The rationale of such a separation, and the significance of the results obtained by making these particular groupings, does not here concern us; this I have already discussed in the chapters on the universal market and on the service and retail-trade occupations. What is interesting at this point is that these groupings correspond precisely to the stagnating and the growing portions of the American economy. Each of the industrial classifications listed by Fuchs as belonging to Industry has been either stagnating or declining in terms of the percentage of national employment it represents, and this is true for every classification in the group since the 1950s and for almost every classification since the 1920s. On the other side, every classification (except household employment) included by Fuchs in the Service sector has been a rapidly growing area of employment throughout the last hundred years, again in terms of its percentage of total employment." The Service sector, as defined by Fuchs, grew from approximately 40 percent of total employment in 1929 to over 55 percent in 1967. Between 1947 and 1965 alone, there was an increase of 13 million jobs in this sector, compared with an increase of only 4 million in the Industry sector.\*12
The most striking finding reported by Fuchs is the growing gap between the pay levels in the Industry sector and those in the Service sector. With remarkable consistency, the average rates of pay in the Service sector each year slipped further behind the average rates of pay in the Industry sector, so that by 1959 Industry rates were on the average 17 percent higher, and thereafter the gap continued to widen.'4 Since the Service sector employs a disproportionately large share of nonwhite, female, and very young workers, Fuchs next investigates whether this widening wage gap is perhaps simply the effect of the contrasting compositions of the two sectors, by color, age, sex, and education—in other words, whether it is not just another way of looking at the well-known fact that blacks, women, young workers, etc., receive less pay. This proves to be only part of the explanation: the differing compositions of the two sectors of employment “explain" only about one-half the great and growing spread in pay. This means that while the Service sector contains a disproportionate share of those who, throughout the whole economy, get lower pay, and this pulls down the average for the sector, at the same time all kinds of workers in the Service sector, no matter what their age, color, or sex, receive on the average lower rates of pay.\*i5
The levels of pay in the low-wage industries and occupations are below the subsistence level; that is to say, unlike the scales of the highest paid occupational groups, they do not approach the income required to support a family at the levels of spending necessary in modern society. But, because these industries and occupations are also the most rapidly growing ones, an ever larger mass of workers has become dependent upon them as the sole source of support for their families. It is this continual enlargement of the mass of lower-paid occupations that is at the root of the tendencies, which began to be publicized only during the 1960s but which existed before, toward “poverty in the midst of plenty" in the United States; it is this that accounts for the rapid expansion of the welfare rolls to take in ever larger masses of employed workers.
This tendency, which is but one of the factors leading to what Marx called an “accumulation of misery, corresponding to the accumulation of capital," is so marked that even when one abstracts from the effects of the rapid influx of female labor into ill-paid employment and considers only male employment, it is still visible and measurable. A study of the distribution of earned income made by Peter Henle of the U.S. Department of Labor follows the widespread custom of disregarding female employment, which is considered to be somehow temporary, incidental, and fortuitous, when it should actually be placed at the very center of all occupational studies today. Henle considers only the distribution of earned income among males, and his conclusion for the years 1958 to 1970 is as follows: “Over the 12-year span covered by this study, there has been a slow but persistent trend toward inequality in the distribution of earnings and in the distribution of wages and salaries. The trend is evident not only for the work force as a whole, but also for many individual occupational and industrial groups. If the effect of fringe benefits could have been included in the calculations, the trend would undoubtedly have been even more pronounced." “All in all," he notes, "the net effect of the shifting occupational composition of the economy seems clearly in the direction of a more elongated earnings distribution, helping to produce the trend toward inequality."7 But the “shifting occupational and industrial composition of the economy" is far less significant for the male population alone; it is female employment, as has been noted, that accounts for the bulk of the occupational and industrial shift, and thus it is female employment that constitutes the bulk of the new workingclass occupations. We cannot doubt, therefore, that if Henle's analysis were repeated for the total of the wage and salary earning population, it would show a rapid and intense, rather than a slow, trend toward polarization of income.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Structure of the Working Class
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\* This increase, we may note in passing, was not, according to Fuchs, accompanied by any increase in the share of output produced in the Service sector. Measured as a share in Gross National Product, the output of the Service sector did not increase at all between 1929 and 1965, despite the great increase in its share of employment.‘3 This estimate is interesting, as far as it goes, in highlighting the increasingly wasteful allocation of labor, but since Fuchs is bound by the fictitious concepts of“output" used in calculating the Gross National Product, it does not go nearly as far as it should. The “output" of great portions of the Service sector exists only in the balance sheets of the corporations operating within it, and in the national product accounts of statisticians and economists, while adding little or nothing to the social product calculated in noncapitalist terms.
\* Another investigation of the same subject matter, by Barry Bluestone, reaches this conclusion: "In tracing wage histories since the Second World War, one finds that the wage differential between high-wage’ and 'low-wage’ industries has increased secularly. In 1947 the set of industries with lowest wages paid straight-time hourly rates which averaged 75 percent of the average wages prevailing in the highest wage industries in the nation. Apart from slight cyclical variation in wage increases during the ensuing period, the wage ratio between these two sets of industries fell to 60 percent by 1966. The low-wage industries granted smaller wage increases (in percentage as well as absolute terms) in all but four years during the two-decade period."16