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

Of course, if increasing female participation in the workforce was facilitated by a reduction in domestic work hours, made possible by the difusion of labor-saving household appliances of various sorts and by the outsourcing of domestic tasks to market service providers, then even as women increased their hours of compensated work, total hours of market and nonmarket work per household might have stayed the same or even have fallen. There is some contention about whether increasing afluence, with more widespread access to appliances such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners, led to a decrease in domestic labor. Some analysts, looking at US data, argue that there is evidence that numbers of hours of housework per week have tended to go down over time (Robinson and Godbey 1999; Zilibotti 2010). However, Ruth Cowan’s (1983) historical research suggests that the amount of time devoted by households to domestic labor did not fall significantly in response to the dissemination of supposedly time-saving consumer durables. According to Cowan, the efect of labor-saving domestic appliances was, rather, to increase standards for what counts as an acceptably clean and ordered household.21 If domestic labor did not decrease very greatly over the course of the twentieth century then, as more women entered the labor force, it is quite possible that the combined average domestic and waged labor hours per household may actually have increased in the second half of the century.

Coming up with precise estimates for long-term trends in combined domestic and paid work time per household is very dificult, because reliable data are hard to come by. John Robinson and Geofrey Godbey (1999), stitching together American time use surveys (ATUS) from 1954 to 2000, suggest that total household labor has declined.22 But there are problems with the representativeness of the samples used in time use surveys because of low response rates. Time use studies are also problematic because it is unclear how to classify time spent in more than one activity (Hammermesh, Frazis, and Stewart 2005).23 Also, most of the decline charted by Robinson and Godbey occurred between 1965 and 1975, with not much further movement after that period. The combination of increasing female labor force participation, along with no decisive evidence that domestic work retreated to any great degree, casts some doubt on the suggestion that total labor per household declined in the second half of the twentieth century.

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Even if we believe that the patchy ATUS data indicate that total work time did modestly decrease in the final decades of the twentieth century, the decline is still small in comparison to increases in productivity. Moreover, Robinson and Godbey acknowledge that regardless of the real trend in discretionary time, there is a pervasive sense in contemporary society that people face a time bind, with ever more demands made on scarce free time. They suggest that part of the reason for this sense of time scarcity is the ongoing accumulation of commodities, which require time for their use. This interpretation implies that capitalist mass production in conjunction with mass consumption leads to an imbalance in the structure of people’s lives, with too much time spent at work and not enough time to make use of the things that work produces. The obvious solution would be to channel increasing productivity into more free time rather than more production and consumption. That this has not occurred to any significant degree is precisely the puzzle under consideration in the present investigation.

Participation in part-time work is also afected by changes in education. As the number of full-time adult students increased, so too did the number of part-time workers, since many students work part-time in order to help support themselves during their studies. This has the same diluting efect on average hours across the working population as the entry of women into the labor force as part-time employees. John D. Owen’s (1988) research indicates that for nonstudent men, the working week actually increased slightly in the thirty-eight-year period between 1948 and 1986, from 42.7 to 42.8 hours. Owen maintains, more generally, that any reduction in the length of the working week after 1950 can be accounted for by changes in the composition of the workforce rather than by changes of preference among the more homogenous working population prior to 1950. On Owen’s (1988, p. 42 [emphasis added]) assessment: “The series for working hours of non-student men come closest to a measure of changes over time in individual work times because this group has a minimum of other types of responsibilities. And this series has remained constant [since 1940].”

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Time for Things

So, over the course of the second half of the twentieth century we see an overall pattern in which productivity increases at a steady rate, while, by comparison, the working week changes very little. As the US economy entered into a period of significant and prolonged growth in productivity, with rapidly increasing real wages, it would seem, rather counterintuitively, that the relative value placed on free time—if we take this to be indicated by the ratio of the reduction in work time to the increase in real hourly wages—declined. However, that impression is based on macrolevel longitudinal trends. Economic historians have also studied the issue of work time and wages from the point of view of individual behavior, by examining how workers vary the amount they work as their hourly income varies, and how that has changed over time. As mentioned in the last chapter, Dora Costa (2000a) has shown that the supply curve of labor among late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century workers was strongly backward bending, meaning that number of hours worked was inversely correlated with hourly wages. Costa notes that her findings agree both with those of other economic historians and with observations made in that period. By the late twentieth century, however, the supply curve was no longer backward sloping. For workers in this later period, work hours do not decrease as hourly wages increase. According to Costa: “Changes in the structure of daily work hours could largely be accounted for by the relative number of daily hours workers were willing to supply. Compared to the 1890s, increases in the hourly wage no longer have a large, negative efect impact on hours worked. In fact, workers are now slightly more willing to increase their hours as their wages rise” (p. 334).24 Costa’s analysis indicates that between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, a marked change took place in the relationship between wage levels and work time. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the older pattern, in which rising real wages led to a reduction in the number of hours worked, is no longer evident. By the 1970s, the relationship between wages and hours had become extremely weak, and by the late twentieth century, it had disappeared altogether—increasing hourly wages no longer afected the demand for free time.

Costa’s findings are open to diferent interpretations. One possible explanation for them, suggested by Costa herself, is that since people typically worked many more hours in the late nineteenth century than in the late twentieth century, the relative value of free time for them would have been higher, and therefore they would have been inclined to use increases in wage rates to reduce time at work. However, wages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were low enough, in many cases barely afording subsistence, to cast some doubt on that explanation. Insofar as levels of absolute poverty and want were significantly higher in the late nineteenth century than in the later twentieth century, it is reasonable to expect to find a stronger preference for increased income, as opposed to more leisure, in the earlier than in the later period. Moreover, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, there was not much in the way of a welfare state. In the absence of a safety net, there would be a strong incentive to use increases in hourly wages to generate savings rather than to reduce work time.

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There are also some conceptual issues with Costa’s explanation. Costa presupposes that there are decreasing marginal benefits to added increments of free time, such that when time is scarce, its value is relatively high, while when it is abundant, its value is relatively low. But free time is not just another scarce economic resource. It rather has the peculiar characteristic that its marginal value very often increases as more of it becomes available. This is because many activities become more fulfilling with the acquisition of skill and experience, both of which take time. For example, the satisfaction of the ten thousandth hour spent playing a musical instrument is quite probably substantially higher than that of the tenth hour. Since many activities have this feature of increasing returns to time invested in them (as skills become perfected, friendships deepened, tastes refined, and so on), it would be wrong to assume that the value of free time necessarily declines at the margin. Furthermore, diferent kinds of activity take diferent amounts of time, so with more free time, the range of things that can be done with that time increases. The addition of the nth hour of free time might make it possible to engage in an entirely new kind of activity and so be of more value than the addition of the previous hour, which allowed only for more of the same. So while the theory of declining marginal returns makes some sense in relation to income, considered in terms of the set of goods and services aforded by a given amount of money, it is much less clear how it applies to time. Since goods and services can only be made use of in time, as income increases, the degree to which added income can actually be used to produce added utility becomes increasingly constrained by limited free time. But in what sense can the same logic be applied to time itself? It is not apparent why people should reach satiation when it comes to free time. Having time is a condition on doing anything, and there will always be a far greater number of desirable activities that could be undertaken in a given lifetime than can be undertaken—and many of those activities would require minimal funds. It seems clear, therefore, that the benefits conferred by added increments of free time do not necessarily decline at the margin.

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An alternative explanation of Costa’s findings, also from a standard economic perspective, is that people in the late nineteenth century chose to turn higher hourly wages into more time rather than higher consumption, because there simply weren’t very many enticing consumer goods to buy. According to this explanation, when new commodities appeared, especially after the consumer durables revolution of the early twentieth century, the utility commanded by the wage increased and so, consequently, did the demand for income. Making this argument involves positing a counterfactual—that if a contemporary array of goods had been available to workers in the later nineteenth century, then the supply curve of labor would not have been backward sloping. There is something intuitively convincing about this explanation. However, against it is the thought that at low levels of income, consumption of quite basic goods, which were available yet scarce in the late nineteenth century, should yield relatively more utility than increments of consumption at higher levels of income. In addition, as mentioned earlier, the generally low wage levels and absence of a safety net in Costa’s earlier period are reasons to expect that higher income would be at least as attractive to workers as less work time.

Admittedly, all of this is quite conjectural. It is ultimately very hard to know what exactly underlies the apparent diference in time / income preference that Costa discovered between the later nineteenth and later twentieth centuries. However, a more historical explanation than those thus far discussed is that there was a shift in the legitimacy of wage labor between the two periods. Attitudes to wage labor were quite hostile in the nineteenth century, with waged work often characterized as a form of bondage. It is not implausible, therefore, that the preference for less work reflected very negative attitudes toward wage labor—a resistance on the part of waged workers to the commodification of their time. Perhaps a better explanation than the one Costa suggests for the backward-sloping supply curve of late nineteenth-century labor is, therefore, that the waged workforce in that period had not yet fully internalized work-time discipline, having more in common with E. P. Thompson’s (1967) agrarian and protoindustrial workers than with a fully socialized capitalist workforce. This group of workers, to a far greater extent than was the case of later generations, regarded wage labor with a great deal of ambivalence, suspicion, and not infrequently outright hostility. Wage labor was felt by a significant part of the working population to be an external imposition, often compared to slavery, to be reduced as much as possible (Glickman 1997). A good deal of research by labor historians has characterized the postbellum nineteenth century as a liminal period, stretching between the craft-centered agrarian capitalism of the earlier part of the century, and the emergent full-blown industrial capitalism of the early twentieth century (Gutman 1973; Glickman 1997; Montgomery 1987; Rosenzweig 1985). Herbert Gutman breaks the process of proletarianization into three periods: an agrarian and protoindustrial period between 1815 and 1843, a proletarianizing phase between 1843 and 1893, and a period between 1893 and 1919 that witnessed the emergence of a mature industrial working class. During the middle, transitional phase, Gutman (1973 p. 540) writes, “a profound tension existed between the older American preindustrial social structure and the modernizing institutions that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism.” Over the entire period between 1815 and 1919: “That state of tension was regularly revitalized by the migration of diverse premodern native and foreign peoples into an industrializing or a fully industrialized society.” Thompson, Gutman, and Hobsbawm thus present a classic Marxian narrative in which workers begin as undisciplined creatures of habit and tradition; enter the crucible of the factory, where they are subjected to the rigors and endure the trauma of industrial life; and then emerge transformed into a modern industrial proletariat. In Hobsbawm’s (1964) terms, this fully formed working class had learned “the rules of the game” of capitalism. Prominent among those rules is that time is money. How much time is exchanged for how much money thus became the central focus of industrial struggle, pushing aside broader challenges to the institution of wage labor (Foner and Roediger 1987). According to the account given by labor historians, the waning of the struggle over hours, which had historically been framed as a matter concerning the very legitimacy of wage labor, marked the degree to which workers had become incorporated into the capitalist system (in Chapter 5, I go into a more detailed discussion of this history). To the extent that wage earners came to equate time with money, they might well have become less attuned to the diference in value between the two, and so less inclined to trade increasing income for more free time.

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This corporatist account is not, however, the only one possible from a broadly Marxian perspective. A very diferent interpretation of the historical change Costa charts explains the apparent shift in preferences for free time in terms of class power. As noted in the previous chapter, the power relation between business and labor is unequal, and so perhaps the development of a preference for higher wages over more time was no preference at all on the part of labor but rather expressed the interests of business alone. There is probably something to this view. Juliet Schor (1991) has, as mentioned, drawn attention to the fact that workers are rarely ofered the choice to take productivity-linked compensation either as more income or as fewer hours.

The problem with the class power explanation, however, is that American union membership in the middle part of the twentieth century, when the reduction in work hours more or less ground to a halt and the new corporatist industrial pact emerged, was at an all-time high.25 This followed a period of great labor activism in the 1930s, with union membership increasing from 3.5 million in 1935 to 9 million in 1940. In the years immediately following World War II, 36 percent of all nonfarm workers belonged to a union. After the passing of the Wagner Act of 1935, which recognized the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively, organized labor received an unprecedented degree of support from the state. To be sure, after the war there was a backlash against the pro-union policies of the 1930s, with the passage of the Taft-Harley Act of 1947. Nonetheless, collective bargaining in the postwar period became institutionalized. Moreover, even after Taft-Hartley, union membership remained high, accounting for 35 percent of private sector workers in 1954.26 In addition, the postwar period saw close to full employment in the US economy. Low unemployment greatly bolsters the bargaining power of labor. And yet work hours stayed almost constant in the postwar era, in stark contrast to the period between 1880 and 1940 (and especially between 1880 and 1920), when work hours declined steeply, even though labor was much weaker. If workers continued to be so concerned with reducing their hours, why did they not use their relative advantage in bargaining power during the postwar years to reduce hours, as workers did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Analysis of reported reasons for strikes shows that while shorter hours were very important between the later nineteenth century and the Second World War, the issue dramatically receded as a cause of industrial action after 1945.27 So why, in a period in which unemployment was low and union membership at an all-time high, and in which the collective bargaining rights of labor had been recognized to a greater degree than was the case before the New Deal, did labor not press more strongly for reduced hours? After all, between 1945 and 1970, American wage earners were very successful at increasing their wages. Yet businesses are on the whole not in favor of increasing their wage bill. If business had so much power over labor, how were workers able to win such large increases in real wages in the postwar decades? In fact, wage increases were such that the rate of return to capital, as Thomas Piketty (2014) has shown, was uniquely low during the Golden Age period of capitalism. And it was declining profit rates that contributed to the rise of the neoliberal political agenda in the 1980s—one part of which was aimed precisely at curtailing the power of labor (e.g., Ronald Reagan’s treatment of striking air trafic controllers in 1981).

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Given the mid-century strength of labor, it is implausible that the switch from turning more productivity into fewer work hours to channeling it almost exclusively into increasing total real wages just reflected the absolute power of business to impose its preferences on labor. American workers must, at least to some extent, have consented to the new work-time regime.28 There is some suggestive evidence to that efect in Benjamin Hunnicutt’s (1996) history of W. W. Kellogg’s experiment with a thirty-hour week. The experiment was introduced by management in the 1930s to address the problem of unemployment, by distributing the same amount of work to more people. Kellogg also felt that the quality of work would increase with fewer hours. After the war, however, Kellogg’s management changed its position on the issue and tried to return to the forty-hour week. Some workers objected and fought to defend the six-hour day, but significantly, many did not, while some actively supported management’s efort to undermine the experiment with shorter hours. Moreover, one prominent development in the second half of the twentieth century was the introduction of overtime, following the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. While the point of the act was to curtail work hours, working overtime subsequently became very common among workers, so much so that the system of production came to depend on it, and “working to rule” became a form of industrial action. The willingness of wage earners to work overtime suggests that there was a quite widespread preference for income over time. Evidence for the active embrace by workers of longer hours is also provided, in a later period, by the results of a 1985 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, in which workers were asked about their preferences for work hours (Shank 1986). The survey found that 64.9 percent of workers expressed satisfaction with their current hours and pay, 27.5 percent said that they would prefer to work longer hours to increase their incomes, while only 7.5 percent wanted fewer hours with less pay. There is, then, a stark contrast between the long tradition, stretching from the 1830s to the 1930s, of American labor fighting for a shorter working week and the postwar era of collective bargaining and productivity-based wage increases (Foner and Roediger 1987; Hunnicutt 1988). The shift between the two eras cannot be accounted for simply in terms of the interests and coercive power of business.

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This is not to suggest that the power of capital does not bias things in the direction of increasing output over reducing work time. As the political philosopher G. A. Cohen argues, capitalist agencies do, in efect, encourage a preference for output over free time. Cohen makes the reasonable point that under capitalism, there are no advertising campaigns promoting the desirability of more free time as an alternative to more income. As a thought experiment, he comes up with an amusing example of what an ad in such a campaign might look like (all caps are Cohen’s): “WHEN YOUR UNION NEGOTIATES, MAKE IT GO FOR SHORTER HOURS, NOT MORE PAY. ELECTRIC CARVING KNIVES ARE FINE, BUT NOTHING BEATS FREE-DOM” (G. A. Cohen 2000, p. 318). Cohen’s argument is that the aggregate efect of advertising might be to distort people’s preferences. But influencing preferences is, of course, not the same thing as brute economic coercion.

Another explanation for the changing attitude to work time suggested by Costa’s data, one drawn from the perspective of developments at the very end of the twentieth century, might be along the lines of the account given by Arlie Hochschild (1997), in her ethnographic study of attitudes to work time, The Time Bind. Hochschild found that willingness to spend long hours at work among the professional employees she studied was connected to the increasingly fraught and work-like character of family life, in conjunction with more emotionally engaging work. Work, in efect, had become, at least for the professional classes, a welcome retreat from the stress experienced in the domestic sphere. Hochschild’s findings are intriguing, but her sample is small and composed of employees working for a Fortune 500 company and, therefore, perhaps not representative of the general population. But if the part of Hochschild’s account that focuses on attitudes to family life can be generalized, then the shift in preferences toward earning more income and away from free time might well reflect an underlying change in the relative satisfactions of work versus home life. As the discontents of domestic life increased, so the aversion to spending time at work decreased.29

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There are, however, limits to this explanation, especially with respect to the long-term and large-scale trends delineated in this chapter. The domesticdiscontent argument is that people choose to spend more time at work because family life has become comparatively dissatisfying. And yet (as Hochschild notes) the discontents of family life may well have much to do with the way in which the family has been afected by changes in the organization and experience of working life. The sphere of production and the domestic sphere are deeply interconnected—although, under modern capitalism, the flow of influence tends to run from the former to the latter. Reducing work time would open up possibilities for social life outside both work and home, which quite probably would have very positive efects on the quality of domestic life. Furthermore, a domestic-discontent explanation focuses on workplace and household dynamics that lead individuals to make particular decisions to commit to work time. Yet decisions about how much to work within a given work-time regime have a logic diferent from collective decisions about whether to move from a given work-time regime to a diferent one. Humans, to state the obvious, are profoundly social animals, and the value of free time, therefore, depends to a significant extent on the availability of other people to spend it with. If work time were to be reduced in a concerted fashion for the entire population, then the social character of nonwork time would change, since with everyone working fewer hours, greater social resources and opportunities would become available in nonwork time. The kinds of activity in nonwork time that would become available following a collective shift to less work are qualitatively diferent from those aforded to an isolated individual working fewer hours. To return to the music example, an isolated individual choosing to work less can spend more time playing a musical instrument. But if that person is a member of a community that collectively works less, then, in addition to the option of practicing alone, she can join with others to play music together. Moreover, the situation Hochschild describes is essentially a dichotomous one—individuals either spend more time at work or more time at home. Yet where the entire community has more free time, opportunities are expanded for spending time in social contexts that are neither work nor home. If a community opted for fewer work hours, it would thus become more possible for its members to create the kind of rich associational life imagined by communitarians. Indeed, Benjamin Hunnicutt’s (1996) history of Kellogg’s experiment with six-hour days shows how, after the adoption of the shorter working week, a qualitative shift took place in how people made use of their free time, with much more time given over to community activities. So while a domestic-discontent account seems to provide a plausible explanation for why, under current social conditions, at least some individuals choose to spend more time at work, it is not a good explanation for the absence, in the postwar period, of a collective politics aimed at reducing hours—one similar to the shorter hours movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.30 The explanation is anchored to a particular configuration of work time and free time—a configuration the historical development of which this book takes as a problem in need of explanation.

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