There are many other jobs characterised as "services" that are essential to accumulation in the modern world-especially, as we saw in Chapters Five and Seven, health provision and the education service. Today there are over 10 million employed in health and educational services in the US (around one in 13 of the workforce), and US capitalism could not function without them. And the long-term trend is for most of them to be forced increasingly into conditions comparable to those of industrial and routine office workers, with payment by results, assessment and appraisal systems, increased concern with timekeeping, and enhanced discipline codes.
There is the myth that the "service" sector workforce is made up of well paid people with control over their own working situation who never need to get their hands dirty. So Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee writes:
We have seen the most rapid change in social class in recorded history: the 1 977 mass working class, with two thirds of people in manual jobs, shrunk to one third, while the rest migrated upwards into a 70 percent home-owning, white collar middle class.17
If Toynbee had looked at the Office for National Statistics' Living in Britain 2000 she would have found 51 percent of men and 38 percent of women in its various "manual" occupational categories.18 This is because the "service industries" include refuse workers, hospital ancillary workers, dockers, lorry drivers, bus and train drivers, and postal workers. Alongside them are a huge number of women-50 percent-in the "intermediate and junior non-manual" categories, where wages are typically lower than in most manual occupations and working conditions often at least as hard. In the US in 2001, 50 percent of the 103 million employees in service related occupations had manual or routine clerical or similar jobs.19 Together with the 33 million workers in traditional manual industries they made up three quarters of the country's workforce.
334
The Runaway System