The movement of the labor force participation rate in the years since World War II, taken as a whole, is a relatively unenlightening trend. The percent of the noninstitutionalized population found in the total labor force (including the armed forces) has moved since 1947 in a narrow range between 59 and 61 percent. But this static condition conceals changes of a most striking kind, which become visible as soon as one breaks down the overall figures by sex. The nonmovement of the index as a whole is produced by violently contrary movements of the male and female populations.
For the male population during the period 1947 to 1971, a strong and consistent decline since the 1940s and early 1950s has reduced the participation rate from some 87 percent to only 80 percent. This decline is only partly attributable to the increase in school attendance during the student years and to retirement; it is to be found in every age category, and is most particularly marked in male workers between the ages of 55 and 64, for whom the participation rate declined from 89.6 in 1947 to 82.2 in 1971. Unless we are to make untenable assumptions (such as, as Sweezy and Magdoff point out, the assumption of a growing leisure class among workers), this clearly indicates that a portion of the male working population (and the figures point to white workers almost as much as to black) has been and is being moved into the reserve army of labor without this showing up in the unemployment statistics.
For the female population, the trend is precisely the opposite. Here the figures, across the board for all age groups, indicate a very great movement into the labor force, from a participation rate of 31.8 percent in 1947 to 43.4 percent in 1971. And just as among males the largest decrease takes place in the 55- to 64-year-old age bracket, so among females the largest increase takes place in the age groups from 45 to 54 and from 55 to 64; for the former, from 32.7 percent in 1947 to 54.3 percent in 1971, and for the latter, from 24.3 percent to 42.9 percent.
These two opposing statistical movements of male and female workers are contradictory in form only. In essence, they represent two sides of the same phenomenon, the increase in the relative mass of the industrial reserve army. Among male workers this takes the form of a sloughing off into the ranks of the so-called nonparticipants in the labor force, or in other words an increase of the “stagnant" portion. Among female workers it takes the form of a growing body of female labor which is drawn from the mass of women who previously did not work, and hence represents an enlargement of the “floating" and “stagnant" reserve army oflabor by additional hundreds of thousands and even millions each year. As the available pool of unemployed labor is expanded among men by their relative repulsion from industry and trade, it is expanded even more among women by their increasing attraction into industry and trade. The opposing forms taken by this basically unitary movement simply reflect the different starting points of male and female labor at the beginning of the period we have been considering, as well as the strong demand for female labor in the expanding mass occupations in contrast to the relative stagnation of the male mass occupations.
The logical culmination of these trends is an equalization of the labor force participation rates between men and women, and the stabilization of a uniform rate for the population as a whole—in other words, the transformation of as much as one-third or more of the male population into a reserve army of labor, along with a similar part of the female population. But for purposes of this analysis there is no need to enter into risky extrapolations from existing statistical trends. It is enough to notice what has in fact been happening, without trying to assess the extent to which it can proceed, an extent which is limited by future trends in the accumulation process of capital as well as by social trends having to do with the structure of the family, etc. And what has been happening is that, along with an increasing mass of the proletariat, there is also the consolidation of an increasing mass of relative surplus population which takes place by way of a market repulsion of male labor and an attraction of female labor, both on a very great scale.
The well-established fact that women are generally paid on a substantially lower scale than men, either by way of their concentration in lower-paid occupations or within the same occupation, immediately draws our attention to a significant long-term consequence of the statistical movement we have been discussing. The concentration of better-paid employment among craftsmen (as well as professional and managerial males) on the one side, and the further tendency of the mass of working-class jobs to shift in the direction of lower-paid female occupations, clearly brings about a polarization of income among job holders. This is reflected in the fact that the industrial sectors in the United States in which employment is relatively stagnant are the sectors with wage rates above the average, while the sectors in which employment is growing most rapidly are those with lower-than-average wage rates (see table, next page). 10
An important corroboration of this trend toward a polarization of income among job holders emerges from the work of Victor R. Fuchs for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Fuchs is a celebrant of the growing importance of the service industries, and the information we shall cite here arose as a by-product of his effort to establish the shift to service industries and the consequent characteristics of the emerging economic structure. He divided the economy into two sectors, The first, which he called "Industry," included mining, construction, manufacturing, transport, communications and public utilities, and government enterprises. The second, which he called “Service," included wholesale trade, retail trade, finance and insurance, real estate, and household and institutional employment, professional, personal, business, and repair services, and general government including the armed forces.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Structure of the Working Class
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\* This conclusion is also arrived at, by other and much fuller methods of computation, by Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff in their analysis of the labor force participation rate in Monthly Review.8