The Class Position of Clerical Labor
While the working class in production is the result of several centuries of capitalist development, clerical labor is largely the product of the period of monopoly capitalism. Thus the early post-Marx attempts to analyze this phenomenon were severely hampered by the fact that clerical work was as yet little developed as a capitalist labor process. For example, in the discussion of the subject in the German Social-Democracy before the First World War, Emil Lederer (whose Die Privatangestellten in der Modernen Wirtschaftsentwicklung was probably the most substantial and important product of the debate) commented on the stagnant technical conditions of the office:
Indeed, the modern commercial employee resembles the commercial employee of the past more than the labor employed by large-scale industry resembles the journeyman of the Middle Ages. Methods of doing business have hardly changed in the majority of cases. Even large-scale enterprises are only expanded small-scale business. Since no new technique has come to the fore, they 43
exhibit no essentially new methods.
In these discussions, the participants were impressed by the rapid growth of the office; but the changes in office labor, still in their infancy, could not make so great an impression. The general expectation of commentators, as a result, was the rapid increase of office functionaries of the then-dominant varieties. On this basis, the conclusion seemed inescapable: a very large new “middle class" was coming into being.
This conclusion was further guaranteed by the penchant, which continues down to the present day, for defining the class positions of various varieties of office labor on the basis of secondary characteristics. In keeping with this, all the labor of the office is lumped together under such rubrics as “white collar," or “salaried employees." This is nothing but a hangover from the days in which all office labor did share the characteristics of privilege in pay, tenure, authority, etc. In that earlier situation, such designations, when applied to all who worked in offices, served as shorthand expressions for the special position of such employees. It was not the color of the employee's collar, still less the mode of payment on an annual or monthly basis as distinguished from the daily or hourly wage of the manual worker, that in themselves had a determinate meaning, but rather the whole complex of social position and position in the enterprise and the labor process that these terms symbolized.\*
In 1896, Charles Booth was able to write: “The average, undifferentiated human labour power' upon which Karl Marx bases his gigantic fallacy does not exist anywhere on this planet, but least of all, I think, is it to be found among clerks."44 At the time there were few Marxists bold enough to try to counter this thrust. But within less than forty years the development of the capitalist office made it possible for some to comprehend all the essential elements of the process, although it was even then far from being well advanced. Thus Hans Speier, drawing chiefly on German experience, was able to write in 1934:
The social level of the salaried employee sinks with the increasing extent of the group. This qualitative change, which has been termed “the proletarianization of the white collar worker," shows itself in a number of ways. It is most evident, perhaps, in the especially great increase in the women salaried workers, who mostly perform subordinate work. . . . It is the man who typically has the principal authority, the girl who is typically the subordinate. . . . The great increase in salaried employees is especially traceable to a demand for subordinates, not for fully qualified responsible persons. As a result the average chance of advancing has declined. The majority of the subordinate employees in the large offices perform duties which are specialized and schematized down to the minutest detail. They no longer require general training; in part only a very limited and brief training is necessary, in part previous training has become quite unnecessary. The process in the course of which the body of salaried employees become a mass group rests on the successful attempt to replace the personal experience of the individual by a rational scientific business administration, so that an increasing proportion of the workers can be changed without danger to the efficiency of the enterprise. One social result of this development is the rise of the unskilled and semi-skilled salaried workers, whose designation already indicates the assimilation of the processes of work in the office to that in the factory. In the case of the salaried workers who serve as subordinates on one of the many modern office machines, or, for example who sell in a one-price store, the difference in the nature of the duties between such workers and manual workers is completely wiped out . . . especially revealing with regard to the sinking of the social level of the white-collar workers is, finally, the change in the social antecedents. The growing tendency to employ salaried workers of“proletarian origin" indicates that the number of untrained and poorly paid positions is increasing faster than the number of middle and principal positions. In other words, the salaried employees as a 45 whole are being subjected to a process of decreasing social esteem.
Labor and Monopoly Capital
Clerical Workers
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\* The continued use of this terminology long after the realities behind it have disappeared is one of the greatest sources of confusion in the analysis of this subject. A term which lumps together into a single class grouping the authoritative executive representing capital on the one hand, and the interchangeable parts of the office machine which serves him on the other, can no longer be considered useful. This terminology is, however, considered serviceable by those who are alarmed by the results of a more realistic terminology—those, for instance, whose “sociology" pursues apologetic purposes. For them, such terms as “white-collar employees" conveniently lump into a single category the well-paid, authoritative, and desirable positions at the top of the hierarchy and the mass of proletarianized inferiors in a way that makes possible a rosier picture: higher “average" pay scales, etc. In this use of the term, the “white-collar" category tends to get its occupational flavor from the engineers, managers, and professors at the top of the hierarchy, while its impressive numerical masses are supplied by the millions of clerical workers, in much the same way that the stars of an opera company occupy the front of the stage while the spear-carriers provide the massive chorus.
\* Managers often wag their heads over the “poor quality of office help" available on the labor market, although it is their own system of office operations which is creating the office population suited to it. This complaint is, unfortunately, too often echoed by unthinking "consumers" when they run into trouble with an office, as they often do. Such difficulties will tend to increase in the same way that the quality of factory production tends to decline and the servicing of consumer appliances tends to worsen even as it becomes more expensive, and for the same reasons.