration of interstate industrial disputes involving the railroads. In the 1909 dispute between railroad workers and their employers, the Federal Railway Labor Board initially enforced the standardization of wages at the behest of unions, on terms they found agreeable.

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The federal government stepped in to support standardization of wages in other industries also. A fact-finding commission was set up under the Harding administration, to investigate conditions in the coal industry. The main objective of the commission was “ascertaining and standardizing the cost of living for mine workers and their living conditions and standardizing as far as is practicable the amount of work a man shall perform for a reasonable wage.”88 This formulation suggests that the commission was trying to strike a middle path between the positions of business and labor. On the one hand the recommendation was that the content of work at a given wage should be “standardized” in order to limit the capricious intensification of the labor process by ruthless businesses. On the other, the report suggested, in line with arguments made by business, that real purchasing power, rather than nominal rates, should be considered in deciding how to standardize wages.

By the late 1930s, with the inception of the New Deal state, standardized wages had increasingly come to mean those decided upon as a result of state regulated arbitration between labor and business, setting in place one of the elements of the Fordist compromise that was to fully coalesce in the postwar era. As with government eforts to impose product standards, moves on the part of the state to impose a top-down standardization of wages prompted calls from industry figures for action to preempt government intervention.

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W. W. Finlay of the Wright Aeronautical Corporation, addressing a 1938 conference sponsored by the American Management Association, urged companies to move voluntarily toward adopting a “scientific” basis for wages, lest the government intervene to do it for them.89 Ironically, by the late 1930s Henry Ford, great advocate of standardized production and standardized products, had turned vehemently against the state and union sponsored project to standardize wages and promote state mediated collective bargaining agreements. Ford characterized this project as tantamount to an efort to impose a “wage dictatorship,” at the root of which lay the machinations of nefarious “financiers.”90

Standardized pay was also one of the demands made by early campaigners for women’s rights. One activist in 1920 was reported as issuing the following cross-partisan rallying call in support of standardizing wages for men and women working for the federal government: “Through the women of the Democratic and Republican committees the women voters of the country are urged to take up the cause of the standardization on an equality with men of the wages of women in the federal services.”91 Some calls to standardize women’s work, however, meant ensuring that the work was appropriate for their gender. During the First World War, for example, some concern was expressed about the kind of work women were being called on to do. In 1918, Miss Goldmark, a representative of the Consumer’s League of New York, called for the work of female railroad employees to be “standardized” according to the supposed characteristics of their sex. She expressed particular concern that women workers were doing hard physical labor.92

In addition to campaigns for standardized pay as a means of combatting inequality, the project of standardizing wages was also adopted as a bureaucratic measure by government. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly at the level of local government, standardization bureaus were set up to rationalize pay scales. These bureaus were stafed by “wage and salary standardization experts.” Los Angeles began in 1916 to classify all city employees according to standardized criteria, with the aim of making its pay scales more rational by adopting a standard salary schedule.93 The city established its own bureau of standards in 1917 to manage the task of standardizing pay scales for salaried workers, and the policy was extended to cover wage workers in 1918.94 Similar eforts were undertaken in the early twentieth century by New York City, San Francisco, and Detroit, as well as Massachusetts and New York State. As in the case of the railroad dispute, the meaning of standardized government pay became a matter of some contention. Part of the issue was concern on the part of salaried workers that they would be placed in the same category as wage earners. They were worried about being classified in a downward social direction.95 But a more significant concern for public sector workers was that the underlying agenda local government had in standardizing wages and salaries was cutting costs and that this would inevitably result in a downward standardization of pay. In New York State, for example, standardization measures were introduced in response to calls for a \$1,500,000 reduction in the state payroll.96 The New York City Bureau of Standardization set itself the task of cutting the city’s annual wage bill by \$20,000,000 by standardizing the wages of eighty thousand workers.97 With such objectives in mind, standards were typically set by the lowest-paid worker in a given category rather than the highest-paid worker, an approach that was naturally very unpopular with government workers. At the same time, public criticism was leveled at bureaus of standardization for failing to successfully cut pay, and indeed for adding significant new costs to local government. The New York City Bureau of Standardization was estimated to cost the city \$100,000 per year.98 While standardization of public sector pay was primarily advocated on the basis of cutting costs, it was also seen as a means to eliminate irrational and often unfair variations in pay for workers. A city auditor in San Francisco in 1918 complained about the “manifest injustice” of diferences in pay for similar work, and advocated “standardization [of salaries] for all [city] departments.”99 Massachusetts, likewise, justified standardization of state pay by asserting that it would eliminate inequalities between people doing the same work. Similar claims were made (almost twenty years later) by the city government of Detroit.100

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In discussions and disputes about the standardization of wages, all sides deployed the rhetoric of fairness. A standardized wage meant a wage that fairly reflected the work done for it, however that was interpreted by various actors in specific cases. Standardized wages were also supposed to be transparent, making the criteria linking wage and work as clear and open as possible. In that sense, the standardized wage was close to the standardized product, representing a stable quantity of use value. In both cases standardization supposedly brought clarity and stability to things that seemed at risk of being opaque and arbitrary. Moreover, standardized wages and salaries, insofar as they came to be understood in terms of real “purchasing power,”

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rather than in nominal terms, drew attention to the wage goods in terms of which that power was gauged. With wages rationalized on the one hand, and wage goods stabilized on the other, the notion that wage labor could constitute a fair exchange of equivalents became more plausible.

The idea that wages should be standardized, and that product properties should be fixed for a given good, was presupposed in the formula that governed industrial relations in the years following the Second World War, which formed a central pillar of economic regulation in the Fordist era. As mentioned earlier in this book, according to that formula, first established by the 1948 agreement between the United Auto Workers (UAW) and General Motors, yearly changes in pay were determined by a combination of increases in productivity and changes in the consumer price index (Piore and Sabel 1986; H. Katz 1985). The principle became generalized in the economy at large, with even nonunion workers, public sector workers, and management taking their lead from pay negotiations of the big industrial unions, most prominently the UAW. In one form or another, it was adopted across the advanced capitalist world in the postwar era. The formula directly linked mass purchasing power to the increasing capacity of industrial production, thus ensuring some degree of coordination between production and consumption in the industrial economy. It formalized and institutionalized a dynamic conception of fair wages that was quite diferent from earlier notions, which were anchored to absolute standards of living. Yet the governing formula in postwar industrial relations was also a result of the growing consensus, which emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, that wage levels ought to be determined by an objectively reasonable procedure. The linking of wage levels to changes in the cost of living only made sense once product properties became standardized. For changes in real prices can only work as an index of purchasing power, and thus as an independent gauge of the value of a wage, if the properties of wage goods—the basis of their value—can be held constant.

Standardization of products and of labor was a prerequisite for generalized commensuration in economic exchange—for commensuration between categories of object or action. This is because the question of the ratio at which things of a given type should be exchanged for other categories of object can only be addressed once things (and perhaps also actions, if we consider services) within categories are made uniform, such that each thing can be easily recognized as a token of its type. If individual instances of a given category of thing were to vary too wildly, then the category itself would become unstable, threatening to become an arbitrary set of singular things rather than a set logically anchored by the (suficiently) uniform predicates of its elements. Where the things in question are commodities, that instability would lead to higher transaction costs in commerce. For high variation in product quality would mean that goods would have to be carefully inspected, with prices adjusted for units where deviations from the ideal standard version of each kind of good are found. And where careful inspection proves dificult, this would lead to the kind of problem of marketplace uncertainty (potentially leading to market failure) that economist George Akerlof describes in his famous account of the market for lemons (Akerlof 1970). Perhaps, therefore, one of the limiting conditions on the extent of the development of the market economy is the degree to which categories of object become standardized. Rather than thinking about what sociologist Lucien Karpik (2010) calls economic singularities—singular products and services that have unique properties, such as works of art—as anomalous phenomena, in need of special explanation, we might instead think about how it came to be the case that, in general, individual goods are not singularities but rather have become tokens of supposedly uniform types.101 This would raise at least two questions. What social, cultural, and technological conditions are required for the creation of stable, uniform types of product? And what efect did the organization of the economy around the exchange of this kind of product have on economic and social behavior? The answer to both questions, I suspect, would involve the moral economy around wagelabor commensuration.

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The insistent emphasis on the material characteristics of the standardized consumer product entailed a narrowing of the meaning of use value to the physical properties of commodities. In directing attention to the material substrate of use value, standardization displaced use from the concrete social context of actual practice and, as it were, placed it in the things themselves. The pressing questions became; how functional, durable, and reliable are consumer commodities, and how many can be commanded by a given wage? The utility of commodities thus became unhinged from the total ecology of practice within which objects actually become useful. Once use value became primarily a property of things—while things became reserves of utility, stores of potential activity—wage labor was much easier to imagine as an exchange of commensurable substances and hence as potentially fair. Wage labor, which had become a necessary fact of life under capitalism, one imposed largely through economic coercion, was thereby turned into a conceivably legitimate institution. Thus, the reframing of commodities as standard quantities of use value relieved some of the central tensions in labor under capitalism and facilitated the incorporation of previously recalcitrant wage earners into the capitalist growth machine.

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Standardizing Utility: Brands and Commercial and Legal Warranties

In this chapter, I turn from a broad interpretive overview of standardization to focus in more detail on a number of developments. These developments were very much connected to standardization and were particularly important for the status of the standardized commodity as a repository of abstract utility. They include the ascent of the modern branded product, the evolution of standardized commercial warranties, and changes in warranty law. In Chapter 8, I go on to examine the emergence of consumer product testing as an important institution within consumer capitalism—and, specifically, as a means by which standards in consumer goods were policed.

1. Branding of Standardized Products

On the commercial and marketing side, standardization was manifested as the proliferation of branded goods. Brands, understood in a very loose fashion as names attached to manufactured artifacts produced in high volume, have a long history, with archaeological evidence suggesting that they existed as far back as ancient Babylonia (Moore and Reid 2008). They can certainly be found at the dawn of the industrial age, with the appearance in England during the eighteenth century of brand names associated with commercial manufacturing enterprises such as Wedgwood Pottery (McKendrick 1984). However, it was not until the twentieth century that branded goods became the default products in the consumer marketplace, such that unbranded products became, ironically, the marked category.

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The consensus among business historians is that the modern era of brands commenced around 1870 (Strasser 1989; Low and Fullerton 1994). Brands had existed in America in the earlier nineteenth century but were for the most part restricted to two kinds of commodity—patent medicine and tobacco. From the later nineteenth century onward, however, branded goods spread throughout the marketplace and into all product categories.

The spread of branded, mass-produced goods was dependent on developments in production, distribution, and commercial law. Standardized mass production made it possible for consumer goods to be much more consistent in quality, which allowed brand names to be anchored to uniform products. On the most basic level, brand names operate by indexing regularity in the properties of the goods they are attached to—it is dificult to imagine brands working in that way if individual samples of branded products were to vary too wildly. For that reason, the standardization of product specifications was a prerequisite for the rise to dominance of the modern branded commodity. Advances in packaging technologies and new printing techniques made it easy to produce striking labels on which brand names could be displayed. The expansion of transportation along with the appearance in the later nineteenth century of department stores and chain stores as vital nodes in new distribution networks, gave producers unprecedented access to national markets (Chandler 1977). Access to these national markets made possible new economies of scale, which made it worthwhile for manufacturers to invest in brand recognition. Brand recognition was facilitated by the growth of print media, which greatly expanded opportunities for advertising. Lastly, changes in trademark law in the late nineteenth century made it much easier for brand names to be protected.1

With these material and structural conditions in place, the branded consumer commodity soon became commonplace in the market. According to Robert Lynd, writing in the early 1930s, the value attached to businesses with recognized brand names had in the space of just a few years increased from five times annual earnings to sixteen times annual earnings (Lynd 1933, pp. 875–76).2 George Burton Hotchkiss, chairman of the department of advertising at New York University, reminisced in 1925 about a time when, to the astonishment of all, a brand name for baking powder was valued at \$5,000,000—“ a million dollars a letter,” as he put it. Yet Hotchkiss observed that such valuations had, at the time of his writing, become quite unexceptional, commenting that, evidently, “we have become accustomed to the idea that the name of a product (or a person) can acquire monetary value through the process of becoming favorably known to the public.”3 The increasing value attached to brand names was accompanied by their rapid proliferation. By 1934, over half a million trademarks had been registered in Washington as identifying brands. The marketing trade journal Printer’s Ink in the mid-1930s counted over five thousand “commodity slogans” associated with brands (Wilcox 1934). As brands became increasingly pervasive, so did awareness of them among consumers. Research in the 1920s revealed that brand-name recognition had become widespread, with one study showing that 100 percent of its sample (of three hundred men) were able to name brands for each of the category of goods they were asked about and another showing that 90 percent of Chicago grocers claimed that at least three quarters of their customers asked for products by brand name (Strasser 1989 p. 52). The annual consumer survey conducted by the Milwaukee Journal in 1930 indicated the extent to which everyday consumer purchasing decisions were brand-led. Of the households surveyed, 71 percent bought cofee by brand, 78 percent bought soap by brand, 87 percent bought soups by brand, and 81 percent bought butter by brand, with similar numbers for most other staples. By the middle part of the twentieth century, branded commodities were firmly in place at the center of the consumer economy.

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