===================== HES POSTING =================
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (April, 1998)
Lawrence B. Glickman. _A Living Wage: American Workers and the
Making of Consumer Society_. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1997. xvi + 220 pp. Notes, bibliographical
references, and index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8014-3357-6.
Reviewed for H-SHGAPE by Richard Schneirov, Indiana State
University
This book has enormous implications for historians of the Gilded
Age and Progressive Era. To understand precisely how first
requires a capsule summary of nineteenth century labor
historiography. From the 1960s through the early 1980s, U.S.
labor historians sought to write a history of the making of the
American working class much in the manner done so masterfully
for the English working class by Edward P. Thompson. New labor
historians located a nascent socialist critique of the wage
labor system in a working class version of artisan republicanism
grounded in the classical labor theory of value. Most of the
new generation of labor historians found that the career of
labor republicanism came to a halt in the late nineteenth
century with the defeat of the Knights of Labor and rise of the
pure and simple or business unionism, commonly associated with
the American Federation of Labor. Other historians pushed
back the "fall" of labor into the twentieth century, but in most
cases a working class that was "made" throughout most of the
nineteenth century was "unmade" at some point in the twentieth.[1]
For nonlabor historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,
the conclusions of the new labor historians tended to reinforce
a much older view of American history as exceptionalist--that
is, lacking sharp class divisions and a viable socialist or
labor political presence as existed in Europe and Britain. In
the newest version of the old story, exceptionalism was not
inherent in American history but emerged historically out of
working class failure.
_A Living Wage_ is so important because it provides us with some
of the conceptual tools required for resolving labor history's
impasse. Glickman grounds the fin de siecle crisis, whose
resolution created the foundation for modern America, in the
dissolution of a producers' understanding of how value was
constructed. With the sundering of the labor theory of value
from the calculus determining prices and wages--the premise for
neoclassical economic theory--the producers' critique of the
wage labor system lost its intellectual and ultimately its
cultural force. One outcome which Glickman does not discuss is
the marginalist revolution, which facilitated the acceptance of
corporate administered prices and wages. Glickman's book tells
of a different outcome, one that emerged out of the late
nineteenth century labor movement. Accepting the modern premise
that wages no longer were determined by the cost of labor, trade
union activists, inspired by the writings of eight-hour theorist
Ira Steward, began to promote a needs theory of value, according
to which human needs would have priority over market forces in
determining wages. In the terms of the day, labor advocated a
"living wage" whose value would be determined by the
ever-expanding needs and wants of workers in their capacity as
consumers. As Samuel Gompers' associate Frank Foster put it,
"It is not the value of what is produced which determines the
wages rate, but the nature and degree of the wants of the
workers" (p. 70). Whether labor leaders knew it or not, the
new regulative principle was quite in accord with the thinking
of Marx whose maxim of socialism was "from each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs."
The significance of this development has been largely ignored by
labor historians because the doctrine of the living wage and its
corollary, the need for a constantly rising (American) standard
of living, necessarily entailed the acceptance of what was then
called "wage slavery." Many historians have viewed the
abandonment of the goal of self-employment through producers'
cooperation and the acceptance of a consumerist consciousness as
equivalent to a passive and narrowly apolitical acquiescence in
the inevitability of capitalism. But, as Glickman shows, the
living wage doctrine was actively constructed by workers
themselves, partly out of the producers' ideal of a moral
economy as an alternative to the commodification of toil, but
also out of an acceptance of those very relations. In
Glickman's view acceptance, rather than being equivalent to
acquiescence, was the necessary condition for actively reshaping
and regulating market relations according to an ethical standard
external to those relations, viz. workers' self-perceived needs.
Glickman traces the development of living wage thinking from its
first flowering in the eight-hour movement of the late 1880s to
the rise of the 1890s trade union label movement long associated
with business unionism. Inherent in both movements, according
to Glickman, was the vision of a "social economy" that abandoned
the idea that wages should return to workers the full fruits of
their labor. Though much of the old producerist vocabulary
continued to frame labor leaders' thinking, Glickman
demonstrates that trade unionists tried to reshape and control
market relations by making them subject to a socially determined
standard of living emerging from the sphere of consumption and
collective bargaining.
By the early twentieth century, reformers outside the ranks of
labor picked up the living wage ideal and turned it into a
Progressive reform, known as the minimum wage. Because the
minimum wage was defined as a subsistence wage fit only for
those, like immigrants and women, working below the American
standard, AFLers pulled back from the movement. Yet, even the
minimum wage challenged the prevailing legal doctrine of freedom
of contract and the still powerful producerist ethical ideal
that wages should be based on an equivalent of services
rendered. The idea that wages should be based on consumers'
proliferating needs and wants eventually came into its own
during the New Deal. In their understanding of the 1930s
depression as due to underconsumption, New Dealers and
progressive businessmen endorsed the idea that rising purchasing
power, which in part depended on rising wages, was necessary for
the successful functioning of a mass production economy. The
1938 Fair Labor Standards Act establishing a minimum wage is for
Glickman a monument to the triumph of a nonproducerist and
nonmarket criterion of value determination in regard to wages.
The implications of Glickman's book are at least several. It
strongly suggests that historians abandon a time-honored view of
pure and simple trade unionism as "conservative" and
circumscribed by "bread and butter" concerns. To the contrary,
Glickman provides us with a way of understanding this
consciousness as an integral part of an ongoing class formation
that occurred simultaneously with an accommodation to wage
labor. Moreover, by demonstrating that socialism could have both
a consumerist and producerist foundation, this book furthers the
understanding that socialist principles and relations were
intermixed in twentieth century corporate capitalist society and
in modern liberalism.[2] Finally, it provides a way in which a
re-thought labor history can incorporate the history of women
workers and feminists whose agency was often focused in the
sphere of consumption rather than production.
The book does have several limitations that should be mentioned.
First, by promiscuously mixing quotations from the 1880s with
those from the early twentieth century, Glickman misses the
opportunity to suggest in specific ways how and why this new
consciousness developed historically. In this regard, some
labor historians will be disappointed that the book does not
directly confront the prevalent argument that the living wage
was gained only by abandoning skilled workers' control over the
workplace. Second, there is a basic ambivalence in Glickman's
treatment of consumption. At some points, he argues that
organized workers began to view the sphere of consumption as
displacing the sphere of production. At other points, he
suggests that workers merely understood that the two spheres
were interrelated and of roughly equal importance in determining
class identity, a more defensible position. Finally, there is
an implication in the book that the labor movement was the sole
or prime source in defining an American standard of living.
This ignores the long nineteenth century history of Whig and
Republican sponsored protective tariff proposals that party
spokesmen argued were necessary to protect high American wages.
These qualms should not detract unduly from a provocative and
important monograph. Glickman's book is concise (162 pages of
text), well written, and his argument is easy to follow, making
it accessible to undergraduates as well as graduate students.
It promises to become a major text for the next round of
rethinking labor history in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Notes
[1]. For example, see Kim Voss, _The Making of American
Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the
Nineteenth Century_ (Cornell University Press, 1993); for a
survey see Larry G. Gerber, "Shifting Perspectives on American
Exceptionalism: Recent Literature on American Labor Relations
and Labor Politics," _Journal of American Studies_, 31 (1997):
253-74.
[2]. Martin J. Sklar, _The United States as a Developing
Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and
the 1920s_ (Cambridge, 1992); James Livingston, _Pragmatism and
the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1910_
(University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Richard
Schneirov, _Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the
Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-1897_ (University
of Illinois Press, 1998).
Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact [log in to unmask]
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]
|