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

Labor’s pursuit of purchasing power, as opposed to pushing for a broader and more political agenda that challenged capitalism itself, corresponded to the waning of the struggle to reduce the length of the working week. In the period following the Civil War the industrial struggles about work time were animated by ambivalence about wage labor because of its close association with bondage. The efort by labor to limit the length of the working day was conceived of as being part of a broader movement to overthrow, or at least contain, “wage slavery.” In 1866, the General Congress of Labor resolved in a meeting in Baltimore that “the first and great necessity of the present is to free the labor of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in the states of the American union.” (Toph 1898, p.  131). Limiting hours at work would, according to this reasoning, limit the extent of the subjection of workers to wage slavery, since work under capitalism and wage slavery essentially amounted to the same thing. The call to reduce the length of the working week powerfully galvanized workers and was closely associated with the May Day demonstrations of the 1880s. In 1872 over 100,000 workers went on strike in New York City in support of an eight-hour limit to the working day at a time when, according to the 1870 census, the number of people working in manufacturing in the city was 144,285. As with the broader question of wage labor, the concern to shorten the working day was shared by a many in society. William Bliss (1897, p. 1,230), minister, investigator for the Bureau of Labor, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Social Reform, wrote, “Today almost all economists and social reformers favor a shorter day, the only questions being how rapidly it can be introduced, and in what ways.”

The issue of the length of the working week continued to have some presence on the agenda of organized labor until World War II. In the 1930s, for example, against the backdrop of mass unemployment, work time was still a living issue for unions.14 But over the first half of the twentieth century, the importance of the issue of work time gradually waned (as the concern with increasing purchasing power waxed). And, as historian Benjamin Hunnicut (1984, 1998) has noted, the efort to limit hours at work, somewhat mysteriously, almost vanished in the second half of the century. There were occasional local upwellings of support for shorter hours. For example, sociologist Jonathan Cutler (2004) shows how in the 1950s and 1960s members of UAW local 600 branch pushed, against the will of the union’s leadership, for shorter hours. But in the postwar period, there was nothing like the huge national shorter hours movement of the late nineteenth-century.15 Of course, in part the issue of work time became less pressing because, as we saw in Chapter 3, hours fell significantly between 1880 and 1920. Yet, as I noted in that chapter, it is not at all clear why, as productivity improved, and hourly income continued to increase, working hours did not continue to decline at an equivalent rate.

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The ebbing of older concerns about wage labor being tantamount to a form of bondage coincided with the emergence of mass consumption—a correlation which, according to the argument of this book, is not without significance. The change in focus of the labor movement from work time to purchasing power was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather was part of a broader reorientation of politics away from production and toward consumption. Lizabeth Cohen has noted that in the late nineteenth century, the public good was thought about primarily in terms of the health of production. But, beginning in the Progressive era, the interests and welfare of the consumer came increasingly to represent the public good. By the early 1930s, FDR could declare without risk of stirring controversy: “we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought [such] that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer” (L. Cohen 2003, p. 24). The rights of wage earners were, in line with this, increasingly tied to their emerging identity as consumers.

As alternatives to wage labor increasingly vanished, the picture of wage labor as a form of bondage began to fade, and in its place, there emerged not so much a set of arguments as a largely unspoken assumption that a wage could, at the right level, be fairly exchanged for a given quantity of work. Indeed, historian Glickman (1997) notes that as the general concept of wage slavery declined, an alternative metaphor involving slavery appeared—the “wage slave.” The term wage slave referred to a person who toils for low levels of compensation—who works, that is, without, being given a commensurate amount of purchasing power in return for her labor. For wage laborers to have a status akin to that of slaves, thus, became contingent on the buying power of their wages.

The increasing acceptance among workers of wage labor as a de facto reality was in part a response to the consolidation of the power of business and to a state that was increasingly hostile to labor. Howard Kimeldorf (1999) and Kim Voss (1993) have shown in their studies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labor activism that there were also considerable organizational impediments to carrying out a more radical agenda. These dificulties added to the impetus to accept wage labor as, more or less, a fact of life. As Glickman (1997, pg. 2) puts it: “In the period between the Civil War and World War One workers learned to accept wages and to identify themselves as wage earners because they had no alternative.” But this did not mean that their conception of what made wage labor legitimate was the same as that of liberal political economists. Part of how workers came to conceive of wage labor as a justifiable institution was by a consumerist reorientation of class consciousness. The toil of work became justifiable in terms of the supposed fruits of consumption, measured by the concept of purchasing power.

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There were eforts to fix fair compensation in absolute terms, pegged to a specified set of goods. For example, AFL leader Samuel Gompers argued that wages should be set at levels capable of supporting an “American standard of living,” which he defined as “the neat convenient well fitted bathroom . . . food in good quantity and quality, presentable clothes, a comfortably furnished home,” a wage “suficient to maintain an average-sized family.” (Shergold 1982, p. 90).16 This absolute conception of fair wages is somewhat similar to feudal norms of economic exchange, according to which the landed elite was obligated to provide basic security for their serfs in exchange for services rendered. At the same time, the absolute conception of fair compensation for work reflected a presupposition that labor can be fairly compensated by wage goods and that the two are therefore commensurable. Conceptions of a fair wage in absolute terms, however, could not deal with the very dynamic situation created by rapidly increasing productivity. For organized labor also made the argument that increasing productivity should, on grounds of fairness, be rewarded by increasing real wages. As noted in the last chapter, anchoring fair wages to a fixed basket of goods makes it unclear on what moral grounds labor can press for higher wages in exchange for its contribution to increasing productivity. The absolute version of a fair wage, set out by Gompers and others in the early twentieth century, is, then, better conceptualized as specifying minimal standards of living that any wage should secure. It provided necessary, but not suficient, conditions that must be met in order for a wage to qualify as being fair and decent. It did not provide general criteria for determining whether the exchange of a given wage for a given amount of labor is fair. In the second half of the twentieth century, the absolute conception of fair wages became supplemented by a more dynamic notion, which linked increases in productivity to increases in the purchasing power of the wage. The background to this was the development of a mass consumer economy focused on standardized consumer goods.17

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By the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of purchasing power, against the background of mass consumption, had come to provide grounds for the legitimacy of wage labor, which for much of the nineteenth century had been a subject of considerable controversy. As long as wage labor was conceived of as entailing a loss for the worker that was incapable of being compensated, an irrevocable diminishing of her humanity, it remained a deeply questionable practice. The legitimacy of wage labor was secured to the degree that it came to be thought of as, in theory, capable of being commensurately compensated by a suficient quantity of consumer goods. The fact that the development of the institutional, cultural, and social forms associated with consumer society coincided with the gradual acceptance of wage labor as a legitimate form of exchange was, as noted in the previous chapter, not coincidental.

What is not clear, however, is how exactly consumption could make what had previously seemed tantamount to a form of slavery or bondage into something fair and acceptable. At least part of the answer to this question is that consumer commodities became reframed as increasingly standardized quantities of use power—free time and activity frozen in the form of commodities. This change was both reflected in and facilitated by the emergence of a new kind of product, as mass-produced, standardized modern consumer durables became available.

1. The Meaning of Consumption in the Shadow of Wage Work—Some Evidence from Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Research

I characterized the theoretical argument made in the last chapter as an abduction—a conjecture that posits a state of afairs to account for a surprising empirical pattern. The existence of that state of afairs would remove the grounds on which the pattern strikes us as surprising. If the point of consumption is to achieve commensurate compensation for labor, then the tendency for consumption to increase with increases in productivity would follow naturally, as a matter of course. But are there more direct indications that mass consumption was motivated to a significant extent by wage-labor commensuration? What evidence do we have about attitudes toward the connection between work, wage, and consumption among wage earners in the period that saw the emergence of welfare capitalism and the purchasing power paradigm—the period roughly spanning the 1920s to the 1950s?

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Uncovering the attitudes of wage earners toward the relation among work, wages, and consumption is a dificult endeavor. It involves the reconstruction of popular mentalities buried in the past from often fragmentary and indirect evidence deposited in the archive. Disinterring past attitudes to work, spending, and saving demands intense social historical investigation of a kind that, for practical reasons, is most easily undertaken in empirically quite delimited contexts. For that reason, social histories that investigate the work-life nexus often take the form of local studies or microhistories. One example is Roy Rosenzweig’s (1985) detailed historical investigation of work and leisure in Worcester, Massachusetts, between 1870 and 1920. The present book, however, has objectives diferent from those of local histories such as Rosenzweig’s. Its aim is to develop a general theory of the relation between wage labor and mass consumption under industrial capitalism, based in the first instance on abductive inferences made from large-scale historical patterns and trends. Finding evidence that is, on the one hand, rich enough to use to reconstruct attitudes to the relationship between work and consumption and, on the other, representative of wage earners under industrial capitalism is, to say the least, challenging.

There are, nonetheless, some historical sources that present suggestive evidence about the relation between understandings of work and the meaning of consumption. In particular mid-century qualitative research on wage earners provides at least some sense of the ways in which wage labor was justified, during the first half of the twentieth century, in terms of the accumulation of consumer commodities. To be sure, ethnographies written in the past should be approached with caution, because the interpretations they contain are inevitably refracted through the commitments and biases of their authors. Nonetheless, they provide at least something for us to go on. In the remainder of this chapter, I examine a number of studies of industrial wage workers conducted between the 1920s and the 1950s that touch on the interrelated meanings of work, wages, commodities, and leisure. In particular, I consider the evidence presented in sociological investigations by Robert Straughton Lynd and Helen Lynd in the 1920s and early 1930s and by Eli Chinoy, Robert Guest, and Bennet Berger in the 1950s. The Lynds’ analysis of work, consumption, and leisure in Middletown and Middletown In Transition provides some suggestive, albeit often oblique, evidence about the relationship between the meaning of work and consumption. The ethnography of autoworkers in Lansing, Michigan, conducted in the 1950s by the industrial sociologist Ely Chinoy (1955), is especially informative because Chinoy was specifically interested in how wage earners justified their labor, to themselves and to others. Research on autoworkers by Richard Guest (1954) and Bennet Berger ([1961] 1970), also conducted in the 1950s, helpfully supplements Chinoy’s study. Of course, these ethnographies are very far from being based on a representative population sample for the United States, let alone for industrial capitalism in general. Both the Lynds and Chinoy investigated very particular contexts—a small, Midwest nonunion town in the Lynds’ studies and unionized autoworkers in a small midwestern factory town in Chinoy’s case. Nonetheless, what these studies lack in breadth they make up for in depth. Moreover, the research on postwar autoworkers by Chinoy, Guest, and Berger focuses on a group of workers who, following the UAW’s landmark 1948 collective bargaining agreement with GM, had tremendous influence on wage setting and industrial relations in the economy at large (Piore and Sabel 1986; Katz 1985). How autoworkers in this period understood the meaning of their work, and its relationship to their wages and to the consumption aforded by those wages, reflected, but also informed general conceptions of wage and work standards.18 To reiterate, however, the objective of this brief survey is just to provide some evidence in light of which the notion that mass consumption is in part explained by wage-labor commensuration becomes at least plausible. It goes without saying, therefore, that my discussion amounts to an opening note, rather than the last word, on the topic.

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3.1 Wages, Work, and Consumption in Mid-Century America

Early on in the Lynds’ (1929, p. 52) first study of Middletown, they ofer a synthetic overview of the moral economy connecting work and money to the life of the town: “The whole complex of doing day after day fortuitously assigned things, chiefly at the behest of other people, has in the main to be strained through a pecuniary sieve before it achieves vital meaning. This helps account for the importance of money in Middletown, and, as an outcome of this dislocation of energy expenditure from so many of the dynamic aspects of living, we are likely to find compensatory adjustments in other regions of the city’s life.” They make a related point in their second study, Middletown In

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Transition, published almost a decade later, describing the “master formula” at play in Middletown (and by extension in American industrial capitalism more generally) as “Work = money; money buys leisure. Non-work = loss of opportunity to make money, and therefore loss of opportunity to buy leisure.” They continue, “It is thus that pecuniary culture transmutes even leisure into its own terms” (Lynd and Lynd 1937 p. 294). The Lynds are drawing attention here to the commodification of all dimensions of life, but especially of leisure, in a town in which most people got their living by selling their labor. As social life became increasingly mediated by money transactions, a process at the root of which lay the growing importance in all aspects of life of the wage relation, so the meaning of everything became “strained through a pecuniary sieve.” The point about the commodification of life, how leisure became mediated by money, seems clear enough and very much in tune with standard criticisms of capitalism. Yet what is peculiar and interesting in the Lynds’ account is the suggestion that this “pecuniary straining” was not a source of disenchantment but rather a means by which an otherwise quite alienating form of life, and especially work, became imbued with “vital meaning.” What might it mean for the wage to endow deadening work with “vital meaning”? A wage taken in nominal terms is just a number, perhaps functioning like points in a game. But while accumulating money in this nominal sense might serve as a measure of relative success for the archetypal Weberian capitalist, something so abstract would hardly seem suficient to imbue alienated wage work with vital meaning. And how could money in its nominal form secure the idea of fair compensation for work? Money construed as an end-in-itself is surely much too abstract and anemic to make up for the real deficits—of freedom, time, self-ownership, and so on—incurred through subjection to the labor process.19

Assuming that the Lynds were on to something in their analysis—that the filtering of deadening wage labor through a “pecuniary sieve” did indeed somehow redeem the otherwise deeply alienating activity of labor—surely this efect must be explained by the use of money to buy wage goods, in conjunction with the particular meaning taken on by those goods in the notionally free sphere of consumption. I suggested in the last chapter that in order for the equivalence between work and wage to be established, and some semblance of moral balance restored to wage-labor exchange, the wage must be converted into goods, framed as congealed reserves of potential activity. If that is right, then the flow of influence that the Lynds describe in their analysis of leisure, from the wage / money economy to the form of life of the community, travels in both directions. While wage labor leads to the commodification of various aspects of life, at the same time, deadening labor becomes retroactively reanimated through the conversion of wage money into objects seemingly endowed with a vital power. Consumption, when directed at the possession of empowering objects, thus projects an animating meaning back on work.

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3.2. The Automobile as the Ultimate Consumer Commodity

For the workers of Middletown, the commodity that seemed more than any other to justify the alienating activity of labor—endowing work after the fact with “vital meaning”—was the automobile. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the difusion of the automobile in Middletown was rapid and dramatic, afecting all aspects of social life. “In 1890 Middletown was a ‘horse culture,’” the Lynds report, but “by 1920, Middletown had become a horse-power culture. By 1923, there were 2 cars for every 3 families. The ownership of automobiles substitutes, in many cases, for saving (and sometimes even for food and clothing). It is not uncommon to mortgage a home to buy a car” (p. 254). Even in the 1920s, before the era of interstates and large-scale suburbanization, people seemed almost irrational in the importance they attached to cars. “We’d rather go without clothes than give up the car,” one informant, a mother of nine children, told the Lynds (1929, p. 255). Most cars were purchased using finance, with car payments, according to the Lynds’ calculations, amounting to 25 percent of the average wage earned by working people.20 Yet cars were very much conceived of as objects of discretionary consumption. The Lynds note that one of the chief leisure time activities of Middletown workers was to go for a drive and that vehicles were more objects of pleasure than utilitarian tools. One gets the impression that the Lynds’ wage workers to a significant extent worked in order to be able to drive—or at least that the activity of driving to some degree justified the labor sold for a wage.

In Middletown in Transition, the Lynds’ second study, they observe that the obsession with automobiles continued into the 1930s, even against the backdrop of the Depression: “Car ownership in Middletown was one of the most depression proof elements of the city’s life in the years following 1929—far less vulnerable, apparently, than marriages, divorces, new babies, clothing, jewelry, and most other things, both small and large.” The Lynds note that “the passenger registrations in Middletown’s entire county not only registered scarcely any loss in the early years of the depression, but both in numbers and in ratio to population, stood in each of the years 1932–35 above the 1929 level” (1937, pp. 266–67). While the purchase of new cars declined, suggesting that hard economic times in the 1930s prompted people to hang on to their cars for longer, at the same time, gasoline sales dropped only 4 percent during the toughest years of the Depression, indicating that patterns of car usage did not change much. A union organizer interviewed by the Lynds claimed that it was because of their obsession with automobiles that workers in the town proved so hard to unionize. “It’s easy to see why our workers don’t think very much about joining unions,” he remarked, continuing, “So long as they [the workers] have a car and can borrow or steal a gallon of gas, they’ll ride around and pay no attention to labor organization; and if they can’t get gas, they’re busy trying to figure out some way to get it. . . . The automobile always comes first” (1937, p. 26).

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According to the Lynds, the automobile had come to symbolize “living, having a good time, the thing which keeps you working”—which is why the worker “clings” to it with such “tenacity” (1937, p. 245). Evidence of the importance of car ownership as rationalization for work can also be found in Eli Chinoy’s postwar investigation of autoworkers. In research conducted two decades or so after the Middletown studies, Chinoy found, much as the Lynds had, that the automobile had a central place in anchoring people to their jobs. One worker, reflecting on the reasons for his having been stuck in his factory job for so long, commented: “It’s my own fault. I was going to work here for a year after I graduated from high school, then be a printer’s apprentice. . . . But then I bought a car, and that was my downfall. I couldn’t aford to leave if I was going to have a car” (Chinoy 1955, p. 124).

Why should the car have had such significance for the Lynds’ wage earning informants? Why was owning and driving an automobile so important? At one point the Lynds mention that part of the appeal of motor cars was the opportunity driving ofered families for spending time together. Yet presumably a family stroll would be just as, if not more, efective in that regard. Of course, cars could, and sometimes did, serve as positional goods, signifying the purchasing power, and associated status, of their owners. But the power of automobiles to signify status does not by itself seem suficient to account for the obsession with them. Presumably any one of many expensive goods could serve as a sign of the wealth required to buy them—why the singular focus on cars rather than, for example, jewelry or some other commodity? A simple needs-based explanation also seems less than convincing, as the Lynds’ ethnographic work was done in a small town in the 1920s and early 1930s, before the postwar era of suburban sprawl and “mallification,” which made driving increasingly necessary on practical grounds. As noted earlier, the Lynds’ informants categorized automobiles as a luxury rather than a necessity.

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Perhaps part of the explanation is that cars seemed uniquely to represent freedom and that exercising agency is what “living”—as opposed to the getting of a living, by working—means. The Lynds draw attention to a line in an automobile advertisement, “Hit the Trail to Better Times,” suggesting that this slogan indicates that the car was powerfully symbolic of agency, expressed in peoples’ capacity to transform their life circumstances (1929, p.  256). This was (and still is) very much in line with the tendency for car advertisements never just to show automobiles doing quotidian things but rather to depict vehicles driven on endless open roads through dramatic landscapes, headed to destinations that could change at the whim of the person behind the wheel. Cars represented the antithesis of work, converting the wage into a thing with an almost mythical association with freedom. The automobile was thus well suited to serve as compensation for work, a counterbalance to the loss of freedom represented by having to sell labor for a wage. However, that interpretation leads back to the same question: Why exactly did automobiles have that kind of symbolic force?

One possible answer lies in the way in which the automobile could, more than any other commodity, function as a kind of extension of the worker’s embodied will. The pleasure in driving was the sense of expanded agency, the capacity for the will to transcend the limitations of the body. The deficit of agency experienced in wage work—the diminishing of the will that followed the subordination of the body to capital—perhaps seemed compensated for by the extended powers acquired through the ownership of cars. If that is right, then automobiles did not just index the status associated with the money required to buy them, but also a kind of augmented individual agency, facilitated by their technical capacities. In this sense, the motor-car pointed to itself as much as to its owner, its power and panache working as a potent symbol of freedom and transcendence. The workers of Middletown drove primarily not for instrumental purposes but just for the sheer joy of it—for the sense of empowerment imparted by driving. The pleasure of possessing a car was, however, not just realized in the moment, during the activity of driving, but derived also from “pride of ownership”—from the feeling of possessing an object endowed with the powers that cars are endowed with. In owning a motor car, workers possessed a store of use power, of hypothetical possibility, of a kind that extended their natural capabilities in a fashion that, to some extent, made up for their diminishment at work.21 Car ownership in this way worked supremely well as commensurable compensation for the loss of free activity represented by wage work.

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