Peter Frase

It appears that everyone with a presence on the Internet is obligated to post some kind of riff on the amazing Google Ngram Viewer. Via Henry Farrell, I see that Daniel Little has attempted to perpetrate some social science, which made me think that perhaps while I’m at it, I can post something that actually relates to my dissertation research for a change. Hence, this:

Click for a bigger version, but the gist is that the red line indicates the phrase “higher wages”, and the blue line is “shorter hours”. Higher wages have a head start, with hours not really appearing on the agenda until the late 19th century. That’s a bit later than I expected, but it’s generally consistent with what I know about hours-related labor struggle in the 19th century.

The 20th century is the more interesting part of the graph in any case. For a while, it seems that discussion of wages and hours moves together. They rise in the period of ferment after World War I, and again during the depression. Both decline during World War II, which is unsurprising–both wage and hour demands were subordinated to the mobilization for war. But then after the war, the spike in mentions of “higher wages” greatly outpaces mentions of “shorter hours”–the latter has only a small spike, and thereafter the phrase enters a secular decline right through to the present.

Interest in higher wages appears to experience a modest revival in the 1970’s, corresponding to the beginnings of the era of wage stagnation that we are still living in. But for the first time, there is no corresponding increase in discussion of shorter hours. This is again not really surprising, since the disappearance of work-time reduction from labor’s agenda as been widely remarked upon. But it’s still pretty interesting to see such evidence of it in the written corpus.