A Cultural History of Work in the Modern Age

Daniel J. Walkowitz, Daniel J. Walkowitz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350078345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities Changes in production and consumption fundamentally transformed the culture of work in the industrial world during the century after World War I. In the aftermath of the war, the drive to create new markets and rationalize work management engaged new strategies of advertising and scientific management, deploying new workforces increasingly tied to consumption rather than production. These changes affected both the culture of the workplace and the home, as the gendered family economy of the modern worker struggled with the vagaries of a changing gendered labour market and the inequalities that accompanied them. This volume draws on illustrative cases to highlight the uneven development of the modern culture of work over the course of the long 20th century. A Cultural History of Work in the Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.

CHAPTER ONE

The Economy of Work

JENNIFER KLEIN

INTRODUCTION

Viewing the period from the 1920s through the early twenty-first century, we see not only the moments or conditions when workers gained greater leverage over the wage bargain (or lost it), but also the profound effects of state regulation, economic policy, and labor policy on the demand for and conditions of labor. Prior to the 1930s, individual firms had unrivalled prerogative over labor markets in their region and industry. As a result of New Deal and Second World War labor policies in the United States, the idiom of contract—based on an utter imbalance of power—shifted to a set of collective working-class rights and economic citizenship that held business power in check. Through economic policy, labor standards, and unionism, the state and organized labor challenged firms’ domination of the economics of labor, generated redistribution of wealth more broadly, and compressed the gaps in social stratification. Yet because of labor markets segmented by race and gender, contract would have a very different meaning for women and people of color.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generational labor movement in the public sector and service sector changed the terms of this labor: its compensation, cultural worth, and political leverage. Within two and a half decades, women composed 45 percent of unionized workers, the percentage of Latinos in the unionized workforce more than doubled, and one in eight union workers was an immigrant.¹ But labor law remained rooted in the structures of employment of the mid-twentieth century, making it difficult for workers to maintain rights and security as the economics of labor continued to change. By the end of the twentieth century, business had conquered both the legal and the socio-political institutions and culture that had enabled workers to gain some self-determination over working conditions, job markets, and aggregate employment. Companies used politics, technology, and outsourcing to build new forms of insecurity into jobs and labor markets, resurrecting employment “at-will” and disposable labor.

THE PRE-NEW DEAL ERA

The popular image of the 1920s showcases the burgeoning pleasures of mass consumption with a widening array of goods available. For much of the working class, however, wage work was so undependable as a source of steady income, their lives remained conditioned more by scarcity. Consequently, social workers, settlement house reformers and US Women's Bureau researches found the working-class economy relied on “wage earning outside the home, wage-earning inside the home, and cash replacement activities,” including taking in boarders, bartering care support, trading second-hand clothing, extending and receiving loans, and “putting out” children to work in others’ homes. Forms of reciprocity patched the holes left by the labor markets such workers faced.²

While some new manufacturing firms sought to create stability through vertical integration, variegated internal labor markets, scientific management, and personnel management, they were still subject to the ups and downs of the business cycle. Employers shifted the burden of downturns to workers in the form of slack work (short hours) and short weeks. Among the new mass of semi-skilled and unskilled factory operatives, slack work was as much part of the labor-market experience as long hours. Adding up the impacts of technological change, irregular work, strikebreaking and punitive responses to labor militancy, and seasonal production, “insecurity and instability of employment would remain a part of men’s occupational experience.”³

Prior to the New Deal, then, wage work was no ticket to independence. Neither industrial employment nor wages in and of themselves conferred freedom or independence. Despite the idiom of contract that seemed to infuse individual employment and the functioning of markets for wage labor, the experience of work was discontinuous, contingent, and precarious. Legal, structural, and political barriers rendered wage work insecure. Rooted in centuries-old “master and servant” law, a worker was legally “free” to enter into an employment contract, yet the employer could also dismiss the worker “at will” for any reason or no reason. “Management’s absolute right to discharge at-will employees for any reason whatsoever was repeatedly reaffirmed by the courts … as sacrosanct.” If a worker quit, wages could not be demanded as a right.⁴ Management could reinforce its prerogatives through access to force—state militias or private company guards.

In the wake of the First World War, European leaders and reformers perceived Americans as having a uniquely high standard of living, especially defined by high wages and mass-produced goods. Charged with the function of improving standards of living and reforming the conditions of labor internationally, the newly created International Labour Organization (ILO) set out to systematically measure and assess the American working-class standard of living. Yet once the investigation began, it became clear that nobody had an exact idea of the standards of living of average workers in industrial cities such as Detroit. ILO investigators found that the high wage was a “flexible concept” and goods were often bought on credit.⁵

Anti-vagrancy statutes shaped labor markets for the poor and African Americans. In both the post-Civil War South and the urban North, anti-vagrancy laws made it a crime not to have a job. In northern cities, new uniformed police forces conducted dragnet sweeps, herded unemployed people or those cobbling together a living on the street into night court, charged them with vagrancy, and upon release directed them into the labor market or, possibly, military service. Women who were paupers and ended up in the alms-house were sent to work—either in textile mills or in domestic service.

Adrift from patriarchal homes, an individual woman’s precariousness threatened others and threatened the social order. Charity reformers and leaders of public and private welfare organizations, asylums, and orphanages therefore channelled girls and women into domestic work. The social, legal construction of the home as private enabled the persistence of interminable hours, on-call overnight, few days off, arbitrary surveillance, vulnerability to sexual assault, lack of food and extreme hunger, and nonpayment of wages. Middle-class employers insisted that domestic labor simply could not be shoehorned into the frame of an eight-hour day.⁶ This assumption would have a lasting legacy throughout the twentieth century.

For many workers, the insecurity of selling one’s labor power was repeated daily, through the shape-up Each morning, men of all sorts would gather, bunched together on docks, construction sites, warehouses, and fields ready for harvest, hoping the foreman would choose them for that day’s work. They stood outside in any kind of weather, their time expropriated and exploited, as they waited, yet were not paid. Whether it was men gathering on the Embarcadero in San Francisco for waterfront work or African American women in the Bronx waiting to be hired for a day’s domestic labor, workers and labor organizers referred to the shape-up as a “slave market.”⁷

Once inside the factory gates or the shipyard, workers faced the petty tyranny of foremen. Personal discretion—and indiscretions—of front-line supervisors, favoritism, and arbitrary discipline defined life on the job. The drive system was a corollary to at-will employment: using fear and coercion foremen compelled high output, driving out those who could not keep up or chafed under the system. High quit rates and high discharge rates were different sides of the same coin.⁸

FIGURE 1.1 “Make a Wish,” Bronx slave market, 170th Street, New York, 1938, The Crisis. Photo: Robert McNeill. Courtesy Smithsonian Institution.

Seasonal labor churned the workforce of common laborers not only in agriculture. Railroads, mining, urban construction of subways and skyscrapers, canning, and garment manufacturing had seasonal peaks and layoffs. In garments, small manufacturers produced on a “rush-order basis,” setting up a perpetual war of cost cutting, price-cutting competition and, thus, swift surges and contractions of employment, season after season.⁹ Hull House labor reformer Florence Kelley observed, manufacturers “constantly aim to concentrate work of the year into the shortest possible season.”¹⁰ Even Ford Motors, which through the $5 day, personnel management, and welfare capitalism had sought to create more long-term employment, shut down production in 1927 in order to retool for the production of a new Model A auto, throwing 100,000 employees out of work.¹¹

Large corporate employers attempted to combine the imperatives of productive stabilization, worker loyalty, employee welfare, and managerial prerogative through welfare capitalism. Welfare capitalism encompassed social welfare benefits and health, safety, or leisure programs established and directed by the employer. They ran the gamut from cafeterias, athletic clubs, leisure activities, and Americanization classes to more pecuniary forms such as profit sharing, savings and loans, life insurance, sick pay or accident compensation. American corporate leaders saw workplace social welfare as an alternative to unionism and a private, managerial response to pressure from the state and workers, especially when workers sought to use the state to improve working conditions and guarantee economic security.¹²

In the 1920s, prominent welfare capitalists believed that individual employers could use private, firm-based mechanisms to mitigate unemployment. In Rochester, New York, General Electric (GE) and Eastman Kodak gathered fourteen local companies to join in a regional unemployment prevention program. Each company would make contributions to a reserve fund based on its particular layoff history—or experience rating. Allegedly, that would provide incentive for firms to plan better, spread work, and prevent layoffs. No state involvement was necessary, Kodak and GE executives confidently assured everyone.¹³

For progressive reformers and labor advocates Louis Brandeis, John R. Commons, Florence Kelley, and newly emerging union leaders in consumer goods industries, though, business voluntarism did not address what linked intermittent employment, unemployment, and low wages: the imbalance of power within the world of work. Until workers had participation as “citizens” in industry to shape the conditions of labor and collective organization equal to that of the corporation, they could not achieve regular employment, a reasonable income, safe working conditions, and health and leisure.

Labor leaders such as Sidney Hillman and John L. Lewis, aligned with Progressive reformers, pushed forward an alternative means of technocratic management of particular industries’ erratic ups and downs and spasmodic employment. This 1920s “new unionism” promoted mechanisms of social cooperation and compromise in the workplace that would promote greater efficiency and well-being, not through the pure coercion of floor bosses, or the “adjustments” of Taylorism, but through workers’ participation and rule-making, dispute resolution, and contractual obligation. Within this aspirational vision of industrial democracy, joint responsibility would balance the imperatives of managerial efficiency, adaptation to new technology, and workers’ control and democratic consent.¹⁴ Industrial democracy, though, was an elastic concept. It could entail more radical workers’ control or merely substitute new bureaucratic institutions “at the expense of more direct, less predictable forms of shop floor power.”¹⁵

THE NEW DEAL ERA

For most of the working class, the Great Depression represented a change in degree of employment and income insecurity, more than a sharp break. After the stock market crash and the Great Depression sunk in, business turned back instead to the old practices. Large corporations cut hours and workforces and spread the work. Textile plants used the stretch out: forcing fewer workers to tend more machines more intensively. By 1932, at the nadir of the Great Depression, even the unemployment fund instigated by the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester as part of its welfare capitalist program could not keep up with need and, within a year, half of the participating companies had dropped out. Regional, voluntarist micro-regulation could not weather the storm of severe economic crisis and mass unemployment.¹⁶

“The depression was simultaneously a set of distinctive national phenomena and an interconnected global event,” writes historian Mary Nolan. Attempting to preserve jobs for whites, the United States deported over one million Mexicans and Mexican Americans. France similarly expelled Algerians, Spaniards, Poles, and Italians. Many of the new governments in industrialized nations improvised with reform but also drew on earlier social policies and forms of economic reorganization.¹⁷ “In the face of unprecedented unemployment, two dozen states on both sides of the Atlantic, including the United States, Germany, Britain, Switzerland, Sweden, and Bulgaria, established labour services”—although they tended to focus on men, prioritizing male unemployment as both politically threatening and destabilizing to family and gender roles.¹⁸

In the American South, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, the state used coerced labor and political prisoners. Labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively was smashed in fascist Italy and Germany. French West Africa also used forced labor, especially on sisal and peanut plantations, despite the fact that in 1937 France had signed the ILO Convention Against Forced Labour.¹⁹

The New Deal drew on the experiments of the progressive era and the 1920s but also opened an era in which both some politicians and labor began to address unemployment as a question of industrial democracy and economic citizenship. From 1935 on the New Deal changed the economics of labor fundamentally. Through more permanent legislation, the New Deal created a “standardized work” week and security in sync with a particular structure of industrial mass production. The large-scale public corporation represented the apotheosis of American capitalism at that point. The goal of New Dealers was not to take them down in size or disaggregate them. Rather it was to recast corporations as social institutions that must be subject to democratic refashioning and accountability. It was not size per se that posed a problem but the unfettered concentration of self-serving, authoritarian power.²⁰ Employment would no longer be simply the private prerogative of corporations. Unemployment could not be isolated from the unequal workings of labor markets as a whole. With Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy, the federal government would stimulate the economy when it lagged or slow down growth when inflation threatened. The booms and busts that had been a routine feature of American economic life would instead be turned into steady growth and more widely shared benefits. In addition, through unemployment insurance linked to experience rating (a component of the 1935 Social Security Act) employers were held responsible for regular employment. Economic modernization was not to be achieved at the expense of the working class or middle class.

Understanding the New Deal political economy also requires locating where and how New Deal forms of security intersected with democracy in the workplace. Essential to the New Deal order were the various elements that restructured the world of work. To begin with, the New Deal tossed out the fictive notion of “freedom of contract”: that an individual worker could somehow equally negotiate with a corporate employer over the terms of work. The feudalistic control of the foremen’s regime, argues Nelson Lichtenstein, ended.²¹ Workers could organize and take collective action legally, while collective bargaining between unions and management was now seen as rectifying t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• General Editors’ Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Economy of Work
• 2 Picturing Work
• 3 Work and Workplaces
• 4 Workplace Cultures
• 5 Work, Skill, and Technology
• 6 Work and Mobility
• 7 Work and Society
• 8 The Political Culture of Work
• 9 Work and Leisure
• Notes
• Further Readings
• Index
• Imprint