Time, Money, and Labor History's Encounter with Consumer Culture

Abstract

Time and money -hours and wages -have animated the activity of most modern workers' organizations. Still, labor historians not only have neglected these demands but have all too often simply dismissed as trivial their offspring, the culture of leisure and consumption. The conventional concerns of labor historians with economic power relations and the rational articulation of workers' material and psychological interests seem to be threatened by issues that point beyond the workplace. Variations on the theme of "workers' control" continue to take precedence over the struggle over the distribution of productivity among time, wages, and profits. What turns the labor historian from the centrality of time and money may be that these issues suggest a culture of classlessness, the irrelevance of the workplace, and diminished possibilities for collective action.One unfortunate consequence is that labor historians have played a minor role in the ongoing debate over popular and consumer culture. 1 An effect of this relative absence has been that cultural studies of mass consumerism frequently have had to rely on a simplistic interpretation of "Fordism." Technological change and scientific management, the argument goes, led both to the deskilling of work and the necessity of an internal mass market. This, in turn, created the need for new mechanisms of labor adjustment (high wages and shorter hours) and of distribution (Keynesian demand management and, advertising). Gradually, Fordism in the United States and Western Europe led to the "colonization of personal life" by commodity production. 2 Much good history and sociology modifies these bold assertions. 3 But this too-broad interpretation of Fordism allows cultural studies to dispense with concrete analysis of work except as an economic precondition and negative psychological background to consumer culture. Moreover, this analysis leads to an understanding of free time and consumption as unproblematic equivalences; it ignores the possibility of a political struggle for free time as an alternative to the commoditization of culture.Cultural studies generally focus on the dynamics of the modern commodity and consumer. "Pessimists" who emphasize the production of the commodity argue that "mass culture" is a form of "social control" or the channeling of desire that emerged from the social pathology of nineteenth-century industrialization. A competing group of "populists," who stress the role of