From the book review...Lawrence B. Glickman. A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. xvi + 220 pp. Figures, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-3357-3.*Reviewed by:* Margo Anderson , Department of History, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee .
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In the first half of the book, Glickman argues that after the Civil War, as employers claimed that the price of labor was set by supply and demand, working-class leaders abandoned their critique of the wage system as a form of slavery. Advocates of the new living wage critique of capitalism, from Ira Steward to George Gunton to John Mitchell to Samuel Gompers to Father John Ryan, countered with an alternative claim that the "market" set "starvation" or "subsistence" wages, but that workers deserved "fair," "ample," "just," and "decent" wages. And when employers complained that such a living wage standard was imprecise, working-class advocates agreed and responded with an elastic definition that required a wage sufficient for food, clothing, shelter, "sundries," and for "citizenship," "education," "comfort," and "health." John Mitchell, for example, defined such a wage in 1898 as sufficient for a worker "to purchase a comfortable house of at least six rooms," which contained a bathroom, good sanitary plumbing, parlor, dining room, kitchen, sleeping rooms, carpets, pictures, books, and furniture (pp.82-3). Working-class advocates expected the standard to rise over time. Glickman thus sees Samuel Gompers' famous claim for "more, more" "as part of a long working-class tradition of political economy" (p. 77).
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*Published by:* H-Labor <http://www.h-net.org/%7Elabor> (March, 1998)
