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Lawrence B. Glickman
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A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society Paperback – March 9, 1999

by Lawrence B. Glickman (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 4 ratings
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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.

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  1. Print length
    240 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Cornell University Press
  4. Publication date
    March 9, 1999
  5. Reading age
    18 years and up
  6. Dimensions
    6 x 0.69 x 9 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0801486149
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0801486142
  9. Lexile measure
    1530L
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

A Living Wage is an important book that challenges the view of pure and simple unionism as apolitical. It also calls into question where, when, and why Americans first embraced a consumer identity.... A fascinating study of the rise of a consumer-oriented working-class ideology.

― Journal of American History

A very fine, well-written study of changes in rhetoric and ideology, as well as a lucid discussion of what these changes tell us about the goals of working-class leaders, thinkers, and reformers. Glickman's study is less about wage labor and consumption than about changing notions of and perspectives on these issues. As such, A Living Wage is a valuable contribution to the history of working-class culture, rhetoric, and ideology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

― Industrial and Labor Relations Review

Glickman makes a bold contribution to the wider task of rethinking the late nineteenth-century labour movement, and his findings deserve wide notice.

― Labour History Review

Glickman provides an entirely new way of understanding working-class material demands.

― Reviews in American History

Glickman's lively and thoughtful intellectual history of the concept of a living wage speaks both to historians of American working people and to historians of Amercan culture.... His primary method is discourse analysis, and he does it very well.... He writes clearly and evocatively, with sensitivity to gender and race, as well as class.

― Journal of Social History

Review

This is a work of enormous range and brilliance that maps one of the great sea changes in recent history: the accommodation to wage labor and the reorientation of the discussion of citizenship, rights, race, and gender to the new realities it imposed. This is the kind of book that will have an enduring life because of the way in which it so fundamentally shifts the terms of the debates into which it enters, and those who read it will thereafter look at the worlds of work and consumption in a new way.

-- Susan Porter Benson, author of Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economies in the Interwar United States

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cornell University Press (March 9, 1999)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0801486149
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0801486142
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1530L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.69 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 4 ratings

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Lawrence B. Glickman

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Jim Brown
    4.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive analysis of the transformation from producer to consumerist American society
    Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2022
    Lawrence B. Glickman, in A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (1997), asserts that while antebellum workers rejected wages in favor of self-employment, postbellum union “workers developed a positive understanding of wage labor” in the 1870s and “constructed a new consumer identity” rather than thinking of themselves as producers (160). Glickman supports this assertion by contrasting the lack of freedom and degradations of “wage slavery” in favor of the ever-expanding “living wage” that many union workers advocated for throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries that allowed them to earn high wages, work fewer hours, provide for their families as respected breadwinners, purchase quality goods, and demonstrate their citizenship by joining political organizations (103-107). Glickman’s purpose is to credit the workers for their commitment to demanding high wages not based on the value of their production but in order to afford goods that distinguished the American standard of living as superior to minorities and other nations (82-84); thus, workers shifted the United States from a producerist to consumerist economy by organizing against employers who realized that consumer demand drove their production and profits, transformed labor laws—such as the eight-hour workday—by pressuring politicians who relied upon the workers’ votes, and embraced additional leisure time that workers spent with their families and communities, participating in politics, religion, and other interests and obligations away from work (156). Glickman establishes a relationship with scholars studying labor union ideology by citing many postbellum labor union leaders—Ira Steward, Samuel Gompers, George McNeil, among others—and connecting their speeches and publications to the roots of the New Deal programs that encouraged consumerism during the Great Depression (147-156).
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