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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). 
 
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