We may gain a rough first approximation of the working class in this century by considering at the outset the mass occupational categories which embrace, with a few anomalies and exceptions, the unmistakably workingclass population. These, as classified by the U.S. bureaus of the census and labor statistics, are the craftsmen, clerical workers, operatives, sales workers, service workers, and nonfarm laborers. We exclude from these groups foremen, who are usually classified in the craftsman's category; from among the sales workers, we exclude the salesmen, agents, and brokers of advertising, insurance, real estate, and stocks and bonds, as well as manufacturers' representatives and salesmen in wholesale trade, the latter being generally higher-paid and privileged sales workers, thus leaving in this category chiefly salespersons in retail trade.\* In these six categories, so modified, we find the overwhelming bulk of the nonagricultural working class, whose growth and changes of composition can be seen in the following table:
Using major occupational categories in this way, even if modified as described, leaves much to be desired in statistical precision. For example, it has already been pointed out that even the lowest of the occupational categories included in this table—that of service workers——includes among its hundreds of thousands of cooks some of whom, as chefs, manage the labor processes of large kitchens, are paid on a managerial scale, and are thus strictly speaking far from being “working class" in the same sense as the rest of the category. The same is undoubtedly true of some who are classified as bookkeepers, or even secretaries, within the clerical category. One might also raise objections to the classification of police as workers. The numbers involved, however, are small in relation to the size of the categories as a whole. On the other hand, some parts of other major occupational groups not included in this tabulation are just as much a part of the unmistakable and self-evident working class as those major groups we have included above. In that group called “managers, officials, and proprietors," for instance, there are considerable numbers of railroad conductors, union officials, and especially “managers," so called, of retail stores, eating and drinking places, gasoline service stations, repair and personal services, and the like. In a large number of cases the classification of such workers as managers owes more to convention than to reality. The inclusion of draftsmen, medical, dental, engineering and other such technicians among the professional and technical grouping also, in a large and increasing number of cases, conceals a genuinely working-class situation for those involved.
Moreover, a very rapidly growing category reported in the census is that which falls outside of any occupational group and is given the rubric “occupation not reported." This category of the occupational census included 1,369,621 people in 1950, and 3,453,279 in 1960. Furthermore, the growing number of those who are not counted as part of the “labor force" because they have stopped the active search for employment, as well as the enormous undercounting of the population in the working-class portions of the cities now admitted by census officials, also affect the trends. All in all, we must suppose these forms of undercounting result, particularly in recent censuses, in an underestimate of the size of the working-class population. These considerations, rough though they may be, tend toward the conclusion that the nonagricultural working-class portion of the “experienced civilian labor force" has grown since the start of the century from half to well over two-thirds, perhaps as high as three-quarters, of the total at the present time.
The conversion of an ever larger proportion of the population into labor power on the working-class level devoted to the increase of capital, has taken place primarily at the expense of the farming population, which at the turn of the century embraced nearly 40 percent of the “economically active," while by 1970 it had fallen below 4 percent. The most substantial proportional increases have taken place in three categories: operatives, clerical workers, and the combined service and retail-sales sectors. As the employment effects of the technological revolution began to be felt, however, the steady proportional increase of operatives ceased, and after 1950 this group fell backward as a proportion of the total (although numerically it continued to increase). But the continued, and even accelerated, increase of the other two groups, clerical and sales-service, has taken up the workers released from factory employment (or never hired).
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Structure of the Working Class
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\* Since for our tabulation we use the census figures for the “economically active civilian population"—the term used in the early part of this century—or, in later censuses, the “experienced civilian labor force," this tabulation includes all workers whose occupations can be defined, employed or unemployed, but not those who have "dropped out of the labor force."