It is most important to note, however, that not all of this increase is attributable to the tendencies that have concerned us thus far: the reorganization of production and the use of large-scale machine systems. The category of nonproduction employment used in all these figures is a mélange; it is, as Delehanty notes, a residual category, including all those employed in manufacturing apart from production, maintenance, and auxiliary workers. This means it includes not only engineers, technicians, and the clerical workers associated with production tasks, but all administrative, financial, marketing, and other such employment. Available figures do not permit a ready separation of the two types of nonproduction employment into those associated with the production process and those associated with other aspects of the corporation's activity, but there are ample indications that the technical portion of nonproduction employment is the smaller.
For example, Emil Lederer, an early investigator of this subject, noted that in Germany between 1895 and 1907, technical personnel in manufacturing, mining, and construction increased by 153 percent, while commercial personnel increased by 206 percent.5 And Delehanty points out that in 1961, in United States manufacturing, while there were 35 nonproduction workers for every 100 production workers, only 7.9 of these were engineers, scientists, or technicians.6
It is probably better to turn from these industrial statistics to the occupational figures for technical people if we are to attempt to estimate the size of the grouping created by the new industrial revolution to bear responsibility for the conceptualization and planning of production. According to these figures, there were in 1970 some 1.2 million technical engineers in the United States, employed chiefly in the goods-producing industries but also in transportation and communications, as independent consultants, by government, etc. At the same time, there were about a million technicians, including draftsmen, as well as some 365,000 natural scientists of all kinds. Since this total of close to 2.5 million in these occupations may be compared with a total of no more than 80,000 in the same occupations in 1900, it is clear that these are virtually new occupational groupings, produced by the revolution in production of the past century.
But despite this rapid growth, what is remarkable is the concentration of the technical expertise of United States industries in a relatively small grouping. Taken together, the technical engineers, chemists, scientists, architects, draftsmen, designers, and technicians represented not much more than 3 percent of the total labor force in 1970. Of course, this must be enlarged by the addition of some number, impossible to estimate, of managers serving as primarily technical superiors; but it should also be lowered by the large numbers of natural scientists in fields remote from production in any form, and also by the large numbers of draftsmen (including tracers and detailers) and technicians whose jobs are confined to the repetition of simple activities that are rapidly learned and do not encompass any true conceptualization or planning functions. On balance, it is probably proper to say that the technical knowledge required to operate the various industries of the United States is concentrated in a grouping in the neighborhood of only 3 percent of the entire working population—although this percentage is higher in some industries and lower in others.
The profession of technical engineer is at the present time almost completely restricted to those who have taken at least a four-year degree in engineering. Alongside the traditional specialties within this field and such recent arrivals as aeronautical engineering, industrial engineering, which was a small specialty as recently as the 1930s, has grown most rapidly. This is the aspect of engineering concerned most directly with the design of the production process. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the engineering professions scarcely existed; it has been estimated that there were no more than some 30 engineers or quasi-engineers in the United States in 1816. The first census which enumerated the profession separately, that of 1850, showed about 2,000 civil engineers, few of whom had gained their titles through academic training and most of whom were engaged in canal and railroad construction. It was only with the rise of manufacturing industry that the other categories of engineering came into significant existence, and between 1880 and 1920 the number of engineers of all sorts increased by nearly 2000 percent, from 7,000 to 136,000; now the civil engineer was overshadowed by mining, metallurgical, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineers. Where, in 1870, only 866 engineering degrees had been granted in the United States, more than that number were enrolled in engineering colleges in the single year 1890, and by 1910 enrollment had risen to 30,000.7
The enormous and continuous growth in demand for engineers has created a new mass occupation. On the one hand, this has, along with other new professions such as accounting, given a place to those thrust out of the old middle class by the relative decline of the petty entrepreneurial occupations in trade and other erstwhile arenas of small business. But on the other hand, having become a mass occupation engineering has begun to exhibit, even if faintly, some of the characteristics of other mass employments: rationalization and division of labor, simplification of duties, application of mechanization, a downward drift in relative pay, some unemployment, and some unionization.
In a study done for the National Bureau of Economic Research, The Demand and Supply of Scientific Personnel, David M. Blank and George J. Stigler point out that “in the United States since 1890: demand has grown quite rapidly but supply has grown even more rapidly so salaries have drifted downward relative to those for the entire working population." Their index of the ratio of median engineering salaries to those of the full time manufacturing wage earner shows that, if the 1929 ratio is taken as 100, by 1954 the ratio was only 66.6.8
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available statistical evidence.4 But whatever the cause of this statistical quirk, it seems clear enough that the increase in the proportion of nonproduction workers began, in the United States as elsewhere, long before 1952.