A Living Wage

American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society

Lawrence B. Glickman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801433573
• eBook ISBN: 9781501702211
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Comportamento dei consumatori

The fight for a "living wage" has a long and revealing history as documented here by Lawrence B. Glickman. The labor movement's response to wages shows how American workers negotiated the transition from artisan to consumer, opening up new political possibilities for organized workers and creating contradictions that continue to haunt the labor movement today.Nineteenth-century workers hoped to become self-employed artisans, rather than permanent "wage slaves." After the Civil War, however, unions redefined working-class identity in consumerist terms, and demanded a wage that would reward workers commensurate with their needs as consumers. This consumerist turn in labor ideology also led workers to struggle for shorter hours and union labels.First articulated in the 1870s, the demand for a living wage was voiced increasingly by labor leaders and reformers at the turn of the century. Glickman explores the racial, ethnic, and gender implications, as white male workers defined themselves in contrast to African Americans, women, Asians, and recent European immigrants. He shows how a historical perspective on the concept of a living wage can inform our understanding of current controversies.

PART I

FROM WAGE SLAVERY TO THE LIVING WAGE

Between the Civtl War and the 1930s, working-class attitudes toward wage labor shifted from “wage slavery” to the “living wage.” In this period, organized labor moved from a deep and defining aversion to wage labor to an equally definitive embrace of particular kinds of wages, usually called “living wages.” Although the “living wage” had no single meaning, its appearance signaled a transformation in labor’s vision of the just society from a republic of small producers to a republic of wage earners.

Before the Civil War, the idea of a “republic of wage earners” would have seemed a contradiction in terms to most workers. For much of the nineteenth century, wage labor—payment to an employee based on hours or days worked—had posed a fundamental threat to working-class conceptions of liberty. Drawing on two powerful antebellum political discourses, the “free labor” ideology and “artisanal republicanism,” most labor leaders, indeed most Americans, defined freedom precisely as the ability to avoid a lifetime of working for wages; the very word “wages” was, to quote one worker in the 1850s, “odious.”1 Langdon Byllesby, a printer, echoed popular sentiment in 1826 when he called wage labor the “very essence of slavery.”2 To earn wages, in the view of these workers, was to depend on another for one’s daily bread, and dependence was equivalent to degradation. Working-class men prized independence and the ability to provide for their families above all other manly virtues. As one observer noted in 1871, to “put a man upon wages is to put him in the position of a dependent” and therefore to make him “less of a man.“3 For quite different reasons, wage labor also threatened working-class women, whose gender identity was largely shaped by the uncompensated labor they performed for their families as homemakers and consumers.4

Even in the postbellum years, most Americans believed a healthy republic must be made of free men, defined as self-employed small producers.5 Labor leaders regularly linked wage labor to the erosion of citizenship. In 1877 George McNeill, a labor leader and prominent working-class economic theorist, described the wage system in completely derogatory terms as “a system that encourages cunning above conscience; that robs the producers, and enriches the speculator; that makes the employer a despot, and the employee a slave,—a system that shortens life, engenders disease, enfeebles the mind, corrupts the morals, and thus propagates misery, vice and crime.”6 How could such a system serve a republic, which demanded antithetical values? McNeill saw no easy resolution, and he was not alone.

American workers had long denigrated the “wage system” as the main obstacle to what they thought of as their birthright: freedom, independence, and democratic citizenship. Along with the vast majority of organized workers, McNeill believed that wages and republicanism were on a colllsion course, with wage labor destroying the possibility of democratic government. In this context, McNeill seemed to be stating the obvious when he declared, in one of the most frequently quoted lines of the Gilded Age labor movement, “There is an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government.”7

Even as wage labor was becoming increasingly common, nineteenth­century workers deemed it acceptable only as a temporary step on the way to self-employment. Abraham Lincoln articulated the expectations of free American workers perfectly when he said, “The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.” A group of Boston labor reformers agreed in 1872: “During New England’s first 200 years, the wage period was the school period of practical life. While working for wages, the young man was looking forward to the time when he would work for himself. . . . The wage period was merely the transition period in labor from youth to maturity.” As a stepping stone wage labor was acceptable, but as a permanent condition it was scandalous, the very antithesis of labor’s vision of a republic of independent craftsmen. “No wage laborer can be a freeman,” declared Jesse Jones, a minister and labor radical, in 1876. “When any body of wage laborers accept, or seem to accept, their wage condition as permanent, and organize themselves as wagemen to contend with their employers as capitalists, without the distinctly announced purpose to end their wage condition, they do thereby organize themselves into a ‘caste of serfs,’ and the step they thus take tends to make them such forever.”8

For much of the century, wage laborers fared little better in popular estimation than the nefarious wage system of which they were a part, for in a society that promised independence and mobility to all nonslaves, wage earners had to shoulder the responsibility—and the blame—for their degradation. “If none were willing to work as slaves,” declared New York City’s most popular labor newspaper in the 1880s, “there would be no wage-system.” For most of the century, in fact, labor reformers had expressed little sympathy for lifelong wage earners, blaming them for their own condition, ascribing it to what Horace Greeley described as “their own extravagance and needless ostentation.” “If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer,” said Lincoln, “it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly or singular misfortune.” And the reformer E. L. Godkin insisted that only those exhibiting “vice or misconduct or ignorance or want of self-restraint” would be locked into permanent wage labor; “honest and intelligent and self-denying” workers could reasonably expect to set up on their own. In his Fourth of July oration on the American Centennial, Henry Ward Beecher declared: “The laborer ought to be ashamed of himself who in 20 years does not own the ground on which his house stands . . . who has not in that house provided carpets for the rooms, who has not his China plates, who has not his chromos, who has not some books nestling on the shelf.”9

As the century progressed, however, wage labor became increasingly common not simply as a way station on the road to independent proprietorship but as a permanent fact of working-class life. In reality, the artisanal ideal had never been entirely congruent with working-class realities.10 Although independent proprietorship predominated for nonslaves in colonial America, wage labor was already a much-noticed concern at the time of the American Revolution.11 In the 1780s urban artisans condemned incipient changes in the political economy “that would gradually erode self-sufficiency and remake yeomen, artisans, and their children into workers dependent upon wages.”12

The uneven but inexorable process of proletarianization continued through the nineteenth century.13 In an observation that anxious urban commentators would repeat for the next half century, religious reformer Joseph Tuckerman declared in 1829, “The classes are very numerous, of those who are wholly dependent upon wages” and who “will never be anything but journeymen.”14 By the 1830s, a majority of apprentices worked for wages, serving as what one printer called in disgust “journeymen through life,” rather than as independent artisans.15 Philadelphia workers in the 1830s carried picket signs proclaiming “WE ARE NOT DAY LABORERS” to express their rejection of the increasingly common wage labor system.16 Within a generation, however, even their former masters had become wage earners. By 1850 wage earners outnumbered slaves. Notwithstanding President Lincoln’s assurances to Congress in 1861 that “a large majority are neither hirers nor hired,” by that time wage earners outnumbered independent entrepreneurs.17 The Civil War accelerated this process as it both wiped out chattel slavery (turning millions of freedpeople into potential wage earners) and put the final nail in the coffin of apprenticeship.18

Within a few years after armistice, the majority of Americans, male and female, who labored outside the home did so in exchange for wages.19 In 1873 the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor reported that “practically all that the laborer receives is through the wage-system,—a system more widely diffused than any form of religion, or of government, or, indeed, of any language.” Few workers would have disagreed wtth the observation made many years later by Alexander Keyssar that “the era of the independent artisan had come to a close” as “self-employment became the exception rather than the rule.”20

Thus, despite their denigration of the wage system, most Americans earned their daily bread through wages. Even members of the labor aristocracy—white male trade unionists—were forced to sell their labor. As David Montgomery notes, the fact that “two out of three productively engaged Americans [in the post–Civil War world] were hirelings posed an ideological dilemma for the free-labor system.”21

In spite of this dilemma, many workers kept artisanal dreams alive in their collective memory long after wage labor became commonplace. Some challenged the unrealistic premises of the expectation that all competent workers would move out of wage labor. Others clung to the myth that independence was within reach of any hardworking citizen. In 1886 P. M. Arthur, the conservative chief of the Locomotive Brotherhood, unrealistically proclaimed in language reminiscent of Lincoln’s, “The workingman of to-day may be the capitalist of five or ten years from now.” To be free, according to the “free labor” ideology and its later variants, was to be able to work for oneself, to hire others, and, if necessary, to be hired—but only temporarily. Even those labor leaders who recognized the increasing predominance of permanent wage labor, looked to independent proprietorship as the solution, rather than seek a solution within the wage system. While acknowledging that the self-employment myth did not accord wtth reality, for example, the labor leader William Sylvis nonetheless asserted in 1865 that the United States should aim to be “a nation of employers—the employers of our own labor.” “Men should as far as possible, work for themselves,” declared Justus Woods in 1883, for self-employment was “the only work befitting freemen.”22 The irony, of course, is that on this definition few American workers qualified as free.

One fruitful way of gauging the intensity of workers’ aversion to the idea of wage earning is to examine the metaphors they employed. Nineteenth­century workers frequently spoke of “wage slavery” or “prostitution,” invoktng the most degraded states the race-conscious, patriarchal white male American workers could imagine. And so they condemned wage labor as fit only for slaves, girls, and coolies. At the same time, however, this degradation was all too easy to imagine—and experience. Though they too were wage earners, skilled workers did not want to be identified With the slaves and prostitutes they condemned. The force of the anti-wage, profreedom argument depended upon the view that wage labor placed the labor of white working men on an unnatural continuum with the most dependent strata of blacks and women and placed “respectable” women on the same plane as prostitutes. For their part, white women and African American workers, those scorned by this rhetoric, also invoked it, demonstrating the supple and multivalent uses to which the wage slavery and prostitution critiques could be put.

In the following chapters I analyze the discourses of “wage slavery” and “prostitution” and trace the development of an alternative to total rejection of the wage system and acceptance of obviously untrue myths about its promise. Rather than condemn the wage system in broad strokes, this discourse came to distinguish between wage justice and injustice. In creating a space for freedom, independence, and citizenship within the wage system, these alternative languages pointed the way toward the living wage.

1

That Curse of Modern Civilization

Rhetoric linking wage earning to slavery did not originate in nineteenth­century America, but the antebellum United States became, to use David Roediger’s words, the “world leader” in the use of the wage slavery metaphor. The term took on tremendous symbolic importance in the first half of the century in popular belief and in the rhetoric of radicals such as Orestes Brownson, Frances Wright, William Heighton, Thomas Skidmore, Langdon Byllesby, and George Henry Evans. Even in the North, Judith Shklar maintains, slavery was “an ever-present anxiety” for workers striving to reach the increasingly difficult goal of independence defined as self-employment. Women in the antebellum North played a crucial role in developing wage slavery rhetoric as well: “American Ladies Will Not Be Slaves,” proclaimed the banner of a group of striking New England shoe workers in 1860.1

Workers’ rejection of wage labor drew from notions of freedom, independence, and citizenship, which they applied to the interconnecting areas of politics, society, economics, and the family. In the political arena, workers thought that equality was possible only if each member of the polity was economically independent. In the guise of the voluntary contract they perceived a compulsion that they believed made it impossible to exercise citizenship. Those who received wages could not possibly participate in civic life as the equals of their employers. Thus, the wage system would promote the formation of an aristocracy. In the late 1870s, for example, the labor editor J. P. McDonnell was discouraged to report: “After a century of political independence, we find that our social system is not better than that of Europe and that labor in this Republtc, as in the European monarchies, is the slave of capitalism, instead of being the master of its own products.” In economic terms, they believed that wages inevitably granted employees only a partial payment for their labor, leaving a portion of their work uncompensated. “In what does slavery consist?” asked the Mechanic’s Free Press in 1830. “In being compelled to work for others so that they may reap the advantage.” Finally, within the patriarchal family structure endorsed by male workers, masculine and feminine roles were sharply differentiated; the men were charged with breadwinning and the women with household responsibilities. If freedom was possible only when workers owned their labor, neither men nor women could be free. On all these fronts, wage labor was a form of slavery and the growing army of wage laborers failed to qualify as free.2

Most Americans believed independence to be possible only in a society of small producers. Many wondered, as Melvyn Dubofsky has asked, “how could a republican democracy built on the participation of economically independent freeholders and artisans endure in a society composed in the main of dependent wage earners?” Liberty and independence required that each worker receive the “fruits of his labor,” that, as Abraham Lincoln declared, workers garner “the whole produce to...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I From Wage Slavery to the Living Wage
• Part II The Social Economy
• Part III Workers of the World, Consume
• Part IV The Living Wage in the Twentieth Century
• Coda