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SIX: Varieties of Work
- The University of North Carolina Press
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6 varieties of work The nature of work changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Advanced capitalist countries experienced the rise of the factory system, intensified machine production, and the massing and subdivision of labor. Between 1850 and 1900 every industry expanded dramatically, from the manufacture of locomotives, reapers, and Winchester rifles to textiles, cigars, and glass. The post–Civil War era ushered in what labor historian David Montgomery has called a ‘‘cult of productivity,’’ characterized by ever-increasing rates of output and scientific methods of management, imposed by a professional managerial class.∞ While late nineteenth-century workers became habituated to an industrial time sense (a larger transformation signaled by the mass production of pocket watches), they also became aware of their ability to control rates of production.≤ As one e≈ciency consultant observed, every factory has ‘‘a fashion, a habit of work, and the new worker follows that fashion, for it isn’t respectable not to.’’ Employers could be equally tenacious: in 1885 managers at the McCormick reaper plant responded to a conflict with unionized iron molders by firing them all.≥ Moreover, the harmony of working-class interests was subject to constraints peculiar to the American context. According to Ira Katznelson, ‘‘what needs to be explained is not the absence of class in American politics but its limitation to the arena of work.’’ He argues that American laborers, as distinct from European or British, saw themselves as workers at work but ethnics at home. Class solidarity prevailed in the workplace but ethnic identifications ruled elsewhere, dictating political behavior.∂ The fragmentation of working-class consciousness helped to foreclose the ratification of varieties of work :: 177 welfare benefits—unemployment insurance, health coverage, old age pensions —that became integral to industrial societies elsewhere. While America’s common laborers were less protected from the hardships of industrialization than their counterparts, their circumstances also increasingly belied traditional assumptions that hard work entailed economic reward. Such negative assessments were reinforced by economic depressions in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, as well as widespread poverty amid abundance and surplus wealth: for instance, a 1901 Bureau of Labor survey reported that between 20 and 30 percent of wage-earners had poverty -level incomes. Already in 1877, an economic analyst, noting the eclipse of western expansion and of the capital necessary for entrepreneurial success , predicted the demise of social mobility: ‘‘born a laborer, working for hire,’’ he concluded, the typical American would probably die that way.∑ The increasing di≈culties of working-class life gave rise to the labor cooperatives movement, which demanded that workers share in policy-making and profits. Movement membership included many from the middle and upper classes, confirming a general wariness toward capitalist-industrial growth. The question to be answered, given the notorious distress of laborers at the time and the overt distrust of industrialists across socioeconomic classes, was why steps weren’t taken to alleviate this distress and curb the excessive profits of corporate ownership. These developments and the problems they generated were the concern of a vast literature, which will be the focus of the following pages. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Mary Wilkins Freeman’s The Portion of Labor (1901), and Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt (1911) depicted characters struggling to survive in, respectively, the meatpacking, shoe manufacturing, and glassmaking industries. W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899), John Spargo’s The Bitter Cry of the Children (1906), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898) explored the specific fortunes of blacks, children, and women, respectively, as workers in the new industrial order. Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) and Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912) demonstrated the durability of the ‘‘work ethic’’ at a point when its decline was widely proclaimed. Because some of these writers came from the working classes or struggled financially while building their careers, while others were socially positioned (as women or members of minorities) to understand how access to justly compensated labor a√ected life chances, they provided varied perspectives on the experience of work. Together with treatises by labor reformers and social philosophers Samuel Gompers, Jacob Riis, and Henry George, their writings will be viewed as exemplary testimonies of how the American workplace and the [3.238.62.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:16 GMT) 178 :: varieties of work social relations that shaped it were reconfigured between the Civil War...