Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. ix + 220 pp. $39.95 cloth; $15.95 paper.

Abstract

Does class consciousness require the rejection of the possibility of a just wage system? In this history of changing modes of thought in the labor movement, Lawrence Glickman argues strongly for a vision of wage labor that can also be class conscious, through the medium of a politically engaged consumerism. In recounting the genesis and evolution of working-class demands for the “living wage,” he seeks to rescue labor activists who largely accepted the normalcy of capitalist wage relations in the United States from what often has been the condescension or indifference of labor historians. Glickman places the demands derived from the consumerist side of the productive wage relation at the heart of evolving notions of labor's rights between 1870 and 1920. His work thus stands in sharp contrast to historians of consumer culture who have portrayed consumption as an individualizing fulfillment of desires—and hence a politically paralyzing set of values and practices. Recovering and reconnecting a pattern of argument and demands from Ira Steward to Samuel Gompers to John L. Lewis, Glickman builds a case for consumerism as an essential element of working-class notions of political economy. Finally, he argues that the legacy of these earlier champions of the worker-as-consumer was central to the shape of the modern economic policies formalized at the level of the state during the New Deal.