The tendency of modern capitalist employment, in which a vast mass is occupied on a less and less differentiated level of general labor, was recognized early by Theodore Caplow and well portrayed by him in the following passage:
Near the midpoint of the occupational status scale, where white-collar and manual levels overlap, there are a vast number of employments which are usually called“semiskilled." As a matter of fact, most of them cannot be readily evaluated in terms of skill. Their common characteristic is that no lengthy experience is required to perform the work, and that movement from one occupation to another is easy and frequent. Indeed, the mark of a semiskilled occupation is its vagueness. Unlike the higher and lower portions of the scale this great central cluster of factory and office jobs is not clearly compartmentalized. Lifetime involvement in a job is rare. Men and women perform comparable work under comparable conditions. Job titles do not correspond to organized social groupings; and each occupation merges into many others. All these factors together contribute to the very high and sustained rate of horizontal mobility which is characteristic of semiskilled workers.48
The increasing similarity of the work in factory and office is noted by Caplow, and particularly the similarity of requirements in the form of a high-school diploma to provide the background of general familiarity with the commonplace routines of modern society:
The characteristic jobs of machine operators in modern factories, of clerical workers in large offices, and of sales clerks, inspectors, and other minor functionaries require a general familiarity with technical and commercial operations, together with a minimum command of the number system, the written language, and the technic of operating such devices as automobiles and cash registers. Although the emphasis upon mechanical insight and manual dexterity is greater in the factory trades than in the office jobs, the two broad branches of semiskilled work tend to become increasingly alike in many ways. Movement from one to the other takes place very readily. Tests carefully devised to measure clerical aptitude sometimes turn out to be better indicators of mechanical aptitude, and vice versa. This is apparently explained by the fact that the tests are patterned after operations actually required in typical jobs, and that operations required in machine production and clerical work are often very similar.
The modern technics of job classification and personnel selection, developed in connection with large-scale production, are designed above all to facilitate the interchangeability of personnel. One method of ensuring interchangeability is to reduce each complex operation to a series of simple operations which require no extraordinary ability. When this is done, an automatic effect is to standardize output throughout the series of related operations at a point well below the maximum output of which individual workers might be capable. At the same time, the formal qualifications required for employment are standardized by the educational process, so that there are comparatively few differences that matter between one worker and another.49
The problem of the so-called employee or white-collar worker which so bothered early generations of Marxists, and which was hailed by anti-Marxists as a proof of the falsity of the "proletarianization" thesis, has thus been unambiguously clarified by the polarization of office employment and the growth at one pole of an immense mass of wage-workers. The apparent trend to a large nonproletarian “middle class" has resolved itself into the creation of a large proletariat in a new form. In its conditions of employment, this working population has lost all former superiorities over workers in industry, and in its scales of pay it has sunk almost to the very bottom. But beneath them, in this latter respect at least, are the workers in service occupations and retail trade, whom we must consider next.
Notes
244
Labor and Monopoly Capital
Clerical Workers
245