The most marked feature of this tabulation is the decline in laborers. A large part of this classification had become operatives (we are still speaking in terms of percentages, since in terms of absolute numbers the total of the three groups was about 222/3 times larger in 1970 than at the turn of the century, and each percentage point now represents about 222/3 times as many people) and the rest had become craftsmen and foremen. This shift is taken, on its face, to represent a massive “upgrading" of workers to higher categories of skill.\*
Classifications of workers, however, are neither “natural" nor self-evident, nor is the degree of skill a self-evident quality which can simply be read from the labels given to various such classifications. The first socioeconomic occupational classifications used in the United States were those of William C. Hunt, an employee of the Bureau of the Census who, in 1897, grouped all gainful workers into four categories: proprietors, clerical employees, skilled workers, and laborers. The group we now call “operatives" did not exist in this classification, and the division of manual workers into two classes was a clear and unambiguous one: There were the craftsmen—the mechanics in various trades, whose admission into this category of skilled workers was thus dependent upon satisfying the traditional requirements of craft mastery. Laborers were all others; they were thus a residual category.
In the 1930s a revision of these classifications was carried out by Dr. Alba Edwards, for many years an official of the Bureau of the Census, who reconstructed the conceptual basis of occupational statistics in a fundamental fashion. The change which he made that is of concern to this discussion is his division of the former group of laborers into two parts. Those who tended or operated machines, or attended mechanized processes, he called operatives. Laborers, still a residual category, now consisted of those nonfarm workers who were neither craftsmen nor machine operatives. These classifications were first applied in the census of 1930. Edwards, however, did the massive work of reconstructing the census data back to the turn of the century, and even earlier, in accord with his new classification scheme. The class of workers known as “operatives," therefore, insofar as we find it in the census statistics earlier than those of 1930, is a backward projection of a category that did not exist in these earlier censuses. Edwards' work has been the chief basis for all similar reconstructions since done by others.ª
The three Edwards classifications were taken to correspond, both in official terminology and in common parlance, to levels of skill. Craftsmen continued to be called skilled workers and laborers “unskilled"; operatives were now called “semiskilled."But it must be noted that the distinction between the skills of the two latter categories was based not upon a study of the occupational tasks involved, as is generally assumed by the users of the categories, but upon a simple mechanical criterion, in the fullest sense of the word. The creation of “semi-skill" by Edwards thus brought into existence, retroactively to the turn of the century and with a mere stroke of the pen, a massive “upgrading" of the skills of the working population. By making a connection with machinery—such as machine tending or watching, machine feeding, machine operatinga criterion of skill, it guaranteed that with the increasing mechanization of industry the category of the “unskilled" would register a precipitous decline, while that of the “semiskilled"would show an equally striking rise. This statistical process has been automatic ever since, without reference to the actual exercise or distribution of “skills."
Let us take as an example the categories of teamster on the one side, and the operators of motor vehicles (such as truckdrivers, chauffeurs and taxi drivers, routemen and deliverymen, etc.) on the other. These categories are important because that of teamster was, before World War I, one of the largest of occupational groups, while the drivers of various sorts are, taken together, one of the largest today. The former are classified, retroactively, among the “unskilled" laborers, while the latter, because of their connection with machinery, are classed as operatives and hence “semi-skilled." When the Edwards scale is applied in this fashion, a skill upgrading takes place as a consequence of the displacement of horse-drawn transport by motorized. Yet it is impossible to see this as a true comparison of human work skills. In the circumstances of an earlier day, when a largely rural population learned the arts of managing horses as part of the process of growing up, while few as yet knew how to operate motorized vehicles, it might have made sense to characterize the former as part of the common heritage and thus no skill at all, while driving, as a learned ability, would have been thought of as a “skill." Today, it would be more proper to regard those who are able to drive vehicles as unskilled in that respect at least, while those who can care for, harness, and manage a team of horses are certainly the possessors of a marked and uncommon ability. In reality, this way of comparing occupational skill leaves much to be desired, depending as it does on relativistic or contemporary notions. But there is certainly little reason to suppose that the ability to drive a motor vehicle is more demanding, requires longer training or habituation time, and thus represents a higher or intrinsically more rewarding skill than the ability to manage a team of horses.
296
Labor and Monopoly Capital
A Final Note on Skill
297
\* It would be wrong to try to derive any comforting conclusions from the rise in the category of craftsmen and foremen between 1900 and 1970. We have already discussed the dispersal and deterioration of craft skills in the machine shop, for example, and many of the possessors of partial skills continue to carry the label of craftsmanship. In a discussion of traditional apprenticeships in British industry, for example, one British authority points out that “although apprentices theoretically emerge as skilled craftsmen much of the work they are put to would be regarded as semi-skilled, because of the fragmentation of many industrial processes." Because, this writer says, the need is for “semi-skilled” workers, “the apprenticeship system encourages unrealistic and rigid job definitions."4 In the United States such attacks against the apprenticeship system are no longer necessary, since there is little left of it. And it should also be noted that much of the growth of the craftsmen classification is due to the rapid increase of the "mechanics and repairmen" category (the largest grouping of which is that of automobile mechanics) which does not conform to traditional standards of craftsmanship and represents an ever slighter level of technical capacity and training.