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The working class people, the individuals were the key people.

However, key people that "lorded over" the worker class include:
John D. Rockefeller
Henry Burden
Jay Gould
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Bagley and Wright

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The Gilded age to the Progressive Era, from 1877-1917.

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It started in Britain and Europe, then moved to the U.S. and continued spreading. The first labor union was formed in 1810, in Manchester, in what was then called the Kingdom of Great Britain (because Ireland had not yet joined). The union was named the General Union of Trades, and was also called the Philanthropic Society. Its goal was to protect its workers and make their lives better.

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A trade union is an organisation made up of members who are workers. The main aim of a trade union is to protect and advance the interests of its members. But the activities of a trade union - such as securing a pay rise - benefits all workers in a workplace, not just those who are members of the union. Going beyond particular workplaces, the campaigning and lobbying work that trade unions do can help change laws in the whole country and gain new rights for workers. In doing this, a strong trade union movement benefits all workers in a country. Most trade unions in the UK are independent of any employer.

Trade unions undertake the following activities:

Negotiate agreements with employers on pay and conditions;

Discuss major changes to the workplace such as large scale redundancy;

Discuss their members' concerns with employers;

Accompany their members in disciplinary and grievance meetings;

Provide their members with legal and financial advice.

Employers who recognise the rights of a particular union to represent its workforce will negotiate with that union over members' pay and conditions. This is known as ' collective bargaining'.

Most employers recognise a trade union voluntarily. But if an organisation that employs more than 20 people refuses to do so, trade unions can seek recognition through a legal process. According to the Employment Relations Act 1999, the union can approach the Central Arbitration Committee, which can grant recognition on the basis that a majority of the workers concerned are members of the union or that a (qualified) majority support recognition in a ballot.

History of trade unions in the UK (18th century to the present)

The rights that British workers enjoy today have been gained over many years, and in some cases reflect more than two centuries of collective action by workers and their unions.

The origins of the trade union movement can be traced to the time of the industrial revolution, which transformed Britain in the 18th and 19th century from an agrarian and rural society to one which was based on industrial production in factories, textile mills and mines. The conditions in these new industries were often harsh, with men, women and even children forced to work long hours for very low wages. The workers did not accept these conditions passively - there were a number of trade disputes during the 18th century where workers came together to resolve one-off problems at work. The factory owners, the government (which at that time was elected by only 3% of the adult population - the landowning men) and the media were hostile towards any 'combination' of workers to defend their rights. The Combination Acts, passed in 1799 and 1800, made any sort of strike action illegal. Striking was punishable with up to three months' imprisonment or two months' hard labour.

Following widespread protests, the Combination Acts were repealed in 1824 and 1825. But labour unrest reached new levels during the 1830s, and the government responded through draconian measures to prevent workers from getting together to form trade unions. In March 1834, six agricultural labourers who had formed a trade union in the Dorsetshire village of Tolpuddle were arrested and found guilty of 'administering illegal oaths' in what was a show trial. Their sentence of transportation to Australia for seven years led to a mass campaign, which led to their sentences being dropped.

The 1871 Trade Union Act recognised unions as legal entities entitled to protection under the law. However, it was only in 1875 that it was legal for trade unions to take effective strike action by picketing (Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875).

By the 1880s, trade unions were active in the cotton, coal, iron and (later) steel and engineering industries. Many trade unions later joined the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), which formed the basis for today's Labour Party. There are still links between between the Labour Party and trade unions in the UK.

Between 1888 and 1918 trade unions grew very quickly, and began to reach out to unskilled workers and to women workers. There was an unprecedented wave of strike action during this period. This included the strike by the women workers at the Bryant & May match factory in the East End of London, in July 1888. Another famous strike from this period was the dockers' strike in 1889 for a minimum wage of 6 pence an hour, which they won after a five-week strike.

Although the number of women in trade unions had increased by 1914, 90% of all trade unionists were men. Trade unions supported the campaign for extending the vote to women, but on the whole, trade unions still tended to represent the interests of their male members.

Between the end of WWI in 1918 and the outbreak of WWII in 1939, there was a period of decline in industrial growth in the UK and elsewhere (known as the 'great depression'). In Britain, official unemployment rates reached 20% by the end of 1930. The high rate of unemployment also resulted in declining rates of union membership. This was also the period of the biggest strike in Britain so far - the General Strike of 1926. In response to the General strike, the government made general strikes and other solidarity action illegal, and placed restrictions on picketing through the Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act 1927. The Act remained in force until 1946. The restrictions on trade unions continued during WWII.

After the Second World War, the Labour government's programme of nationalisation of the coal, gas and electricity industries and the establishment of a comprehensive welfare state made the state a major employer. Britain experienced a period of growth and high levels of employment in the 1950s. Women's employment levels increased steadily. This was also a period when workers from former colonies in the Caribbean and South Asia migrated to fill labour shortages in the UK. Union membership continued to grow steadily during 1950s and 1960s. This was also a period when trade unions gained important victories such as the first equal pay legislation for women workers.

The 1970s was a period of unprecedented industrial action. During the 1970s, 21.9 million working days each year were lost to strike action, rising to 29.47 million in the 'winter of discontent' in 1979 (ONS, 2003). By comparison, according to Office for National statistics, the number of working days lost to strike action fell to 4.1 million in 1989, and was down to 1.39 million in 2011.

There was a considerable amount of industrial and political conflict at that time. The miners came out on strike in 1972, the first time since 1926, and their action in stopping supplies of coal to the power stations led to the imposition of a three day working week on British industry to save electricity. The miners were successful in achieving higher wages. But discontent soared again in 1974, leading to a further strike. The Conservative Government refused to compromise and the situation led to Edward Heath, the Prime Minister, declaring a state of emergency and re-introducing a three day week. Heath called a General Election for the 28th February believing that the country would be in sympathy with him, but the Conservatives were defeated. The Labour Government and the miners reached a deal shortly afterwards and the strike ended.

The new Labour government under Prime Minister James Callaghan also attempted to control public sector pay rises in order to curb inflation. This led to the so called "Winter of Discontent" in 1978-79 during which there were widespread strikes by public sector trade unions. But these strikes during the coldest winter for 16 years ultimately led to the defeat of Callaghan's government in 1979, and the election of a Conservative party government under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In the 1970s, the leaders of the trade unions were almost exclusively white men. Many migrant workers found that the unions were racist and supported the management in keeping the wages of women and non-white workers down. Trade unions frequently failed to support strike actions by their women and non-white members for better pay and conditions (eg., Plessey dispute in Bathgate, Scotland (1982) and the Burnsall strike in Birmingham (1992)). From 1970s onwards, in the context of the second wave of feminism, women workers successfully mobilized their unions to take up issues like equal pay and maternity rights. Non-white workers also organised through and outside their unions on racism in the workplace . Trade unions began to respond to these political pressures by making greater efforts to recognize these issues and the needs of diverse groups of workers.

It was against this background of industrial strife in the 1970s that one of the most significant the strikes in the history of the labour movement took place at the Grunwick Film processing plant in 1976-78, when black and white workers came in their thousands in a show of support for South Asian women in a small factory in North London.

The late 20th century: 1980s onwards

During the 1980s and 1990s, the British trade union movement faced several inter-related challenges. High unemployment led to the decline in union membership, especially in those industries which traditionally had a strong union base. The Conservative government privatized many of the former nationalised industries including the railways, gas and electricity - and public services increasingly used private contractors for key activities, all of which reduced union influence and strength. But by far the biggest challenge to trade unions' ability to defend workers' rights was from a Conservative government that was committed to curbing the power of the trade unions.

In 1984, miners in their tens of thousands again took industrial action, this time against planned closures of the coal mines. Margaret Thatcher was determined to win the battle against the strikers whom she termed "the enemy within". This was one of most divisive conflicts in post-war Britain with high levels of police violence and mass arrests of the strikers and their supporters. The government prevailed and the miners were forced back to work, only to face mass redundancies as the government implemented the planned cuts to the collieries up and down the country. Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government passed five major pieces of legislation between 1979 and 1990, which together weakened the powers of the unions by making it more difficult to strike legally. Tony Blair's Labour government did not reverse Thatcher's changes .

Trade union membership in the UK reached a peak of 13 million in 1979 and then declined steadily until the end of the twentieth century. The numbers stabilized at around 7.3 million between 2000 and 2012, and have been increasing again, particularly among private sector workers. Trade unions still remain among the biggest membership organisations in the country. According to Fulton, in 2011, over a quarter (27%) of all UK employees were members of a trade union, though union density was much higher in the public sector (57%) than in the private sector (15%).

The law gives workers the right to join a trade union wherever they work. This right applies whether a union has been recognised or not. Workers are protected from being disadvantaged for being a union member. It is illegal for an employer to refuse a worker employment, dismiss him/her or for selecting a worker for redundancy because of their trade union membership or activity. The law also gives a worker the right not to join a trade union.

When a union is recognised by an employer, members also have the right to time off at an appropriate time to take part in trade union activities. These may include voting in ballots on industrial action, voting in union elections and meeting to discuss urgent matters.

Although trade unions remain among the largest membership organizations in the UK today, downsizing of public sector employment by the Conservative led Coalition government is likely to lead to a decrease in unionisation since membership levels are the highest among public sector workers.

Since the 1980s, the rights of trade unions to take strike action has been restricted in various ways. But during this same period, there has been an overall strengthening of anti- discrimination legislation. There has also been a move towards resolving industrial disputes through individual action in employment tribunals rather than through collective action by workers. However, not all workers can afford to take legal action through the tribunal, as an employer will have far greater resources than a lone worker.

From July 2013, the Coalition government announced new upfront fees of up to £1,200 which workers will have to pay for taking employment tribunal cases against their employers. This fee applies to workers pursuing sexual harassment or race discrimination complaints after they have been unfairly dismissed. Trade unions have criticised this move - which ministers claim will save money for businesses and taxpayers - as the latest attack on workers' fundamental rights. The TUC general secretary, Frances O'Grady, said: "Today is a great day for Britain's worst bosses. By charging upfront fees for harassment and abuse claims, the government is making it easier for employers to get away with the most appalling behaviour." A report found women and low-paid staff worst hit by these changes, with 80% fall in sex discrimination claims and 85% drop in unpaid wage cases.

Trade Union Bill 2015-16

The Trade Union Bill, which began its journey into law by being presented into the Commons on 15 July 2015, represents the biggest shake-up in the rules on industrial action in 30 years. Under current rules a strike requires a simple majority of those union members that take part in a ballot. But the Trade Union Bill would impose a minimum 50% turnout - and public sector strikes would need the backing of at least 40% of those eligible to vote, i.e. everyone with a vote, not just those who cast a vote. So if there are 100 teachers in a union, 50 of them will have to vote and 40 out of the 50 who voted (so 40% of the union membership, i.e., 80% of those voting in this case) would have to vote for a strike for it to go ahead.

However, such restrictions do not apply to any other elections. For example, in our first-past-the-post system, MPs can get elected with as little as 30% of the votes cast, which (if the turnout is 65%) will amount to just 19.5% of those registered to vote. If the 40% test is applied to MPs elected in 2015, most would fall short. Of the Conservatives' 330 MPs, for example, 274 failed to win the support of at least 40% of their electorates. Half of the MPs in Cabinet would not have been elected, including Business Secretary Sajid Javid who is the minister who will shepherd this new law through the Commons. On the whole, the Conservatives won the support of just 24% of the electorate in the general elections on 2015, far short of the 40% they are asking from union members. If this rule were applied to previous elections, Boris Johnson would not be the mayor of London, Margaret Thatcher would have not have won her seat in the elections of 1979, 1983 and 1987.

The new laws would force unions to give employers 14 days notice of strike action and allow them to bring in agency staff to cover for striking workers and help break the strike action. The legislation could also cut the amount of money unions have to mount campaigns - or donate to parties such as Labour - with members actively having to "opt in" to pay the so-called political levy, which is currently automatic unless members opt-out. It will be made an offence not to have a named individual supervising a picket line.

The unions have been arguing that making it easier to vote by allowing people to vote online will help increase turnout and make any result more representative of the union's membership (and reduce costs for the unions) , but currently those taking part can only vote by post. The Conservative government is not willing to allow this change.

Taken together, the changes proposed in the BIll will make exercising the right to strike significantly harder, the drafting of agency workers will in effect make legitimate strike action redundant, the curbs on picketing risks criminalising pickets, and the changes to the political levy will reduce trade unions' political campaigning funds. A lot of rights that we take for granted today - such as sick pay and annual leave - have been won through strike action of previous generations of workers. Any moves towards further curtailing the right to strike will have serious consequences for workers' ability to retain the rights we have or extend these to keep up with changing times.

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Claiming rights: Role of trade unions in the UK

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A trade union is an organisation made up of members who are workers. The main aim of a trade union is to protect the interests of its members. This section outlines the history of [no-lexicon]trade unions[/no-lexicon] in the UK and their role in advancing workers' rights.

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The working class was formed because of the Industrial Revolution and the factories that were built and created products.

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The working class made stuff in factories. They formed labor unions, which helped protect them from unfair or dangerous job conditions.
For more information on what happened and the key moments in working class history, go to the link.

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Department stores such as Macy's, Lord & Taylor, Bonwit Teller, B. Altman, and Saks Fifth Avenue played a part in the consumer culture.
Railroad tycoons such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Leland Stanford made a lot of money on the railroads by shipping goods across the country.

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The increasing production of goods made stores want to sell more. They made buying more attractive, and the U.S. began to make the shift towards a material-value society as more and more people began to consume products. The products were made better, cheaper, easier, and more accessible to people of all varieties.

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Over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff.

Television set the stage for the democratization of luxury on a scale hitherto unimagined. Image: Evert F. Baumgardner/National Archives and Records Administration

The notion of human beings as consumers first took shape before World War I, but became commonplace in America in the 1920s. Consumption is now frequently seen as our principal role in the world.

People, of course, have always "consumed" the necessities of life - food, shelter, clothing - and have always had to work to get them or have others work for them, but there was little economic motive for increased consumption among the mass of people before the 20th century.

Quite the reverse: Frugality and thrift were more appropriate to situations where survival rations were not guaranteed. Attempts to promote new fashions, harness the "propulsive power of envy," and boost sales multiplied in Britain in the late 18th century. Here began the "slow unleashing of the acquisitive instincts," write historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb in their influential book on the commercialization of 18th-century England, when the pursuit of opulence and display first extended beyond the very rich.

But, while poorer people might have acquired a very few useful household items - a skillet, perhaps, or an iron pot - the sumptuous clothing, furniture, and pottery of the era were still confined to a very small population. In late 19th-century Britain a variety of foods became accessible to the average person, who would previously have lived on bread and potatoes - consumption beyond mere subsistence. This improvement in food variety did not extend durable items to the mass of people, however. The proliferating shops and department stores of that period served only a restricted population of urban middle-class people in Europe, but the display of tempting products in shops in daily public view was greatly extended - and display was a key element in the fostering of fashion and envy.

Although the period after World War II is often identified as the beginning of the immense eruption of consumption across the industrialized world, the historian William Leach locates its roots in the United States around the turn of the century.

In the United States, existing shops were rapidly extended through the 1890s, mail-order shopping surged, and the new century saw massive multistory department stores covering millions of acres of selling space. Retailing was already passing decisively from small shopkeepers to corporate giants who had access to investment bankers and drew on assembly-line production of commodities, powered by fossil fuels; the traditional objective of making products for their self-evident usefulness was displaced by the goal of profit and the need for a machinery of enticement.

"The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society," Leach writes in his 1993 book " Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture." Significantly, it was individual desire that was democratized, rather than wealth or political and economic power.

The 1920s: "The New Economic Gospel of Consumption"

Release from the perils of famine and premature starvation was in place for most people in the industrialized world soon after the Great War ended. U.S. production was more than 12 times greater in 1920 than in 1860, while the population over the same period had increased by only a factor of three, suggesting just how much additional wealth was theoretically available. The labor struggles of the 19th century had, without jeopardizing the burgeoning productivity, gradually eroded the seven-day week of 14- and 16-hour days that was worked at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England. In the United States in particular, economic growth had succeeded in providing basic security to the great majority of an entire population.

It would be feasible to reduce hours of work and release workers for the pleasurable activities of free time with families and communities, but business did not support such a trajectory.

In these circumstances, there was a social choice to be made. A steady-state economy capable of meeting the basic needs of all, foreshadowed by philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill as the stationary state, seemed well within reach and, in Mill's words, likely to be an improvement on "the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each other's heels ... the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress." It would be feasible to reduce hours of work further and release workers for the spiritual and pleasurable activities of free time with families and communities, and creative or educational pursuits. But business did not support such a trajectory, and it was not until the Great Depression that hours were reduced, in response to overwhelming levels of unemployment.

In 1930, Kellogg adopted a six-hour shift to help accommodate unemployed workers. It didn't last long.

In 1930 the U.S. cereal manufacturer Kellogg adopted a six-hour shift to help accommodate unemployed workers, and other forms of work-sharing became more widespread. Although the shorter workweek appealed to Kellogg's workers, the company, after reverting to longer hours during World War II, was reluctant to renew the six-hour shift in 1945. Workers voted for it by three-to-one in both 1945 and 1946, suggesting that, at the time, they still found life in their communities more attractive than consumer goods. This was particularly true of women. Kellogg, however, gradually overcame the resistance of its workers and whittled away at the short shifts until the last of them were abolished in 1985.

Even if a shorter working day became an acceptable strategy during the Great Depression, the economic system's orientation toward profit and its bias toward growth made such a trajectory unpalatable to most captains of industry and the economists who theorized their successes. If profit and growth were lagging, the system needed new impetus. The short depression of 1921-1922 led businessmen and economists in the United States to fear that the immense productive powers created over the previous century had grown sufficiently to meet the basic needs of the entire population and had probably triggered a permanent crisis of overproduction; prospects for further economic expansion were thought to look bleak.

The historian Benjamin Hunnicutt, who examined the mainstream press of the 1920s, along with the publications of corporations, business organizations, and government inquiries, found extensive evidence that such fears were widespread in business circles during the 1920s. Victor Cutter, president of the United Fruit Company, exemplified the concern when he wrote in 1927 that the greatest economic problem of the day was the lack of "consuming power" in relation to the prodigious powers of production.

"Unless [the consumer] could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts and electric ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets."

Notwithstanding the panic and pessimism, a consumer solution was simultaneously emerging. As the popular historian of the time Frederick Allen wrote, "Business had learned as never before the importance of the ultimate consumer. Unless he could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts and electric ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets." In his classic 1928 book " Propaganda," Edward Bernays, one of the pioneers of the public relations industry, put it this way:

Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained-that is if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity.... Today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand ... [and] cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda ... to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.

Edward Cowdrick, an economist who advised corporations on their management and industrial relations policies, called it "the new economic gospel of consumption," in which workers (people for whom durable possessions had rarely been a possibility) could be educated in the new "skills of consumption."

It was an idea also put forward by the new "consumption economists" such as Hazel Kyrk and Theresa McMahon, and eagerly embraced by many business leaders. New needs would be created, with advertising brought into play to "augment and accelerate" the process. People would be encouraged to give up thrift and husbandry, to value goods over free time. Kyrk argued for ever-increasing aspirations: "a high standard of living must be dynamic, a progressive standard," where envy of those just above oneself in the social order incited consumption and fueled economic growth.

President Herbert Hoover's 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes welcomed the demonstration "on a grand scale [of] the expansibility of human wants and desires," hailed an "almost insatiable appetite for goods and services," and envisaged "a boundless field before us ... new wants that make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied." In this paradigm, people are encouraged to board an escalator of desires (a stairway to heaven, perhaps) and progressively ascend to what were once the luxuries of the affluent.

Charles Kettering, general director of General Motors Research Laboratories, equated such perpetual change with progress. In a 1929 article called "Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied," he stated that "there is no place anyone can sit and rest in an industrial situation. It is a question of change, change all the time - and it is always going to be that way because the world only goes along one road, the road of progress." These views parallel political economist Joseph Schumpeter's later characterization of capitalism as "creative destruction":

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is, but never can be stationary.... The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.

The prospect of ever-extendable consumer desire, characterized as "progress," promised a new way forward for modern manufacture, a means to perpetuate economic growth. Progress was about the endless replacement of old needs with new, old products with new. Notions of meeting everyone's needs with an adequate level of production did not feature.

The nonsettler European colonies were not regarded as viable venues for these new markets, since centuries of exploitation and impoverishment meant that few people there were able to pay. In the 1920s, the target consumer market to be nourished lay at home in the industrialized world. There, especially in the United States, consumption continued to expand through the 1920s, though truncated by the Great Depression of 1929.

Electrification was crucial for the consumption of the new types of durable items, and the fraction of U.S. households with electricity connected nearly doubled between 1921 and 1929, from 35 percent to 68 percent; a rapid proliferation of radios, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators followed. Motor car registration rose from eight million in 1920 to more than 28 million by 1929. The introduction of time payment arrangements facilitated the extension of such buying further and further down the economic ladder. In Australia, too, the trend could be observed; there, however, the base was tiny, and even though car ownership multiplied nearly fivefold in the eight years to 1929, few working-class households possessed cars or large appliances before 1945.

The prospect of ever-extendable consumer desire, characterized as "progress," promised a new way forward for modern manufacture, a means to perpetuate economic growth.

This first wave of consumerism was short-lived. Predicated on debt, it took place in an economy mired in speculation and risky borrowing. U.S. consumer credit rose to $7 billion in the 1920s, with banks engaged in reckless lending of all kinds. Indeed, though a lot less in gross terms than the burden of debt in the United States in late 2008, which Sydney economist Steve Keen has described as "the biggest load of unsuccessful gambling in history," the debt of the 1920s was very large, over 200 percent of the GDP of the time. In both eras, borrowed money bought unprecedented quantities of material goods on time payment and (these days) credit cards. The 1920s bonanza collapsed suddenly and catastrophically. In 2008, a similar unraveling began; its implications still remain unknown. In the case of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a war economy followed, so it was almost 20 years before mass consumption resumed any role in economic life - or in the way the economy was conceived.

The Second Wave

Once World War II was over, consumer culture took off again throughout the developed world, partly fueled by the deprivation of the Great Depression and the rationing of the wartime years and incited with renewed zeal by corporate advertisers using debt facilities and the new medium of television. Stuart Ewen, in his history of the public relations industry, saw the birth of commercial radio in 1921 as a vital tool in the great wave of debt-financed consumption in the 1920s - "a privately owned utility, pumping information and entertainment into people's homes."

"Requiring no significant degree of literacy on the part of its audience," Ewen writes, "radio gave interested corporations ... unprecedented access to the inner sanctums of the public mind."The advent of television greatly magnified the potential impact of advertisers' messages, exploiting image and symbol far more adeptly than print and radio had been able to do. The stage was set for the democratization of luxury on a scale hitherto unimagined.

Though the television sets that carried the advertising into people's homes after World War II were new, and were far more powerful vehicles of persuasion than radio had been, the theory and methods were the same - perfected in the 1920s by PR experts like Bernays. Vance Packard echoes both Bernays and the consumption economists of the 1920s in his description of the role of the advertising men of the 1950s:

They want to put some sizzle into their messages by stirring up our status consciousness.... Many of the products they are trying to sell have, in the past, been confined to a "quality market." The products have been the luxuries of the upper classes. The game is to make them the necessities of all classes. This is done by dangling the products before non-upper-class people as status symbols of a higher class. By striving to buy the product-say, wall-to-wall carpeting on instalment-the consumer is made to feel he is upgrading himself socially.

Though it is status that is being sold, it is endless material objects that are being consumed.

In a little-known 1958 essay reflecting on the conservation implications of the conspicuously wasteful U.S. consumer binge after World War II, John Kenneth Galbraith pointed to the possibility that this "gargantuan and growing appetite" might need to be curtailed. "What of the appetite itself?," he asks. "Surely this is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question."

"We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate," retail analyst Victor Lebow remarked in 1955.

Galbraith quotes the President's Materials Policy Commission setting out its premise that economic growth is sacrosanct. "First we share the belief of the American people in the principle of Growth," the report maintains, specifically endorsing "ever more luxurious standards of consumption." To Galbraith, who had just published " The Affluent Society," the wastefulness he observed seemed foolhardy, but he was pessimistic about curtailment; he identified the beginnings of "a massive conservative reaction to the idea of enlarged social guidance and control of economic activity," a backlash against the state taking responsibility for social direction. At the same time he was well aware of the role of advertising: "Goods are plentiful. Demand for them must be elaborately contrived," he wrote. "Those who create wants rank amongst our most talented and highly paid citizens. Want creation - advertising - is a ten billion dollar industry."

Or, as retail analyst Victor Lebow remarked in 1955:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.

Thus, just as immense effort was being devoted to persuading people to buy things they did not actually need, manufacturers also began the intentional design of inferior items, which came to be known as "planned obsolescence." In his second major critique of the culture of consumption, " The Waste Makers," Packard identified both functional obsolescence, in which the product wears out quickly and psychological obsolescence, in which products are "designed to become obsolete in the mind of the consumer, even sooner than the components used to make them will fail."

Galbraith was alert to the way that rapidly expanding consumption patterns were multiplied by a rapidly expanding population. But postwar industrial enterprise stoked the expansion nonetheless. The rise of consumer debt, interrupted in 1929, also resumed. In Australia, the 1939 debt of AU$39 million doubled in the first two years after the war and, by 1960, had grown by a factor of 25, to more than AU$1 billion dollars. This new burst in debt-financed consumerism was, again, incited intentionally.

Tapping into the Unconscious: Image and Message

In researching his excellent history of the rise of PR, Ewen interviewed Bernays himself in 1990, not long before he turned 99. Ewen found Bernays, a key pioneer of the new PR profession, to be just as candid about his underlying motivations as he had been in 1928 when he wrote "Propaganda":

Throughout our conversation, Bernays conveyed his hallucination of democracy: A highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians is continuously at work ... adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.... Throughout the interview, he described PR as a response to a transhistoric concern: the requirement, for those people in power, to shape the attitudes of the general population.

Bernays's views, like those of several other analysts of the "crowd" and the "herd instinct," were a product of the panic created among the elite classes by the early 20th-century transition from the limited franchise of propertied men to universal suffrage. "On every side of American life, whether political, industrial, social, religious or scientific, the increasing pressure of public judgment has made itself felt," Bernays wrote. "The great corporation which is in danger of having its profits taxed away or its sales fall off or its freedom impeded by legislative action must have recourse to the public to combat successfully these menaces."

The opening page of "Propaganda" discloses his solution:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.... It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

The front-line thinkers of the emerging advertising and public relations industries turned to the key insights of Sigmund Freud, Bernays's uncle. As Bernays noted:

Many of man's thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which [he] has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired, not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself ... because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success.

Edward Bernays "described PR as a response to a transhistoric concern: the requirement, for those people in power, to shape the attitudes of the general population."

Bernays saw himself as a "propaganda specialist," a "public relations counsel," and PR as a more sophisticated craft than advertising as such; it was directed at hidden desires and subconscious urges of which its targets would be unaware. Bernays and his colleagues were anxious to offer their services to corporations and were instrumental in founding an entire industry that has since operated along these lines, selling not only corporate commodities but also opinions on a great range of social, political, economic, and environmental issues.

Though it has become fashionable in recent decades to brand scholars and academics as elites who pour scorn on ordinary people, Bernays and the sociologist Gustave Le Bon were long ago arguing, on behalf of business and political elites, respectively, that the mass of people are incapable of thought.

According to Le Bon, "A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first"; crowds "can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas," leading to "the utter powerlessness of reasoning when it has to fight against sentiment." Bernays and his PR colleagues believed ordinary people to be incapable of logical thought, let alone mastery of "abstruse economic, political and ethical data," and saw the need to "control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it"; PR could thus ensure the maintenance of order and corporate control in society.

Bernays and his PR colleagues believed ordinary people to be incapable of logical thought, let alone mastery of "abstruse economic, political and ethical data."

The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the late 20th century, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, "people recognize themselves in their commodities." Marcuse's critique of needs, made more than 50 years ago, was not directed at the issues of scarce resources or ecological waste, although he was aware even at that time that Marx was insufficiently critical of the continuum of progress and that there needed to be "a restoration of nature after the horrors of capitalist industrialisation have been done away with."

Marcuse directed his critique at the way people, in the act of satisfying our aspirations, reproduce dependence on the very exploitive apparatus that perpetuates our servitude. Hours of work in the United States have been growing since 1950, along with a doubling of consumption per capita between 1950 and 1990. Marcuse suggested that this "voluntary servitude (voluntary inasmuch as it is introjected into the individual) ... can be broken only through a political practice which reaches the roots of containment and contentment in the infrastructure of man [ sic], a political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values."

The difficult challenge posed by such a transvaluation is reflected in current attitudes. The Australian comedian Wendy Harmer in her 2008 ABC TV series called "Stuff" expressed irritation at suggestions that consumption is simply generated out of greed or lack of awareness:

I am very proud to have made a documentary about consumption that does not contain the usual footage of factory smokestacks, landfill tips and bulging supermarket trolleys. Instead, it features many happy human faces and all their wonderful stuff! It's a study of a love affair as much as anything else.

In the same vein, during the Q&A after a talk given by the Australian economist Clive Hamilton at the 2006 Byron Bay Writers' Festival, one woman spoke up about her partner's priorities: Rather than entertain questions about any impact his possessions might be having on the environment, she said, he was determined to "go down with his gadgets."

The capitalist system, dependent on a logic of never-ending growth from its earliest inception, confronted the plenty it created in its home states, especially the United States, as a threat to its very existence. It would not do if people were content because they felt they had enough. However over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for its "wonderful stuff."
Kerryn Higgs is an Australian writer and historian. She is the author of "Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet," from which this article is adapted.

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Over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff.

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This began after 1890 and is still going on today.

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As production increased in America, the people wanted to buy more. It started in America.

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An increase in agricultural productivity led to less people having to work on farms, so they moved to the city. The city populations boomed because of the imported food and the new jobs and innovations in factories and such.

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This political cartoon shows the effect of the working class on the robber barons. The working class worked for the barons and made them rich, while they themselves were still poor and struggling to "keep their heads above the water."

Photo from Wikimedia commons

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Production became easier and cheaper, and excess material possessions had previously been a sign of wealth. People wanted to look wealthy so they bought stuff.

Photo taken from https://www.njlifehacks.com/materialism-happiness/

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This video discusses how consumer culture came about and why it did.

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Consumer Culture in the Late 19th Century

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Ease of access, cost-effectiveness, and seeming extravagance in products were some of the impacts of the consumer culture. People wanted things easy and cheap, but to look nice. Material oriented people abounded, and money made a big difference.

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Investors, banks, and railroad companies were key players in the panic of 1873.

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The first global economic crisis, which involved both Europe and the United States. The panic was triggered by the collapse of the Vienna stock exchange in may of 1873.

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If you do not know the answer to when the Panic of 1873 took place, you really need to learn how to read a title.

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The Panic of 1873 was a massive panic in the U.S. and Europe.

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The stock market in Europe crashed and investors began to sell the stock that they owned.

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Causes, as named by the video:
Overproduction
Railroad speculation
Failure of man big banks

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The Panic of 1873: The Great Depression of the 19th Century

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Caused much unemployment, financial instability, decrease in immigration, and economic contraction.
It did not cause a complete collapse, however.

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Frederick Winslow Taylor founded Taylorism, and is called the father of scientific management.
Morris L. Cooke furthered Taylor's work.

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What is it? Watch the video:

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Gilbreth Time and Motion Study in Bricklaying

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It was introduced in 1909 in Taylor's book: The Principles of Scientific Management

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It started in Philadelphia.

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It occured to make working more efficient for better profits.
For more information, click the link.

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The "Scientific Management" movement was born in early twentieth-century Philadelphia factories but spread rapidly, transforming not only management techniques but also popular conceptions of industrialized society itself. According to its founders, the system simply sought the "one best way" to perform any task. But its time-study engineers, along with the assembly line, came to symbolize the bleak and mechanical organization of workers' lives by industrial engineers. Its advocates, on the other hand, hailed scientific management as the basis for the transformative increases in productivity that, they argued, improved the lives of working people.

Although many early management consultants contributed to the development of the system, Philadelphia's Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) is acknowledged as the "Father of Scientific Management"; in fact, the system is also known as "Taylorism." His concepts and practices were embraced by industrialists and municipal reformers, attracted devoted followers and harsh critics, and inspired, if indirectly, numerous movements seeking to reorganize society by making it more efficient. The first incubators of Taylor's experiments were Philadelphia factories, and by the mid-twentieth century his associates and imitators had installed "scientific" systems of management in all kinds of establishments throughout the region and, from there, the world. By the twenty-first century, timed-to-the-second fast-food and help-desk workers were so commonplace that most Americans did not realize how Taylorized their workplaces had become.

According to its proponents, scientific management sought the "one best way" to perform any task. Applied to manufacturing, and later to other fields, it meant that "waste" of any kind, especially waste of time, must be eliminated, resulting in vastly improved productivity. Whereas earlier manufacturing relied on the expert knowledge and decision-making of craftsmen, the new approach attempted to transfer all knowledge of the manufacturing process to management-and in particular to new planning departments-which would then instruct workmen on the precise methods and motions to be used to perform each job.

The "Efficiency Craze"

The system's implementation, in companies as varied as the Link-Belt Engineering Company at Hunting Park Avenue and Twenty-First Street in Nicetown, Cramp Shipyard in Port Richmond, and Bethlehem Steel in South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was often beset with problems and sometimes ultimately rejected. Yet the "efficiency craze" that Taylor launched spawned numerous management consulting firms as well as do-it-yourself efforts at many companies. His arguments also convinced corporate management that it must control all aspects of how work is done if it was to survive in the cutthroat competitive world of twentieth-century capitalism. Not unexpectedly, unions like the International Association of Machinists fought these new management schemes in order to defend their members' prerogatives and union work rules, and in other cases to oppose "speedup" or at least gain a larger share of the increased proceeds from greater productivity.

Despite the global spread of scientific management, its origins and first several decades were a thoroughly Philadelphia story. Frederick Winslow Taylor was born in 1856 in Germantown to an old Quaker family. He spent his youth attending Germantown Academy, touring Europe, and engaging in cricket with friends from similarly wealthy families, though he never matriculated at Harvard as expected. Perhaps surprisingly, he used family connections to instead begin an apprenticeship as a patternmaker and machinist at the Enterprise Hydraulic Works, a pump manufacturer at Twenty-Second and Race Streets. The Industrial Revolution was reshaping not only the American economy by the 1870s but also society itself, and Philadelphia was at its lead, rapidly becoming the " Workshop of the World." It was not unusual for some young men from wealthy families to use the route of apprenticeship to gain the knowledge they needed to advance in industry.

After he completed his apprenticeship at Enterprise, Taylor began working at Midvale Steel in Nicetown. Once again he tapped family connections, for Midvale was owned by the father of Taylor's tennis partner and by Taylor's future brother-in-law. He started at the bottom, working as a laborer for a few weeks to learn how jobs were done and to attempt to understand the motivations of workers. Taylor moved up quickly, eventually becoming chief engineer of the works, and it was in the course of his employment there that he developed the prototypes for the innovations he would become famous for.

Although Taylor is most remembered for his management and organizational ideas, he also made contributions to mechanical processes and machinery, designing a giant steam hammer at Midvale, developing "high-speed steel" at Bethlehem Steel, and earning 42 patents. In fact, he first used a stopwatch to gauge the performance of machine tools, but he soon applied the same techniques to measure the motions of human workers. As Taylor formulated and refined his approach to scientific management at a succession of companies in the Philadelphia region from the late 1870s to the early 1900s, he increasingly regarded workers as elements of the production process. In his view, their actions could be precisely molded, with the right incentive schemes, by a new type of management that left no leeway for personal discretion.

"Schmidt" the Achiever

In Taylor's most well known, if partially fabricated, description of his techniques, he claimed to have turned an average laborer at Bethlehem Steel he called "Schmidt" (actually named Henry Noll [1871-1925]) into a superhuman loader of pig iron (although he "firmly believe[d] that it would be possible to train an intelligent gorilla so as to become a more efficient pig-iron handler than any man can be"). Revealing his own class attitudes towards laborers, Taylor related, in his lectures and writings, what he thought of Schmidt, a "man so stupid that he was unfitted to do most kinds of laboring work," though he built his own house, was married, and had a grade-school education.

Although Schmidt was purportedly happy with the deal, other workers at Bethlehem and elsewhere were not. Taylor claimed that he did not oppose unions, but he believed they would be an unnecessary encumbrance in a scientifically managed company, where increased wages for greater output would make everyone richer-and happier. Consequently, he urged companies like Link-Belt to keep unions out and was disappointed when they ignored his advice. The experience of scientifically managed companies in regard to organized labor was checkered. Taylor proudly noted that workers at companies for which he consulted, such as Link-Belt and Tabor Manufacturing, did not participate in Philadelphia's massive general strike in 1910. But he did not mention the long and bitter strike that same year that targeted the bonus system at Bethlehem Steel, one of the remnants of Taylor's earlier efforts there. The resentment expressed by one employee of a Philadelphia manufacturer for the "silk-shirted bespectacled slide rule and stopwatch expert" who watched and timed his actions was not uncommon. Labor opposition to "speedup" systems grew rapidly, and Bethlehem workers even gave the system's founder a new moniker: "Speedy Taylor."

Unionists were not the only opponents of scientific management, however. Philadelphia companies like Baldwin Locomotive relied heavily on the expert skill and knowledge of their craftsmen and had no interest in Taylor's ideas. Others, like Cramp Shipyard and Bethlehem Steel, experimented extensively with the new approach but eventually rejected it, claiming it was expensive and highly disruptive. Yet even those companies kept some parts of the system in place: Bethlehem simply renamed Taylor's "instruction cards" to "speed cards." Cramp's management rejected his recommendation to "speed . . . up all of the machinery in your shops 60% beyond its present speed," but kept his better-organized tool room. Some avid enthusiasts, like Oberlin Smith (1840-1926) of Bridgeton, New Jersey's Ferracute Machinery Company, wanted to install the system, but Smith was "appalled" at the estimated expense to implement it in 1907, though he finally implemented a similar program some years later.

Workers and socialists attacked Taylor's version of scientific management for turning workers into automatons, deskilling craftsmen, and firing those who could not or would not perform as "first-class men." Yet, if managers strictly followed Taylor's prescriptions, the workers who remained did at least see pay increases, and piece rates were not reduced (at least initially). But after Taylor withdrew from active consulting in 1901, his disciples and followers, and soon other "consultants" who saw an opportunity to cash in on the latest management fad, were often less scrupulous about how the returns from increased productivity should be shared.

The Spread of "Taylorized" Systems

Several of the consultants who installed Taylor's system in Philadelphia became important in their own right and were responsible for the spread of "Taylorized" management systems far beyond the relative handful of companies that the founder implemented himself. His assistants worked on the two installations that became Taylor's showpieces of scientific management for visitors to Philadelphia, Link-Belt and the Tabor Manufacturing Company, and implemented some elements of the system at Philadelphia's Frankford Arsenal and the Navy Yard. The Link-Belt Company also led to the longest lasting direct Philadelphia descendant of Taylor's original group, the Day & Zimmermann management consulting firm. Although later diversified, it was started as Dodge & Day by Link-Belt founder's son Kern Dodge (1880-1958) and his friend Charles Day (1879-1931). After helping "modernize" Link-Belt with Taylor's consultants, they formed their own company and began doing the same for other clients, often in consultation with Taylor, starting with the Jeanesville Iron Works in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

Another close confidante of Taylor's, Morris L. Cooke (1872-1960), broadened the reach of the system to Philadelphia's city government and marked the further integration of scientific management with the Progressive movement, when he became the city's director of public works in 1911 and introduced several efficiency measures. Cooke wrote: "That these principles-enunciated by Taylor-can be applied to city work as they have been applied to scores of different kinds of industrial work is to me only too obvious. It opens up a field of endeavor which staggers the imagination." He followed up by firing a thousand city employees for inefficiency, brought in two hundred "expert" engineers to direct highway workers, and claimed to have saved the city some five million dollars. His attempt to convince President Woodrow Wilson to turn Washington, D.C., into a municipal laboratory, however, failed.

The "efficiency craze" spread across the country and the world after future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis coined the term "Scientific Management" during the famous Eastern Rate Case in 1910 and Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management the next year. But paradoxically, the founder's original strict interpretation of the system was diluted as more "efficiency experts" rushed to take advantage of the new opportunities. In 1911 Taylor complained that Harrington Emerson (1853-1931), a former close adherent of the Taylor method, had told Navy Yard officers that he could install all the "important" parts of Taylor's system in a few short months. Emerson later introduced his quicker and cheaper alternative in many other plants, including Lukens Steel in Coatesville, Pennsylvania.

Other companies like DuPont decided to try converting to "scientific" management methods on their own. Unfortunately, DuPont began its experiment in its Repauno High Explosives Operating Department near Gibbstown, New Jersey, in 1913. Although some employees complained that foremen were "rushing the men," the project continued until a massive explosion killed four workers. The experiment was moved to another building. It, too, suffered an explosion soon after, killing several more men. Interest in putting an efficiency scheme into practice did not resume until the Great Depression induced the company to find new ways to reduce costs.

Charles Bedaux, Simplifier

When DuPont did again embark on systematizing its operations, it did so with the consulting company of the colorful and controversial Charles Bedaux (1886-1944). His simple and relatively inexpensive program promised a quick return on investment without the lengthy and painstaking selection of workers, plant redesign, and job study required in Taylor's approach. In addition to DuPont, Lukens Steel also switched to the Bedaux plan, as did numerous other Delaware Valley companies. At Campbell Soup' s flagship plant in Camden the system became the flashpoint for innumerable conflicts between workers and management for several decades starting in the early 1930s. Soup plant workers complained that the "B" system was difficult to understand, targets were hard to meet (resulting in hundreds of firings), and that management changed targets unfairly. Yet the efficiency program was a central element of Campbell's successful drive to keep costs down and profits high. Workers at Keasbey and Mattison, an asbestos shingle manufacturer and the largest employer in Ambler, Pennsylvania, however, were more successful in ending the Bedaux system there; the company threw the system out in 1937 due to "labor unrest."

By World War II, time-and-motion study and job standards were no longer a novelty. Young women working in the secretarial pool at the Army Ordnance offices on South Broad Street and machine tenders in steel fabrication plants had become accustomed to "efficiency experts" timing and monitoring their work. Later management trends claimed to replace Taylorism with newer approaches to work and workers, but most of them were deeply indebted to the Germantown native. The central concepts of "Lean Production," for example, were the elimination of waste-especially waste of time-and continuous improvement, all with the goal of increasing productivity. Both original scientific management and its later incarnations also claimed to be in the best interest of workers.

The central argument for the beneficial effects of Taylorism for employees rested on the premise that the proceeds from increased productivity would be shared equitably between management and labor, by the mechanism of the system's bonus incentive plan. It has even been credited with raising the standard of living for Philadelphia's working class generally. The first objection to this argument concerned all those left out of it. Taylor himself said there were very few "first-class men" for any job, and those who could not make the grade, whether at Bethlehem Steel or Campbell Soup, were dismissed. Those who survived the cut worked much harder than before and lost any discretion they previously had in determining how they performed their jobs, but they did see increased wages-in companies that strictly followed Taylor's rules. The cardinal principle here was that management would not raise the amount of work needed to reach the bonus level once a job had been "scientifically" studied and rated. Very few companies kept to this precept for very long, however.

At its core, Taylorism was a class philosophy, in which strict but benevolent masters would provide well for their subordinates as long as they did exactly as they were told. Far more responsible for raising Philadelphia's workers' standard of living were the efforts they expended themselves. In the defensive strikes of unionized craftsmen early in the twentieth century and the mass unionization drives by industrial workers during the Great Depression and World War II, workers fought for and often won a greater share of the increased productivity resulting from Taylorism and other efficiency schemes.

Daniel Sidorick teaches labor history at Rutgers University New Brunswick. He is the author of Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Copyright 2015, Rutgers University

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Scientific Management - Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia

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The "Scientific Management" movement was born in early twentieth-century Philadelphia factories and spread rapidly.

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Workers were lazy and inefficient, working at slow paces.

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Terence V. Powderly started and leaded the Knights of Labor.

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The Knights of Labor wanted to end child labor and forced labor for criminals.

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257 - Knights of Labor vs. American Federation of Labor

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Knights of Labor was founded in 1869

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Knights of Labor was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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They wanted standardized work hours, and for the people making stuff to own the companies.

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The Knights of Labor (article) | Khan Academy

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In the late nineteenth century, the Knights of Labor attempted to organize workers of all kinds into a union to improve working hours and conditions for laborers.

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It was originally a secret society. It was formed because of the need to protect workers' rights.

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It won against major railroad companies and managed to help workers stay safe.

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Samuel Gompers
John McBride
William Green
George Meany

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They standardized the 8-hour workday on 1 May 1890.

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Founded in December of 1886.

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AMERICA

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It was created as an alternative to the unsuccessful Knights of labor.

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Terrible labor conditions led to the rise of labor unions.