This was written before the mechanization of the office. Writing at about the same time, Lewis Corey was anticipating future events when he said: “The mechanization of clerical labor becomes constantly greater; a typical large office is now nothing but a white-collar factory."46 But by 1951, much of the anticipatory element had disappeared and C. Wright Mills was able to write, upon a solid basis of fact:
The introduction of office machinery and sales devices has been mechanizing the office and the salesroom, the two big locales of white-collar work. Since the twenties it has increased the division of white-collar labor, recomposed personnel, and lowered skill levels. Routine operations in minutely subdivided organizations have replaced the bustling interest of work in well-known groups. Even on managerial and professional levels, the growth of rational bureaucracies has made work more like factory production. The managerial demiurge is constantly furthering all these trends, mechanization, more minute division of labor, the use of less skilled and less expensive workers.
In its early stages, a new division of labor may specialize men in such a way as to increase their levels of skill; but later, especially when whole operations are split and mechanized, such division develops certain faculties at the expense of others and narrows all of them. And as it comes more fully under mechanization and centralized management, it levels men off again as automatons. Then there are a few specialists and a mass of automatons; both integrated by the authority which makes them interdependent and keeps each in his own routine. Thus, in the division of labor, the open development and free exercise of skills are managed and closed.
The alienating conditions of modern work now include the salaried employees as well as the wage-workers. There are few, if any, features of wage-work (except heavy toilwhich is decreasingly a factor in wage-work) that do not also characterize at least some white-collar work. For here, too, the human traits of the individual, from his physique to his psychic disposition, become units in the functionally rational calculations of managers.
To these pictures of the merging characteristics of clerical and production labor, it is now possible to add a number of important details.
The use of automatic and semi-automatic machine systems in the office has the effect of completely reversing the traditional profile of office costs. A situation in which the cost of operating a large office consisted almost entirely of the salaries paid to clerical employees has changed to one in which a large share of the total is now invested in the purchase (or paid out monthly for the leasing) of expensive equipment. Past or “dead" labor in the form of machinery owned by capital, now employs living labor, in the office just as in the factory. But for the capitalist, the profitability of this employment is very much a function of time, of the rapidity with which dead labor absorbs living. The use of a great deal of expensive equipment thus leads to shift work, which is particularly characteristic of computer operations.
At the same time, the employment of machinery pushes the office installation toward the warehouse and industrial districts of the cities. This is facilitated by the development of remote terminals and other communications devices which annihilate distance and do away with almost all the inconveniences of separate installations, so that executive offices can be maintained in the more expensive and accessible locations while the mass of clerical workers can be moved into lower-rent districts, often together with warehousing or production facilities. Thus the convenience and cachet of working in the central part of town, with its greater shopping interest and more varied lunching facilities, etc., begins for many clerical workers to disappear.
At the same time, the labor market for the two chief varieties of workers, factory and office, begins to lose some of its distinctions of social stratification, education, family, and the like. Not only do clerical workers come increasingly from families of factory background, and vice-versa, but more and more they are merged within the same living family. The chief remaining distinction seems to be a division along the lines of sex. Here the distribution within the clerical and operative groups is strikingly congruent: in 1971, the category of operatives was made up of 9 million men and 4 million women, while that of clerical workers was made up of 10.1 million women and 3.3 million men. The sex barrier that assigns most office jobs to women, and that is enforced both by custom and hiring practice, has made it possible to lower wage rates in the clerical category, as we have seen, below those in any category of manual labor. The growing participation of women in employment has thus far been facilitated by the stronger demand for clerical employees and the relatively stagnating demand for operatives. The existence of two giant categories of labor, operatives and clerical workers, as the two largest major occupational classifications, and the composition by sex of each of these categories, leads to the supposition that one of the most common United States occupational combinations within the family is that in which the husband is an operative and the wife a clerk.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Clerical Workers
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