num_pages: 237
description: Analyzing the history of the movement to shorten the workday in late nineteenth-century New York City and Berlin this book explores what Karl Polanyi has termed the fictitious commodification of labor. Despite the concepts significance for present-day social movements European and North American historiography has largely ignored the impact of free-market rhetoric on the formation of organized labor. Filling this gap Philipp Reick provides both a contribution to the current reevaluation of Polanyian thought and theory and an interdisciplinary investigation of the trans-Atlantic transmission of ideas.As Reick demonstrates while on both sides of the Atlantic workers opposed the unchecked commodification of labor power as a violation of their political social and economic rights the emerging movements for protection from commodification did not promote a universalist concept of rights. By showing that American and German workers drew upon a strikingly similar rationality when formulating demands this book reveals that we cannot label either the US labor movement as a deviation from the supposed norm of industrial contestation or its German counterpart as the embodiment of that norm.
language: English
title: "Labor Is Not a Commodity!": The Movement to Shorten the Workday in Late Nineteenth-Century Berlin and New York
publisher: Campus Verlag