Eugene Coyle wrote,
>Having said that, I wonder if losing the "family wage" -- i. e.
>needing two wage earners to support a household that one wage earner
>once could isn't a claw-back on the part of capital. Any
>thoughts/statistics about that?
Another name for the family wage would be the "male breadwinner model",
which also indicates its darker side. In the MBM, you still have two people
working but one is either off the books and tied to a no-wage personal
service contract or marginalized in the waged labour force.
As for statistics, a lot depends on what source you use and how you slice
it. As usual, I'd like to plug our book, Working Time: International trends,
theory and policy perspectives as containing a valuable survey of the
statistics and various angles on them. For example, here is part of a table
presented by Bluestone and Rose comparing education, and the percentage
change in hours and earnings for US families between 1973 and 1988:
Headed by HS dropouts HS grads BA+
Annual Hours 11.6 16.1 16.6
Real Earnings -8.2 3.7 32.5
"family"
hourly wage -10.7 -11.5 13.6
In the Overworked American, Juliet Schor argued that total annual work hours
(including both paid and unpaid time) are increasing, while Robinson and
Godbey found that total workload fell between 1965 and 1985.
>Or is the need for two incomes driven by the mad consumerism upon
>which we embarked in the same early post-WWII period during which the
>family wage was eroded?
There may be a method to the madness. In terms of a triumph of mass
consumption, I would be inclined, along with Benjamin Hunnicutt, to locate
it in the 1920s and 1930s. A lot of that has to do with consumption of
public goods -- expanding public education, public health, highways etc. as
well as public not-so-goods expenditures on military and policing (and more
highways).
Private mass consumerism could be seen as much as an outgrowth of trade
union ideology as it was of commercial promotion. I'm thinking especially of
the ideas of Ira Steward with regard to shorter hours, higher wages and
consumer demand driven economic growth. These anticipated Keynes in some
respects. In 1926, Henry Ford virtually declared himself a disciple of Ira
Steward in the way that he explained why he had introduced the five-day
workweek in his factories.
I guess my point is that our chains today have been forged in partially
victorious struggle, which sometimes makes it difficult to tell whether we
are coming or going. What makes it even more difficult is a quite
understandable human tendency to attribute all bad things to the evil
machinations of the other side and to defend all past, provisional gains as
if they were sacrosanct when in fact many of those gains have been
compromises and many of those compromises have become successively more
compromising.
>I would add another thought: Although it is by no means a sure
>thing, cutting working hours (eventually down to a few hours a week)
>could change the culture of consumption, so that our esteem could be
>gained otherwise than acquiring things.
It being "by no means a sure thing" is probably why it's so hard to get on
the policy agenda. Policy-makers and the opinionated public keep looking for
sure things, even if those sure things have an appalling track record. GWB's
big ticket policy initiatives are all sure things. Better to fail
unambiguously than to succeed ambiguously.
>That ties your post and work back to the issue that Mark Jones addresses
>-- that the world can't go on with those in the North living as we do.
>And such a cultural shift would be an answer to Henwood who sees no hope
>that people won't go on buying till the oceans rise.
This adds a new dimension to the expression, "surf's up!" It was plain in
1968, 1973, 1979, 1989, 1994 and 1998 that the world couldn't go on with
those in the North living as we do. Yet the nettle remains virginally
ungrasped. Unless, that is, one chooses to read the surrender to sheer
fantasy as the sign of an underlying but perhaps incapacitating realism.
Tom Walker
Bowen Island, BC
604 947 2213
