Gender in Store: Salespeople’s Working Hours and Union Organisation in New Zealand and the United States, 1930-60

Evan Roberts*

Explanations for the weakness of retail employees’ unions have often emphasised that a high proportion of salespeople were women with low attachment to the labour force and unions. Comparing the experience of salespeople’s unions in Wellington (New Zealand) and Saint Paul (Minnesota), this paper shows instead that perceptions of women as consumers shaped the political environment in which retail unions tried to control working hours. After 1930s legislation in both countries denied salespeople the 40 hour week other occupations had been granted, retail unions in Saint Paul and Wellington focussed their efforts on achieving a 40 hour, five-day week. While both unions were successful in gaining their 40 hour week, when that goal had been accomplished they lost the commitment of their members, revealing the structural limitations of craft-based unionism trying to organise workers in an industry which was organised on merchandise, not functional, principles.

Introduction
‘Who are the most important people in the store?’ the Saint Paul, Minnesota, Retail Clerks’ Union asked its members in 1955. Their answer belied self interest and the contested social space in department stores; We have heard it is the customer, but we disagree. We believe it is the sales clerk without question. The reason is because the clerk has direct contact with the customer and through this contact the store portrays its personality as a whole. Yes, the clerk represents the store, and to customers is to a large degree the store itself.1 But 30 years earlier in New Zealand, the staff at Farmers’ department store were told that customers were not mere buyers. They are not outside people who come in to buy things. They are more important than the goods. They are more important than the system and routine of the shop.2 Similarly, in Saint Paul salespeople at the Golden Rule department store were told that The boss of this store is the customer. It’s for the customer you and I are working. It’s the customers that you and I are here to please. It’s the customers who pay your wages and mine. Without the customers no store can exist. The treatment they receive at your hands is what they judge the store by. To the customer you are the store.3	1
Despite the distance in time and space between these statements they are part of the same conversation. Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century people in both New Zealand and the United States contested whether department stores were places where people worked, or spent time shopping. They were both, ‘machines for selling’ and ‘palaces of consumption’. As machines for selling they were cultural icons far out of proportion to the share of coin they transacted. In America’s largest cities some stores employed between 4,000 and 20,000 people, but their share of retail trade was small. In 1930, United States department stores transacted just nine per cent of total retail spending. In New Zealand it was probably lower.4	2
It is impossible to know exactly who made those purchases, but the common view was that customers were mainly women. Advertising in the Dry Goods Economist, the department store trade magazine read throughout the English speaking world, the National Cash Register Company told store owners ‘Women do ninety per cent of the buying in department stores’. Salespeople in Saint Paul and New Zealand learnt the statistic in their staff magazines. Department stores’ reputation as an ‘Adamless Eden’ was completed by the high proportion of women in the ranks of salespeople. In both countries around two-thirds of salespeople were women.5	3
‘Madame the Customer’ and the ‘Shopgirl’ had a relationship that necessarily conflicted. ‘Consumption’ meant more than purchasing goods. Store owners promoted the desirability of spending time and money together, advertising themselves as places to spend the whole day. Leisured attitudes to customers’ time in store was promoted in New Zealand too. Whenever stores were open saleswomen had to be there to encourage and enable purchasing. Shorter working hours, or more leisure, for saleswomen meant fewer shopping opportunities for customers.6 From the 1930s to the 1960s, retail unions in both Saint Paul and Wellington struggled to reduce the hours saleswomen worked. For both Local Number 2 of the Retail Clerks’ International Association in Saint Paul (Local 2), and the Wellington Amalgamated Shop Assistants’ Association (Wellington shop assistants) this campaign focussed on achieving a 40 hour, five day week. These campaigns can be read as straightforward and unconnected narratives of progress towards a shorter working week in two cities 8,000 miles apart. Seen in the context of earlier legislative limitations on women’s working hours, the cultural conjunction of women and consumption, and the shift from a culture of production to a culture of consumption, a different story of these campaigns emerges. It is, first, a story of two pairs of ideas in tension. There was tension between the interests of women as consumers, or as workers. There was tension between two notions of ‘consumption’, time or money.7 Second, it is a story of the limitations of craft unions’ ability to represent workers in firms organised on merchandise lines, rather than function, in an environment where unions’ goals conflicted with customers.	4
Precisely because there were important institutional differences in political and industrial relations systems means that the parallels in union behaviour that are found point to some stronger lessons about how modern unions can organise effectively in the service sector. Salespeople in Wellington and Saint Paul were represented by craft unions – unions which were defined by occupational distinction. What people did on the job was the criteria for belonging to a craft union, in this case unions of salespeople in department stores. In both cities the unions for department store salespeople were affiliated with ‘clerks’ (the American term) or ‘shop assistants’ (the English and Australasian term) in grocery stores, pharmacies and butchers’ shops. In New Zealand, the arbitration system was critical in ensuring the predominance of craft based unions in the mid-twentieth century. In the United States, however, craft and industrial unions competed for members in an environment with less institutional support for unions, even following the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 which recognised the role of unions in the industrial relations system.	5
What emerges from the story of how Local 2 and the Wellington shop assistants tried to limit working hours is that effective union organisation has to take account of how firms are organised and managed, and how the interests of firms’ customers can restrict unions’ abilities to control aspects of the work process. Department stores were an exemplary and early example of firms whose organisational divisions were largely based on what was being sold, not what was being done. Heads of departments had authority over both merchandise buying decisions, and the dayto-day management of salespeople in the department. Thus, disputes that arose between management and salespeople about the work process were often localised to one department. Disputes about the particular management of one department could not be the basis for salespeople identifying common interests and unionising effectively. Moreover, many departments had employees who were not salespeople. Tailors, clerical staff and waitresses, for example, were also employed by department stores, worked alongside the salespeople, and had a common interest in working hours. Craft unions did not bring these occupational groups together in either Wellington or Saint Paul. Once salespeople’s unions had achieved their goal of a 40 hour week, they had little with which to retain the commitment of their members. The lesson for union organisation in the service sector today is that they should represent a range of occupational groups, acknowledging the reality that the interests of drivers, waitresses, and checkout clerks employed in the same industry, sometimes by the same firm, will overlap.	6
‘A Long Way From New York’: Commercial and Economic Similarities
Wellington and Saint Paul were both small nodes in world commerce, distant from the centres of the department store world. It was during the 1840s that European settlement expanded in both cities. By 1865, both were political capitals of rapidly expanding territories with extensive agricultural and extractive industry. Both cities developed around the break in transport between water and land. The main department stores were founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, influenced in their practices by the flow of immigrants and ideas from older cities. At the beginning of the twentieth century, neither city was regarded as the commercial capital of its territory. Wellington was overshadowed by Auckland. Saint Paul was eclipsed by Minneapolis. Saint Paul and Wellington had an ambivalent importance between local and global. A 1915 advertisement in the Dry Goods Economist appealed to the isolation of Twin Cities merchants: ‘It’s a Long Way from New York to Minnesota’ they announced in promoting lecture tours about department store merchandising. The lectures never came to Wellington. Merchants had to be content with reading the same magazines. Australian and British media sometimes filtered the American sources, and made their own contribution to the pot-pourri of international influences on New Zealand department stores. Despite the distance, Saint Paul and Wellington were part of the same English-speaking culture and capitalist world economy. Even discounting self-interest, there is truth in the Dry Goods Economist message in its celebratory ‘First World Wide Number’; Merchants … in Australia and New Zealand … had discovered how valuable an aid [the Dry Goods Economist] could be … In other words the retailer in Melbourne was anxious to know how his fellow-merchant in Minneapolis kept up sales.8	7
Staff magazines show similar influences on department stores in Minnesota and New Zealand. Extracts from books about sales methods, and advice to ambitious salespeople were sometimes identical, and often from the same source. Extracts from the Dry Goods Economist were common. Ideas sometimes followed a less direct path from New York to Wellington. New Zealand retailers had three local trade magazines, two published in New Zealand and one in Sydney, which excerpted American trade publications, and published news about American retailing.9	8
Stores were fundamentally similar in New Zealand and Saint Paul, down to the stereotype of the ‘country customer’. A luggage salesperson in Saint Paul said farmers were ‘a trifle backward, some of them won’t talk’, and advised his colleagues how to deal with rural folk. In New Zealand, Farmers’ staff were regaled with the story of a ‘country customer who … completely confounded the liftman and practically sent the passengers into the hysterics’ because of his excitement at seeing the parrot which was a symbol of the store’s advertising. In all the efforts at identifying types of customers that were made by department stores in New York and Boston, the ‘country customer’ was rarely seen. Saint Paul and Wellington were indeed a long way from New York.10	9
Protecting the Shopgirl: Working Hours Legislation in Minnesota and New Zealand
Economic and commercial similarities provide one basis for comparison. Another platform is the overlap in progressive politics. By the 1880s, there was a tension between the motivation to settle in Minnesota or New Zealand, and the reality of it. Migrants often wanted to escape industrialisation, but industry and concentrated economic power followed quickly. New Zealand was at the end of the earth, settlers could go no further. In the United States the frontier appeared to be closing. In both territories there was a perception of dependent, colonial relations with financial centres in London, New York or Chicago. The political response in both Minnesota and New Zealand was to turn to the state. In New Zealand this movement has been called ‘socialism without doctrines’ or ‘state socialism’. In Minnesota the response included both Populism and Progressivism. A unifying description is ‘governmentalism’. The state could stall or reverse evils of industry. Founding myths of both countries combine equality and democracy. Wheat farmers in Minnesota, and small sheep farmers in New Zealand, expressed their outrage at railroad rates or large ‘gentry’ sheep stations by appealing to the violation of these ideals. They proposed state action to set railroad rates or ‘bust up’ great estates. The advocates of governmentalism were often small town professionals, farmers, labourers, and some of the skilled working classes. When they united they were successful in passing legislation, but they were always opposed.11	10
Rural gentry in New Zealand and industrialists in Minnesota fought successfully to dilute the impact of governmentalism. In New Zealand, the Liberal government gave voice and legislation to governmentalism between 1890 and 1911, but then splintered. Labour overtook the Liberals as the dominant left-wing party but did not gain government until 1935. In Minnesota, the party organisation of liberals was also fragmented. Party discipline was weaker than in New Zealand. Liberal politicians belonged to the Republican, Democratic and Farmers’ Alliance parties. Though Minnesota elected liberal Democratic Governors in 1898 and 1904, and Farmer Labor Governors in the 1930s, governmentalism was less successful for three reasons. First, Minnesota’s republican constitution limited the impact of any one branch of government. New Zealand had a formally bicameral parliamentary system, but was effectively a unicameral state with the executive largely selected from the majority party in the lower chamber. Second, urban concentration and industry was greater in Minnesota, making opposition to progressivism more effective.12 Third, Minnesota was part of the United States, and opponents of governmentalism had powerful allies outside the state.	11
There were important connections between legislation in Wellington and Saint Paul. The turn of the twentieth century saw a correspondence of ideas about labour legislation. Australasian compulsory arbitration systems were of intense interest to reformers in the United States, including Minnesota. The Farmers Alliance proposed the adoption of compulsory arbitration. Governor John Lind urged the adoption of the ‘New Zealand principle of compulsory arbitration’, and was supported by the St Paul Pioneer Press. Lind’s valedictory speech in 1901 repeated the call, but his proposal led to no legislation in his time. John Ryan from the Saint Paul Seminary also publicised Australasian laws in Minnesota, and when a minimum wage law passed in 1913, it was attributed to his ‘persistent work’.13	12
Minnesota’s Labor Relations Act of 1939 introduced a State Labor Conciliator. Employer and employee representatives could appeal to the conciliator to mediate, but the relationship was voluntary conciliation, not compulsory and binding arbitration. Minnesota’s government intervened in industrial relations more than most American states did. Local 2 described the Act as ‘legislation that effects [sic] labor and which is trying to take away what they have already gotten’. In New Zealand, shop assistants were happy to ‘nestle safely within the arbitration system and to receive gratefully such benefits as it conferred on their members’. Neither industrial relations system was based on free contract, and states intervened to resolve industrial disputes. Legislation recognized union claims to represent workers in collective bargaining. The price of state recognition was state oversight of union activity. From 1936, New Zealand unions had the institutional security of compulsory unionism, leavened with greater government overview. There are substantial differences between voluntary conciliation, and compulsory arbitration and unionism. The differences are encapsulated in the constant struggle of Local 2 to retain members, while in Wellington the union had to accept members they did not want.14	13
Arbitration was part of a flurry of legislative reform between 1890 and 1911 under the New Zealand Liberal government. Laws restricting women’s working hours were also expanded. The first law restricting the hours women worked was passed in 1873 and formed the basis of the 1892 Shops and Shop Assistants Act. Pressure for the 1892 law came after inquiries into allegations of ‘sweating’ in shops. Contrary to Arcadian mythology, some women were working 12 hours a day, six days a week in poor conditions. A Colonial Early Closing Association pressed for legislation to limit the trading hours of shops, and invoked the customers’ welfare. Writing under the pseudonym ‘No Gaslight Shopping’, a draper’s assistant argued that ‘They will have daylight so that they won’t be put off with a green for “a beautiful blue”. A faded tie is often palmed off onto them for “perfect goods” by gaslight’. Shop assistants tried to finesse the conflict between their leisure and the customers by arguing that customers also suffered when shops opened late. The terms of the debate linking customers’ shopping hours and salespeople’s working hours were set early. They recurred across time in New Zealand, and were echoed across space in the United States.15	14
After 1892, the Shops and Shop Assistants Act was amended 22 times in 70 years, mostly defining which shops were excluded. Department stores were always included. Initially a work week of 52 hours excluding meal times was introduced, with no daily limit. A daily limit of 9.5 hours was introduced in 1894 and reduced in 1904 to nine hours, with two extra hours on Friday. In 1920, weekly work hours were reduced to 48, and in 1921 male assistants were included.16	15
Minnesota’s first law limiting women’s working hours passed in 1909 and limited women’s weekly working hours in shops to 58. In 1917, daily hours of work for ‘any person’ were limited to ten, and in 1933 women’s weekly hours of work were reduced to 54. Minnesota was one of a number of American states with little legislation restricting women’s working hours specifically. Actual hours worked in Saint Paul department stores tended to be between 48 and 54, though about one in five saleswomen were working 54 to 58 hours a week.17	16
Minnesota’s 1909 legislation resembled New Zealand’s 1892 law. New Zealand was five years past an important change in working hours limitation. As in Europe and Australia, working and trading hours were linked. A consolidation of the law in 1904 limited shops in the ‘four main centres’ to opening no earlier than 8am everyday, closing no later than 6pm on four days, closing no later than 9pm on the fifth full workday, and giving employees a ‘half-holiday’ on the sixth workday. Sunday trading remained illegal, despite no state religion, and comparatively low church attendance. Before 1912, when the first Softgood Employees’ Union formed in Wellington, salespeople’s legislative influence was limited. The conflation of trading and working hours by Wellington salespeople was not their invention. Customers’ interests in trading hours and employees’ interests in working hours were linked before the union formed.18	17
Conflicts between customers’ shopping time and employees’ working hours were sharpest at closing time. Department stores told salespeople that customers should be allowed to finish their shopping if they had entered the store before closing time. ‘Customers’, the Farmers’ store in Auckland told its staff, ‘often wonder what all the hurry is about … at the close of the day’s work’. This position was backed by legislation. From 1921, the Shops and Offices Act allowed 15 minutes unpaid overtime at the close of trade for late customers. Minnesota’s legislature was not so attentive to the details of salespeople’s contracts, but it was a recurring complaint of Local 2 that stores insisted the 15 minutes after closing time be uncompensated.19	18
‘Madame the Consumer’: Gendered Perceptions of Time in Department Stores
A 15 minute tithe to end the day was common to salespeople in Saint Paul and Wellington. Despite differences in labour legislation and industrial relations the same issue was identically resolved. Grievances about unpaid work for late customers were inevitable given department stores’ view of their customers’ behaviour. In both countries women were thought to be the majority of customers. A sumptuous literature shows how consumption of goods in Western countries was gendered in the twentieth century. Perceptions of time in retailing were also gendered, and limited unions’ attempts to control working hours.20	19
It was a dictum of advertising and retailing until at least 1960 that the vast majority of customers were women. ‘Ninety per cent of store customers are women. Please them’, the staff at the Golden Rule were told. Years later in New Zealand, the same basic message was being repeated: ‘Women do most of the buying. We must never forget that. They even influence about 70% of the motor-car sales’. Even sales of men’s clothing were influenced by women: ‘Women buy 90 per cent of men’s suits. Directly or indirectly, they influence nine out of ten sales … She is more interested in her husband’s appearance than he is’. It was thought that men wanted to shop quickly, so they could return to work and earn money for their wives’ shopping; ‘the busy business man finds no enjoyment in elbowing his way through crowds of women’. Men were not natural shoppers, but women shopped instinctively. The Dry Goods Economist told its readers around the world that; Primarily, man is not a shopper, in the sense that a woman is; he will be eventually, but it will require some years of suggestion and training before he can be depended upon “to go out and look, just to see if there is anything he wants.” Women do this. It is feminine trait, prenatal and also cultivated.21 [emphasis added]	20
The perceived need to save men’s time affected the design of stores. James Smith’s department store in Wellington claimed that ‘Men like to shop at James Smith’s Store for Men because it is not an after-thought to a woman’s store, but a Real Men’s Store in itself. Separate entrance, Manners Street’ [emphasis added]. American authorities on department store management recommended laying out stores so men could shop quickly. During the early twentieth century, when many firms built new stores, the Dry Goods Economist recommended stores ‘Keep your men’s shops so far removed, so completely quarantined against your women’s shops that men won’t know the women are there’. After World War II, when stores redesigned interiors, they were reminded that women liked crowds, but men wanted space being able to leave quickly. Whereas it was normal for women to buy clothes, the oddity of the male customer was revealed in the asymmetric assumption that men shopping in women’s departments were lost.22	21
Women were encouraged to linger. As well as goods to buy, there were things to see including fashion and music shows, art displays, lounges, post offices, and playrooms for children. New Zealand stores copied what foreign stores did. Department stores tried hard to attract middle class women. Women customers had lots of time to spend in stores. Their concept of time well spent differed from the salesperson’s. Women customers’ perceived disdain for salespeople’s time is illustrated in two cartoons appearing in Farmers’ staff magazine 20 years apart (Figure 1). Both show women customers asking male assistants to entirely empty the shelves without intending to buy anything. The women in the cartoons range in age from a child to a grandmother. Regardless of age this was a feminine trait. In both cartoons the salesperson is a man. Men did work in material departments, because they were needed to lift heavy bolts of material. These cartoons clearly illustrate gendered conceptions of time. Other illustrations in staff magazines and trade literature show female salespeople, reflecting that women were the majority of department store salespeople.23	22
Thus, customers were women who shopped for a long time. To make their staff appreciate this, Farmers’ told them that, ‘When a woman goes home from a shopping expedition, she generally gives a full hour to telling the story of what she did and what happened to her’, though how they knew it was an hour was not revealed. In the 1920s, United States department stores attempted to make customer classifications more scientific. New Zealand stores followed this effort with interest. Gail Reekie argues that the main psychological characterisation of customers came down to ‘predictable men’ and ‘impulsive women’. This is too simple. Images of sceptical, discriminating and bargain hunting women were also present. Common to all these images was that women shopped for a long time. The impulsive women had to be encouraged to stay in the store. Bargain hunters and sceptical women took a long time of their own accord.24	23
Defending the Time of Housewives
Women were also often seen as ‘housewives’. Despite different personalities, tastes, and incomes, all shopped while their husbands worked. All housewives needed time to shop, and department stores argued they had to meet that need. In both Minnesota and New Zealand, department stores’ service to housewives was strongly stated when stores felt opening hours might be limited. Facing a threat of Saturday closing in 1938, New Zealand retailers defended the shopping time of housewives. As in America, New Zealand retailers never called on any actual housewife to put her case to the Arbitration Court. The reality of married women outside of the paid work force in the mid-twentieth century is not in doubt, but the housewife who spoke on behalf of retailers was a rhetorical construct in service to their interests.	24
For a housewife, Saturday was ‘the only opportunity she has to get away to town and do the shopping’. Housewives who had been caring for children all week only had Saturday to leave children with their husband and go shopping in the daylight.25 The other image New Zealand retailers drew on was the ‘factory girl’. Like the housewife, she did not personally appear before the Court. She was a handy image, as her opinions were construed to support what housewives had just said in support of Saturday shopping. Seen as a girl, she could be imagined to one day be a housewife. A Christchurch department store owner said that ‘Girls in Factories liked shopping in the light because the colour factor today enters largely into the makeup of girls’ requirements’. Asked if the ‘factory girl’ could shop after she finished work at 4pm, Hay, the department store owner, replied that ‘you have to remember that most girls like to go home and be properly dressed before turning out to shop’. Even the gaslights advertised as equivalent to daylight were not enough, so Saturday opening had to stay. Fictional housewives and factory girls were effective advocates for department stores’ wishes. In 1936, weekly hours in factories and offices had been reduced to 40 over five days, but weekly hours in shops remained at 44, the extra hours on Saturday morning.26 Figure 1 : Salespeople and department store executives believed women customers spent a lot of time shopping. Gender differences in the perception of how to spend time shopping are accentuated by the portrayal of the salespeople as male.   Sources: ‘To Satisfy the Enquiring Mind’, Farmers’ Union Trading Company’s Optimist, no. 143, October 1926, p. 7. Auckland War Memorial Museum and Library MS 1400 Box 9, 55/73. “Just Looking”, Big Store News, 2 May 1948, Auckland War Memorial Museum and Library MS1400 Box 9, 55/147.	25
Housewives were also useful to United States department stores. Like New Zealand’s Labour government, the Roosevelt administration included reformed labour legislation in its program. National Recovery Administration (NRA) codes promulgated in 1933 had limited weekly hours to 40, but the codes were declared unconstitutional in May 1935. Saint Paul salespeople were back to hours determined by contract with downtown stores, and the higher hours allowed by Minnesota law. When the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) passed in 1938, 98 per cent of retail workers were not entitled to the 40 hour week it mandated. Retailing industries had their exemptions and wanted to keep it that way.27	26
In New Zealand, retailers could not legitimately complain that government was remote from its concerns. As a unitary state of one and a half million people with a powerful House of Representatives, and a weak upper house, the state was too close to the issues. Determination of shops’ half-holidays was controlled locally. Every borough in the country could decide which day stores would close in the afternoon. In the United States, the New Deal dramatically changed the pattern of government involvement in industrial relations. Until the 1930s, labour law was principally the concern of state governments. National uniformity came from the Supreme Court not the federal government. Retailers in the United States had a constitutional argument their counterparts in New Zealand did not have or need. United States retailers argued they should be exempt from federal labour standards because retailing was not ‘inter-state commerce’.28	27
When a bill to include retail employees under the FLSA was introduced in 1948 American retailers were alarmed. In 1937, the American Retail Federation had supported the FLSA because it gave other workers more time to shop, and exempted their industry. Department store owners were not opposed to legislation per se, but argued ‘retailing is essentially a local enterprise’, so legislative oversight was best kept local. They would repeat this claim until 1961 when the FLSA was amended to cover the retail trade. In 1961, the ‘essentially local character’ of retailing, and the ‘complete divorcement of its operations from the stream of interstate commerce’ were not ‘easily demonstrated’ to Congress. New Zealand and the United States had different constitutional structures. New Zealand provided an institutional platform – the Arbitration Court – for store owners to present their claims in. But the scale of organised business representation to government was smaller and agriculture, not commerce, was the most powerful lobby. Despite these differences in political environment the same imagery was used to respond to the same threat to department stores’ interests. United States retailers invoked the interests of the housewife they had long claimed to serve.29	28
Occasionally store owners were honest in their self-interest. The National Retail Merchants’ Association said ‘for the industry’s sake, we do believe that the retail exemption should remain intact’. Mostly they proclaimed themselves bidden to customers’ demands. The National Retail Dry Goods Association – department stores’ principal lobby – repeatedly opined that ‘The business hours of retail stores … are dictated and controlled by the requirements of the stores’ customers’. Stores did what female customers asked; All I can say is that the one person we deal with and all retail people deal with is Mrs. Public, the consumer, and she has wanted lower prices for a long time.30	29
If salespeople were paid the same for a shorter working week without reducing trading hours, prices would rise as more staff were employed. Male proprietors could not divine when unpredictable women might shop. Stores had to be kept open to accommodate any possible time they might wish to shop. Customers’ shopping habits were ‘fluctuating and uncontrollable’. Manufacturers could easily schedule and control their workforce. But, the retailer ‘is controlled entirely by the buying impulse of his customers. Mrs. Smith may decide at ten o’clock she wants to buy a dress, or she may decide not to’.31	30
Store proprietors claimed it was a positive benefit for salespeople that Mrs. Smith sometimes decided not to buy a dress at ten o’clock. Salespeople still had to be there. Between customers it was an easy job. The Minnesota Employers Association described retail work as ‘waiting on the trade. This work requires relatively little effort, skill or training’. Their claim that it was easy work ignored the reality that store managers tried to have salespeople doing anything productive when there were no customers, so long as staff speedily responded when customers came. In manufacturing, workers were sent home if production slowed, but shops had to have people there. Ignoring the fact that stores knew trade was highly seasonal, they claimed that unlike manufacturing, department store jobs guaranteed an annual wage.32	31
For retailers, even their employees were women who were seen to be working to consume. There was no conflict of interest between the interests of women as consumers and women as salespeople. Salespeople were a just subset of consumers. ‘Many’ salespeople were ‘supplemental wage earners’ and ‘not the breadwinners but either wives or mothers supplementing family income’. A ‘large majority’ of saleswomen in the store were just ‘bringing home a second pay check in the family’; they were ‘housewives’ earning ‘pin-money, pocket-money, and fun-money’, and merely ‘adding to a going family operation’. Department store owners tried to erase the image of the shopgirl who motivated protective labour legislation by saying she was now a housewife. Housewives did not need their working hours restricted, because they wanted extra money for consumer goods.33	32
In defending housewives’ shopping time, department store owners in New Zealand and the United States reveal the tension between consumption as time or goods, and the tension between women consumers and women as workers. The irony of the FLSA and the Factories Act is that until the 1930s, legislation restricting hours was often to protect women. Now laws were nominally gender neutral, but the exclusion of retailing meant many working women now had less restricted working hours than men. Appearing to write gender out of 1930s hours legislation did not make the debate less gendered. Instead the terrain on which existing ideas about gender were debated was shifted. Debates about reducing the working hours of saleswomen were framed, not by the language of ‘protection’, but by the cultural image of woman consumers.	33
In both countries the nominal gender neutrality of labour legislation was contentious. Gender neutral shop hours legislation was established in New Zealand in 1921. However, in both countries in the 1930s women workers were effectively discriminated against. New Zealand’s Factories Act largely covered male workers and established a 40 hour week. Women in shops had to work up to 44 hours a week. In the United States, the FLSA covered similar proportions (one third) of male and female workers. Suzanne Mettler has shown that many men who were not covered already received better conditions than FLSA minimum hours. Women who were not covered had worse conditions than mandated minima. Gender neutral language allowed salespeople to gain coverage nine (New Zealand) and 23 (United States) years later. In both countries politics dictated exclusion. Frances Perkins introduced cautious legislation that would pass Congress and the Supreme Court. New Zealand’s Labour government firstly addressed the concerns of politically stronger unions, and then worried about reduced shopping hours. In both countries, Keynesian ideas of a consumer led recovery from the Depression also contributed to government support for department stores’ interests.34	34
Though the interests of housewives were invoked by department stores in New Zealand and the United States, the relationship between trading hours and working hours was reversed. In New Zealand, the 1904 Shops and Offices Act limited working hours by controlling trading hours – when shops opened. New Zealand retail unions supported limits on working hours by regulation of trading hours. Department store owners tried to separate trading and working hours by suggesting evening shifts by part-time employees.35 By contrast in the United States, store owners feared restriction of working hours under the FLSA would impose a de facto limitation on trading hours. American retailers were quite frank that	35
Customers have their own ideas about when it’s convenient to shop and they spend their money in stores that make it easy and convenient for them. This sometimes means more than a 40 hour week.36
American unions argued that limitation of working hours would not affect trading hours. Thus, retailers’ representation of housewives’ interests was similar but the position of retailers and unions on the link between trading and working hours was reversed.37	36
Campaigns for a 40 Hour Week in Saint Paul and Wellington
To this point the discussion has referred to New Zealand and the United States, providing illustrations where possible from Wellington and Saint Paul. As the national capital, and second largest city, Wellington was more important in New Zealand than Saint Paul was in the United States. After the 1930s, when labour conditions in both countries were more often determined nationally this difference is important in explaining why Local 2 and Wellington shop assistants demanded a 40 hour week in different ways. In Wellington the distance between local and national concerns was limited, more so because the union’s secretary was the secretary of the New Zealand shop assistants federation. In Saint Paul Local 2 hoped national legislation would provide a 40 hour week, but had little influence on the debate. Though both unions would achieve a 40 hour week, their progress demonstrates the limitations of craft based unionism in department stores, and in a political environment where consumers’ interests were important.	37
The local existence of the debate on women as housewives or saleswomen in Saint Paul is illustrated by a Minneapolis department store advertisement from 1947 that Local 2 saved in its files (Figure 2). Dayton’s portrayed itself as able to resolve any conflict between working and shopping hours. The advertisement relies on the oppositional ideas of women as consuming housewives or working women. The housewife’s economic dependence on her husband is immediate because she shopped after taking her husband to work. Shopping and socialisation are associated in the reference to a lunch date. Dayton’s ordering of shopping ‘after driving John to work’ at nine o’clock followed by lunch, padded with ‘ample time’ suggests how long department stores thought women might shop for.38	38
The message delivered by the ‘lucky Daytonan’ exemplifies themes discussed above, and introduces others. Five days and 40 hours are conjoined as a benefit. In Saint Paul the members of Local 2 discovered to their surprise that the 40 hours over six days they had accepted could be worse than even 44 hours over five days.39 The image of a woman riding a bicycle suggests shorter hours give more time for leisure. While the ‘busy housewife’ has a car, the ‘lucky Daytonan’ caught the bus. The housewife is partially defined by her relationship to John, her friend for lunch (presumably also a housewife) and ‘Junior’, but the ‘lucky Daytonan’ gets a weekly day to herself. Where is her fiancé or beau? Perhaps she would soon be one of the many saleswomen farewelled in their early 20s to be married. When did she see her friends? If they worked on Monday mornings, the Daytonan was not so lucky.	39
Packed with allusion, Dayton’s claim to ‘speak for thousands’ illustrates how stores constructed rhetorically oppositional images of women’s interests and then finessed the conflict away. Dayton’s encapsulated both opportunity and threat for Local 2, being notorious for not working with unions, and for increasing benefits to reduce employees’ sympathy for unions. If non-union stores had better conditions than Local 2 had negotiated, members would question the return on their dues, and non-members had excuses for not joining.40	40
Between 1933 and 1935, the NRA mandated a 40 hour week in Saint Paul department stores. The FLSA held out the promise it might return, but from national, rather than state, legislation. Meanwhile Local 2 attempted to negotiate a 40 hour week. After the NRA’s repeal, department stores around the country reverted to previous longer schedules. Local 2 pressed for a new contract while rosters for a 40 hour week were fresh in the memories of downtown stores. Local 2 negotiated in a different environment than other United States locals. Saint Paul department stores formed a Retail Employee Relations Commission (RERC) to conduct unified negotiations giving Local 2 some advantages. Conditions could be uniformly specified in all stores. Personnel relations academics praised Saint Paul merchants for being ‘farsighted enough to forestall labor trouble’ by negotiating with the union. In 1937, Local 2 negotiated a 42 hour week with six days of seven hours, but customers’ demands took precedence. Three ‘peak weeks’ were allowed every year when 45 hours would be required. Peak weeks were resented, and Local 2 pressed without success during the 1940s to have them removed. Claims for a 40 hour week during the 1940s were also unsuccessful.41	41
Between 1951 and 1955, Local 2 achieved what it had demanded for 17 years. Their success and negotiations illustrate that while a 40 hour week was important to salespeople it was not infinitely important. Time and money were also the two sides of consumption for salespeople. In 1951, the union was offered a contract with 40 hours, but over six days for less pay. Local 2’s demand had been for a five day week, and an hourly increase to give the same weekly wage. Put to the membership explicitly as a trade-off between wages and hours, they voted for the money.42 Figure 2: Dayton’s department store in Minneapolis, MN advertised that it was able to reconcile the tension between adequate time for shopping and long working hours for salespeople.   Source: Minneapolis Star Journal, 10 February 1947, p.5.	42
The next year there was no trade-off because the stores offered 40 hours for the same weekly pay, over six days, and Local 2 accepted the offer. Forty hours over six days was not as good as 40 hours in five days. Saint Paul department stores refused to alter trading hours to accommodate shorter working hours. Salespeople had shorter lunch hours, and some new part-time staff were hired. Local 2 members were aware of this constraint. One meeting prior to submitting contract focused on schedules for a 40-hour five-day week without drastically shortening lunch times, increasing payroll costs, or reducing trading hours. Department store owners portrayed housewives to Congress as impulsive shoppers at unpredictable times. Stores did not operate on this assumption, and Local 2 knew this. Their schedules to fit 40 hours into five days made opening time 9.00am, not 8.30am.43	43
Despite the extra travel costs of working six days when the contract was renegotiated in 1954, increased pay was of greater concern than reduced hours.44 Salespeople wanted a five day week, but it was not of overwhelming importance. Money could be more important than time. In 1955, Local 2 did negotiate a 40 hour, five day week. In achieving this aim, they demonstrated some of the limitations of craft-based unions organising department stores also evident in Wellington. Local 2 was obliged to follow Hotel & Restaurant workers in the stores who were also negotiating with the RERC for a 40 hour five day week, into a five week strike. Salespeople were divided about this. Sensing the division among members, Local 2 leadership reluctantly led the membership through a strike which generated more acrimony within the union, than between Local 2 and the department stores. Though the RERC agreed to the demands of Local 2, membership dropped precipitously after the strike.45	44
Over the same period that Local 2 demanded a 40 hour five day week, it was also competing with the Teamsters to organise a Montgomery Ward department store in Saint Paul. Local 2 appealed to Montgomery Ward (Wards) workers on two grounds; that they had negotiated lower hours downtown than Wards had, and that women salespeople’s voice would not be heard in the Teamsters union. Teamsters claimed jurisdiction over all Ward’s employees because of the many drivers and packers employed in the mail-order operations. Local 2 claimed jurisdiction over the salespeople in Wards. Their position was consistent in that they represented salespeople and attempted to separate their interests and problems from downtown stores’ waitresses, or delivery drivers and shipping clerks at Wards. The Teamsters claim to represent salespeople at Montgomery Ward was not motivated by uniting retail workers of different occupations, but to gain members and money. Nevertheless, the Teamsters appreciated more than Local 2 that craft unions had to have different strategies when organising department stores. In the ensuing representation election, the Teamsters gained 300 votes to only 75 for Local 2.46	45
Fundamental to the structure of department stores was division into departments on merchandise lines, not function or craft. Department stores did have ‘staff management’ sections for personnel and labour relations. The same personnel office that negotiated hours with waitresses also negotiated with salespeople and tailoresses in the workrooms of apparel departments. Though conditions were not uniform they were linked. Authority over different occupations was given to department heads. Thus, in apparel departments for example, the department head would manage the work of both salespeople and tailors. Except for basic training, authority over day-to-day matters rested with department heads. When there were grievances about the work salespeople did, they were not often settled with reference to central personnel departments. Settling grievances required almost ethnological research about the relationships between salespeople and buyers within a department. Disputes about the labour process in department stores often involved disagreements about priority in serving. It was common in department stores in both countries for there to be formal or informal rules governing which salespeople in a department could approach a customer first. In stores where salespeople earned commission payments these rules had a material importance for salespeople, beyond their function in organising work on the shop floor. Typical disputes about serving priority would be salespeople disagreeing amongst themselves about who had been entitled to serve customers, or a grievance against the department head that opportunities to serve paying customers were not being distributed fairly. By their very nature these disputes were localised to one department only, and could even set salespeople against each other. In New Zealand or the United States these disagreements could not form the basis of effective union organisation. Salespeople in millinery had little reason to take any interest in the order of serving in men’s clothing. Salespeople did have a common interest in hours and wages, and it was an interest they had in common with other occupations within the store. It is ironic that Local 2 could not co-ordinate a strike with waitresses. Like salespeople, waitresses had to be there for the customer, and had a common interest in negotiating hours with department stores, but did not organise together.47	46
Susan Porter Benson has shown how the division into departments led to a departmentally based work culture for saleswomen in the United States. In New Zealand there was greater unity across departments, but it was not channelled into union organisation. Salespeople had strong associational bonds on and off the job, but it was expressed in social and sporting activity, not in the union.48 With the institutional support of compulsory unionism New Zealand shop assistants’ unions did not try to build on this strong work culture. Union delegates in stores, critical to Local 2, were rejected in New Zealand as impractical by the leadership of the shop assistants unions. In both Wellington and Christchurch, the shop assistants had delegates in stores, but after the introduction of compulsory unionism the delegate system was allowed to wither away, and many shop assistants had little direct contact with the union leaders. After 1936, Wellington shop assistants’ union included all retail employees but Awards were negotiated separately for different parts of retailing, such as grocery and department stores. Awards also separated unions from representing other occupations in the same store. Thus, in both cities, craft unions tried to organise and represent workers whose firms’ organisation was not suited to this style of unionism. The result was that the unions tried to unite members round the achievement of a 40 hour, five day week. While Local 2 lost members, the Wellington shop assistants lost interest.49	47
Under compulsory unionism their one option was voice. As in Saint Paul, membership records show what happened in Wellington. Membership leapt from 1400 in 1934 to nearly 5000 in 1937, and the diverse craft interests of butchers, grocers and haberdashery saleswomen were combined. ‘Non-unionist thinking members’ were one problem. Simple apathy was yet more trouble. By remaining silent, members consented to the effectiveness of the arguments made on their behalf. In Wellington, a 40 hour week was achieved through political pressure exercised by the union’s secretary, Alexander Croskery. Croskery was secretary of the New Zealand Federation of Shop Assistants, and had extensive connections in trade unions, and with the Labour government. His argument was simply based on the inequity of the ‘toiler in the shop’ having to work longer hours than the man in the factory. Shop assistants’ claim for a 40 hour week was turned down in 1938, and at subsequent renewals of the Award. Employers argued that if the government wanted salespeople to have a 40 hour week, it would have been law. Retailers themselves were complicit in shifting the matter from the Arbitration Court where the ‘trade’ would be considered to negotiations inside the Labour Party. Despite Croskey’s connections, other unions and the Labour Party were not immediately receptive to reduced shop trading hours. However, wartime reduced consumer demand, and the threat of Japanese invasion prompted blackout regulations, making a 40 hour, five day week reality in Wellington and Auckland during the war. After lobbying by Croskery, legislative stamp was given to these arrangements in 1945, with shops restricted to trading 40 hours on five days of the week. New Zealand, with the exception of some seaside boroughs, closed for the weekend.50	48
Some unions had voiced concern that people would have no time to shop, if shop assistants’ demands were met. But shopping time got less of a hearing in Wellington than in Saint Paul. In 1938, New Zealand retailers had advanced a defence of their interests based on the supposed interests of housewives and factory girls. Retailers welcomed the extra trade shorter hours in factories had brought them. By suggesting the government could legislate for a 40 hour week in shops retailers conceded most of their issue. In the Arbitration Court, the independent judge was bound to hear about the conditions of the ‘trade’, and the effects of changing the Award. The government had less obligation to listen, and the issue was the discrepancy between the Factories Act and the Shops Act. In New Zealand, the interests of different groups of workers were now being compared, not the interests of consumers. Advocacy of housewives’ need for Saturday shopping was made by the National Party in parliamentary debate on the 1945 legislation. The oft-quoted statistic that ‘90 per cent’ of customers in department stores were women was repeated, but to no avail. Tight party discipline in the House of Representatives, and a rubber-stamp Legislative Chamber, assured the law’s passage. The process became as removed from consumers as the Saint Paul strike became close to them.51	49
Despite the radically different way in which Local 2 and the Wellington shop assistants achieved a 40 hour, five day week, it had a similar effect on their organisation. Local 2 stumbled through the next four years, placed under supervision by the International office of the Retail Clerks International Association. After Dayton’s from Minneapolis took over a Saint Paul store in 1959 and called a representation election which Local 2 lost, their membership declined precipitously. At a time when the union was growing rapidly elsewhere in the United States, Local 2 was compelled to amalgamate with the Saint Paul grocery clerks’ Local. In Wellington, the shop assistants exemplified unions who survived because of compulsory unionism. Members’ interest in defending their 40-hour week was so minimal that a meeting in 1955 called to discuss changes to the Shops and Offices Act lapsed for want of a quorum. A quorum required just eight people. When the government proposed that a dormitory suburb north of Wellington be allowed to set different trading hours than downtown stores, the secretary exhorted members that their 40 hour week was threatened. Unlike two years previously, the meeting was quorate, but only just.52	50
Conclusion
Success in achieving the 40 hour week revealed fundamental weaknesses in the position of craft unions in department stores in Wellington and Saint Paul. Department stores divided management authority over the salespeople into different merchandise departments. It was in departments that disputes about control of the work process of salespeople arose, and which craft unions were suited to deal with. Reduced working hours was a concern salespeople shared with store colleagues. Waitresses in Saint Paul negotiated with the same employer group. Office clerks in New Zealand were also covered by the Shops & Offices Act. The interests of drivers and tailors also overlapped with salespeople’s interests. A work culture internal to department stores at the department or store level, and opportunities for promotion in store, also hindered craft-based unions. Neither union appeared to recognize these fundamental aspects of department store organisation, and adjust their strategy accordingly. When the unions had the symbolic focus of achieving a 40 hour week they held their members’ interest. Once it was achieved, the weakness of their organisation and appeal to department store salespeople was clear.	51
Explanations of the weaknesses of salespeople’s unions have often emphasised that many salespeople were women, who had less orientation towards unions. Two reasons for this are adduced. Some women were working before marriage, and would exit for matrimony before they organised to improve conditions. Women who remained working accepted the ethos of store management that they could advance in the internal labour market. Yet, as Cobble has shown, waitresses in the United States did organise successfully, though some of the conditions such as contact with the customer were common to salespeople. The grocery clerks union in Saint Paul, formed with the support of Local 2 in 1944 absorbed its parent in 1959 when Local 2 got into difficulty. Grocery clerks were a major source of the growth in the Retail Clerks International Association in the 1950s. The success of grocery clerks (largely male) and waitresses (largely female) in organising service workers, compared with a demonstrated difficulty of organising department store salespeople in Saint Paul shows that firms’ management structure, gender, and union structure all affected the success of union organisation. Common to both restaurants and grocery stores was that the work process was functionally managed. Restaurants did not have separate teams of waitresses for different types of order. Supermarket clerks served customers regardless of what they purchased. Other occupations in restaurants or grocery stores tended to be under different lines of authority than waitresses or clerks. The organisation of work in restaurants and grocery stores was more conducive to craft union activity than in department stores. In department stores work was divided along merchandise lines, but unions in both Saint Paul and Wellington focussed on increasing pay and reducing hours – issues which transcended both departments and occupations within the store. In Wellington the problem was encountered at a higher level, because the union incorporated diverse selling occupations from different types of shops.53	52
Gender was a factor in salespeople’s unions’ ability to reduce hours, but not at the level of organising workers within stores, as has often been argued. In both New Zealand and the United States the debate on reducing working hours connected working and trading hours. In New Zealand the link was legislated – salespeople’s working hours were limited by restricting the hours shops could open. In the United States department store owners openly worried that if the weekly hours of salespeople were limited by the Fair Labor Standards Act it would be necessary to reduce trading hours. Customers’ interests in the opening hours of stores were therefore an issue. While customers did not articulate their views themselves, department store owners always maintained that customers would be seriously disadvantaged if shops could not open at all times customers wanted to shop. In both countries the dominant cultural image of department store customers was that they were women who spent a lot of time shopping.	53
Following the 1930s depression, governments sympathetic to labour in both countries introduced nominally gender neutral legislation for 40 hour, five day weeks in certain industries. Responding to political concerns, and the need to promote private consumption for economic recovery, department store salespeople were not covered by this legislation. Consumers’ needs eclipsed concern for saleswomen. Operating in different political and industrial relations environments, unions in Saint Paul and Wellington responded to this perceived inequity, and demanded the same conditions. Though both would achieve it, their success revealed the structural weaknesses of their organisations. Rooted in craft union traditions, they could focus on achieving a 40 hour week, but could not effectively represent salespeople in department stores without this symbolic goal. The parallels between craft unionism in retailing in the United States and New Zealand suggest that traditional explanations for union weaknesses in these countries – a hostile political environment in North America, and the too-supportive arbitration system in New Zealand – are not complete. Further attention must be paid to the relationship between union structure, and the organisation of the industries and firms whose employees unions seek to organise.	54
Endnotes *I thank Ellen Arnold, Marisa Brandt, Andrea Burns, Anna Clark, Sara Evans, M.J. Maynes, Melanie Nolan, Nicole Phelps and Steve Ruggles for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful to the editors and two anonymous referees for their suggestions. 1. Handbill (untitled), 19 September 1955 in ‘Department and Specialty Stores Retail Employee Relations Commission Contracts and Negotiations, 1955 Strike – handbills’, Retail Clerks’ Union of Saint Paul (RCUSP), Box 1, P1071, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, Minnesota. 2. Treat Customers as Capital’, Farmers’ Union Trading Company Optimist (FUTCO), no. 128, July 1925, p. 12, Auckland War Memorial Museum and Library (AWM), MS1400, Box 9, 55/58. 3. Store News, vol. 3, no. 9, 15 September 1916, p. 8, The Golden Rule, Saint Paul (MN). 4. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1986, pp. 31, 34; Susan Porter Benson, ‘Palace of Consumption and Machine for Selling: the American Department Store, 1890-1940’, Radical History Review, vol. 21, 1979, pp. 199-221; H. Pasdermadjian, The Department Store: its Origins, Evolution and Economics, Newman Books, London, 1954, pp. 116-117; J.W. Rowe, ‘A Note on Retail Distribution in New Zealand’, Economic Journal, vol. 66, no. 262, 1956, pp. 367-370. 5. Benson, Counter Cultures, pp. 75-116; William Leach, ‘Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores 1890-1925’, Journal of American History, vol. 71, no. 2, 1984, pp. 319-342; Dry Goods Economist, no. 3630, 31 January 1914, p. 44; Frank Crane, ‘The Clerk’, Store News, vol. 6, no. 9, 15 September 1919, The Golden Rule, Saint Paul (MN), Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS); ‘The Wife Decides a Sale’, Farmers’ Trading Company Optimist (FTCO), no. 159, February 1928, p. 15, AWM, MS1400, Box 9, 55/89; Benson, Counter Cultures, pp. 296-299; Evan Roberts, From Mail Order to Female Order?, BA (Hons), History, Victoria University of Wellington, 1999, p. 83. 6. ‘Madame the Customer’ in Olive A. Smith, ‘Looking Ahead in Selling’, Journal of Retailing, vol. 2, no. 3, 1926, p. 20; Leach, ‘Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores 1890-1925’, pp. 319-342; ‘Report from the Capital’, NZ Draper and Allied Retailer, vol. 27, no. 341, 7 March 1949, p. 20. 7. Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture, Routledge, New York, 1993. 8. Julian James Hook, The evolution of department store retail sales in the metropolitan Twin Cities from 1860 to 1964 and predictions of the future department store by 1980, MS, University of Minnesota, 1964, pp. 19-26; Julia Millen, Kirkcaldie & Stains: A Wellington Story, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2000, pp. 17-25; Gordon Parry, Retailing Century: the First 100 Years of the DIC Ltd., DIC Ltd., Dunedin, 1984; Dry Goods Economist, 31 July 1915, p. 44; ‘World Wide Number’, Dry Goods Economist, no. 3716, 25 September 1915, p. 39 9. See ‘Elbert Hubbard’s Idea of Loyalty to Employer’, Store News, vol. 8, no. 9, September 1921, p. 4, The Golden Rule, Saint Paul (MN), MNHS. This was also published in The Farmers’ Staff and Store News, vol. 4, no. 15, 20 October 1938, p. 1, AWM, MS1400, Box 9, 55/144. 10. A.B. Colson, ‘Advice From a Leader’, Store News, vol. 4, no. 4, 15 April 1917, p. 2, The Golden Rule, Saint Paul (MN); ‘Sale Story’, The Big Store News, vol. 2, no. 6, September 1948, p. 19, AWM, MS1400, Box 9, 55/118; ‘A Customer’, The Farmers’ Staff and Store News, vol. 4, no. 9, 14 July 1938, p. 1; Helen Rich Norton, A Textbook on Retail Selling, Ginn and Company, Boston, 1919, pp. 187-200. 11. J.B. Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1930, pp. 165, 438-440; John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: a History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1959, p. 405; Leslie Lipson, The Politics of Equality, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1948, p. 488; G. Theodore Mitau, Politics in Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1970, p. 7; Russel Blaine Nye, Midwestern Progressive Politics: a Historical Study of its Origins and Development, 1870-1958, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 1959, pp. 3-15, 31. 12. Nye, Midwestern Progressive Politics: a Historical Study of its Origins and Development, 1870-1958, pp. 213-214. 13. Peter J. Coleman, Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare State, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 1987; William Watts Folwell, A History of Minnesota, 4 vols., vol. 3, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, 1926, pp. 188, 198; Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Tuesday 4 September 1900, p. 3; Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Minnesota, Saint Paul, 1900, pp. 323-324; Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Thursday 10 January 1901, p. 2; George M. Stephenson, John Lind of Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1935, p. 186; Carl Henry Chrislock, The Progressive Era in Minnesota, 1899-1918, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, 1971, p. 13; Folwell, A History of Minnesota, p. 246; John A. Ryan, ‘Minimum Wage Legislation’ in Jeremiah S. Young (ed.), Papers and Proceedings of the Minnesota Academy of Social Sciences, vol. 6, 1913, pp. 110-122; Raymond V. Phelan, ‘Minnesota Minimum Wage Law, 1913’, American Economic Review, vol. 3, no. 4, December 1913, pp. 989-990; John A. Ryan, Social Doctrine in Action: a Personal History, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1941, pp. 121-123. 14. Mason C. Doan, ‘State Labor Relations Acts’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 56, no. 4, 1942, pp. 507-559; ‘History and Provisions of the Minnesota Labor Relations Act’, Minnesota Law Review, vol. 24, 1940, pp. 217-240; Charles C. Killingsworth, State Labor Relations Acts: a Study of Public Policy, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1948; Brennan (Local 2 organizer) Minutes of Meeting, Retail Clerks International Protective Association (RCIPA) Local 2, 16 February 1939, RCUSP, Box 4, vol. 2, p. 55; Melanie Nolan and Pat Walsh, ‘Labour’s Leg-iron? Assessing Trade Unions and Arbitration in New Zealand’, in Pat Walsh (ed.), Trade Unions, Work and Society, Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1994, p. 16; Richgels to Suffridge, 10 February 1956, ‘Local #2 Weekly Reports to the International officers, 1956’, RCUSP, Box 4; A.W Croskery to R.N. Cook, 25 May 1943, Wellington Shop Employees’ Unions (WSEU) Records, Beaglehole Room, Victoria University of Wellington library, Item 34 (hereafter referenced as WSEU/no.). 15. Edward Stafford, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, vol. 19, 1875, p. 305, quoted in John E. Martin, ‘English Models and Antipodean Conditions: the Origins and Development of Protective Factory Legislation in New Zealand’, Labour History, no. 73, November 1997, p. 55; Report of the Commission, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives, H-5, Wellington, 1890; Clipping in ‘Notes and Clippings – Shop Assistants’ H.O. Roth Papers, 94-106-45/11, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), Wellington, New Zealand; Examination of J.L. Hay, NZ Federated Shop Assistants’ Industrial Association of Workers (IAoW), Shop Assistants’ Dispute Report of Proceedings before the Arbitration Court, 10-13 May1938, MSx 2451, ATL, p. D45. Testimony of Wade McCargo, Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Fair Labor Standards Act Amendments of 1949, 81st Congress, 1st Session, 1949, p. 301. 16. Statutes of New Zealand, 1892, no. 45; Statutes of New Zealand, 1894, no. 32; Statutes of New Zealand, 1904, no. 52; Statutes of New Zealand, 1920, no. 67; Statutes of New Zealand, 1921/22, no. 46. 17. Laws of Minnesota, 1909, Ch. 499, 36th session; Laws of Minnesota, 1917, Ch. 248, 40th session; Laws of Minnesota, 1933, Ch. 354, 48th session; Elizabeth Brandeis, ‘Labor Legislation’, in John R. Commons (ed.), History of Labor in the United States, 1896-1932, Macmillan, New York, 1935, p. 459. 18. International Labor Office, ‘Shop Closing Legislation in European Countries’, International Labor Review, vol. 18, no. 1, 1928, pp. 29-45; International Labor Office, ‘Shop Closing Legislation in European Countries II’, International Labor Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 1928, pp. 202-215; William Pember Reeves, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, II vols., vol. II, E.P. Dutton and Co., New York, 1925, p. 192. 19. ‘On Leaving the Store’, The Farmers’ Staff and Store News, 22 September 1938, p. 3, AWM, MS1400, Box 9, 55/144; K.H., ‘Decalogue of Salesmanship. Courtesy’ FUTCO, no. 156, November 1927, pp. 12-13, AWM, MS1400, Box 9, 55/86; Ballantyne’s Staff Guide, Ballantyne & Co., Christchurch, 1939, p. 22; Shops and Office Act Amendment, Statutes of New Zealand, no. 3, 1921; ‘Articles of Agreement 1937’ in ‘Department and Specialty Stores Retail Employee Relations Commission Contracts and Negotiations, 1936-1939’, RCUSP, Box 1; Minutes of Meeting, RCIPA Local 2, 8 April 1937, RCUSP, Box 4, vol. 1, p. 88. 20. For a review of some recent literature on this topic, see Matthew Hilton, ‘Class, Consumption and the Public Sphere’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 35, no. 4, 2000, pp. 655-666. 21. Carl A. Naether, Advertising to Women, Prentice Hall, New York, 1928; Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, The Business Bourse, New York, 1929; Frank Crane, ‘The Clerk’, Store News, vol. 6, no. 9, 15 September 1919, p. 7, The Golden Rule, Saint Paul (MN), MNHS; ‘The Wife Decides a Sale’, FTCO, no. 159, February 1928, p. 15, AWM, MS1400, Box 9, 55/89; ‘To Sell More – Appeal to Women’, The House, Ballantyne’s staff magazine, issue 5, February 1958, p. 18; Walter Brookes, ‘These Are Among Our Customers’, The Retailer of N.Z., 10 June 1949, p. 23; The quote comes from ‘Foresight a Practical Aid in Selling to Men’, Dry Goods Economist, no. 3640, 11 April 1914, p. 17. 22. Advertisement in Evening Post, 29 July 1933, in Scrapbook, 1932, f-93-215-1, ATL; Louis Parnes, Planning Stores That Pay, Architectural Record Book, New York, 1948, p. 38; Norton, A Textbook on Retail Selling, p. 191. 23. Advertisement in Scrapbook, MS-Group, 93-215-5/3, ATL; J. Ballantyne & Co. Ltd, Procedures Manual, Christchurch, 1939, p. 9; Milne & Choyce Minutes of Board, 1924-1932, Fletcher Challenge Archives and Records Management (FCL), 0251/2/1; For the US, UK and Australia, see Benson, ‘Palace of Consumption and Machine for Selling: