on the chef level. Those who supervise labor in institutions correspond to the foremen who supervise factory labor, or to lower-level managers having the same function in every labor process. Chefs and cooks of superior grades, the highest skill of the service category, offer an instructive instance of the manner in which an ancient and valuable craft is being destroyed even in its last stronghold, luxury and gourmet cooking. The technological means employed in this case is that of food freezing, including its more recent forms, flash freezing and drying at sub-zero temperatures, and cryogenic freezing at temperatures at least 300 degrees below zero. In such processes, cell walls are destroyed and texture and flavor damaged. Moreover, pre-cooked frozen foods tend in the long run to be more expensive than fresh foods because of the expensive equipment required for freezing, transporting these foods in a frozen state, and thawing them in microwave or convection pressure ovens. That moneyed clienteles now pay "luxury prices for slot machine food"so that a rack of lamb ordered rare in a famous Connecticut inn is brought to the table cold and the client told that rare lamb must be cold²—is not what concerns us here. More to the point is the manner in which a precious craft is destroyed and how this destructive tendency feeds on itself. As in so many other fields of work, the simplification and rationalization of skills in the end destroy these skills, and, with the skills becoming ever more scarce, the new processes become ever more inevitable-because ofthe shortage of skilled labor! The food editor of the New York Times wrote, in describing this process:
Many restaurant owners say the shortage and high price of skilled help are major reasons they turn to frozen foods. But kitchen wages are among the lowest in all industries, and the shortage of help may be a result, rather than a cause, of conditions in the trade.
A reader says his wife applied for a job with the Stouffer's chain and was told that they didn't need any cooks, only“thawer-outers."An executive acknowledged that the chain was “not a chef system but a food management system. "13
So far as retail trade is concerned, it is worth noting that although the “skills" of store operations have long since been disassembled and in all decisive respects vested in management,\* a revolution is now being prepared which will make of retail workers, by and large, something closer to factory operatives than anyone had ever imagined possible. In retail food trading, for example, the demand for the all-around grocery clerk, fruiterer and vegetable dealer, dairyman, butcher, and so forth has long ago been replaced by a labor configuration in the supermarkets which calls for truck unloaders, shelf stockers, checkout clerks, meat wrappers, and meatcutters; of these, only the last retain any semblance of skill, and none require any general knowledge of retail trade. The use of mechanical equipment for the shelving, display, and sale of commodities has thus far remained in a primitive state, in part because of the ready availability of low-cost labor and in part because of the nature of the process itself. With the perfecting of a number of computerized semi-automatic checkout systems, however, an increasing number of national chains in retail trade—in other fields as well as in food marketing—have committed themselves to replacing their present cash-register systems with new systems that, they estimate, will almost double the number of customers handled by each checkout clerk in a given time. The system will require affixing to each item a tag or label which carries the proper stock number (a universal ten-digit code has been adopted by the food industry) and perhaps a price, printed in characters which may be recognized by an optical scanner. Thus the clerk will simply pass the item over the scanner (or hold a scanner lens to the tag), and the register will transmit the operation to a computer which can either supply the price or check it against the current price list. The effects of this system on inventory control, quick and general price changes, and sales reporting to a central point require no comment. But the checkout counter then adopts as its own the assembly line or factory pace in its most complete form. The “production" of each register can be controlled from a single central station and laggards noted for future action; and, since no knowledge of prices is required, the production speed of a checkout clerk can be pegged at the highest level within a few hours after that clerk has begun the job, instead of the few weeks of learing time that are now allowed. Of course, the slowest operation will then become that of bagging, and various mechanical systems which will eliminate the separate “bagger" and enable the checkout clerk to sweep the item over the optical scanner and into the bag with a single motion are being devised and tested.™s
The trend to automatic filling stations, where the customer, in return for a small saving, fills his or her own tank while the transaction is monitored on a screen in the station is also worth mentioning, if only for the manner in which it combines a displacement of labor with a shift from male to female labor; the new gasoline station attendants are generally “girls," who, as everyone knows, offer a further saving to the thrifty employer.
As a quick glance at the list of service occupations will make apparent the bulk of the work is concentrated in two areas: cleaning and building care, and kitchen work and food service. Female workers outnumber male, as in retail sales work. Training prerequisites for most of these occupations are minimal, a job ladder leading upward is virtually nonexistent, and unemployment rates are higher than average. In this occupational category are found the housekeeping jobs of a society of concentrated life and labor that masses workers and residents in multiple-dwelling units, giant office blocks, and immense factory units, and which thus develops extraordinary requirements for cleaning, caretaking, and catering. We see here the obverse face of the heralded “service economy," which is supposed to free workers from the tyranny of industry, call into existence a “higher order” of educated labor, and transform the condition of the average man. When this picture is drawn by enthusiastic publicists and press agents of capitalism (with or without advanced degrees in sociology and economics), it is given a semblance of reality by reference to professional occupations. When numbers are required to lend mass to the conception, the categories of clerical, sales, and service workers are called upon. But these workers are not asked to show their diplomas, their pay stubs, or their labor processes.\*
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Service Occupations and Retail Trade
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\* In 1892, F. W. Woolworth wrote in a letter to his store managers: "We must have cheap help or we cannot sell cheap goods."14 Chain stores in the notion and novelty, as well as in the food trades, and nationwide mail order houses, pioneered the fractionalization of retail labor.