Lest this be thought an exaggeration, let me now substantiate it with estimates based upon the pay scales for workers in all of these six classifications in 1971, and official estimates of the cost of maintaining a family of four above the poverty line in that same yearand it's worth noting that the situation since then can only have gotten worse, not only because of the economic crisis, but also because during these four years inflation has outstripped wages, thus lowering real wages. Some 80 percent of service workers and workers in retail trades did not receive enough pay to support a family of four above the poverty level. The same is true of at least 75 percent of all clerical workers and laborers, both of whom are paid on about the same level, the laborers maybe a little higher than clerical workers. It is also true of close to 70 percent of all operatives and kindred workers. Only craftsworkers earn in their majority enough to lift a family of four out of the officially defined poverty category, and even in this grouping the wages of 40 percent, if used to support a family of four, were below the poverty level.
Now, one result of these earnings levels is that very large numbers of families do live below the poverty level; that a big majority of families is not put in that position is due only to multiple job-holding within the same family. This we know. But what I am trying to highlight is the startling fact that a pretty large majority of the jobs in the economy have now been transformed by the workings of the capitalist division of labor into the kinds of work one usually thinks of as second jobs, the mythical pin-money jobs which women and teenagers are supposed to be the only ones to take to supplement the major family income. The result is that most of the people, whether they are supplementary earners or heads of households, now occupy such so-called second jobs with their pitiful and demeaning duties and meager pay. That this is so is due not only to the kind of division of labor we have been discussing, but also to the occupational and industrial shifts which have resulted from the accumulation of capital in the United States. 1auvn 1
Let me try to make this clear. In striving to economize on labor time, the corporation is also striving to reduce the number of workers required for a given quantity or output, or—and this comes to much the same thingto produce a rapidly growing output without a proportional growth in the number of workers. To use Marx's memorable way of putting it, unlike the generals who win their wars by recruiting armies, the captains ofindustry win their wars by discharging armies. The practical consequences of this can be seen in any analysis of United States employment in the manufacturing industries over any reasonable period of time. Thus in the United States between 1947 and 1964, a seventeen-year period, the output of the textile industries grew by more than 40 percent but employment was cut by one third. Other industries, such as iron and steel foundries, lumber and wood products, malt liquors, and footwear, showed production increases of from 15 percent to 40 percent in the same period, accompanied by employment drops of 10 percent to 25 percent. The petroleum industry poured out five-sixths more product at the end of the period than at the beginning, but its employment was one-fourth lower. Even the construction industry, which by the nature of its production processes is notably resistant to technological change, doubled its output while adding only 50 percent to its labor force. Only the most rapidly growing industries showed substantial increases in employment. Thus electrical machinery and motor freights added respectively 50 percent and 70 percent to their employment, but in the process they roughly tripled their output. The aluminum industry more than doubled its employment, but this was the result of a quadrupled output. An extreme case is that of air transport, which enlarged its output some eight times while increasing employment by only one and one-third times.
Now, the figures that I have been giving you deal only with a seventeenyear period; but, taking a much longer-term view, you can very clearly see the trend by focusing on the changes in manufacturing and related industries like construction. For at least a century these industries occupied close to half of all non-farm employment, usually between 45 percent and 50 percent. But after the 1920 census, about fifty years ago, this began to change; and by the time we come to the most recent census, that of 1970, these industries occupy only one-third of non-farm employment. There has therefore been an immense shift of labor out of the traditional manufacturing, mining and construction, and transportation industries into the very rapidly growing areas of real estate, insurance, finance, services, and wholesale and retail trade. But these rapidly growing fields of industry are precisely the low-wage portions of the economy; while the higher-wage sector is the stagnant or declining portion. None of this is accidental; there are profound structural reasons why the most rapid growth of capital has taken place in the low-wage areas and also in the enlargement of nonproductive as against productive work. In any case, this trend is not a matter for doubt, and it is this trend, along with the rapid growth of the lowest-wage occupations, such as clerical, service, and retail trade, that in good measure accounts for the fact that we live increasingly in an economy of so-called second jobs and that true first jobs in the traditional sense—jobs that are rewarding in themselves and pay enough to support a family—are fewer than ever.
If the captains of industry win their war, as Marx put it, by discharging armies, how do we know that the rapidity of the accumulation of capital will keep up with it and that new products, services, or unproductive industries will develop rapidly enough to absorb all of the labor freed by the capitalist drive for higher productivity? Well, we do not know, and in fact in capitalist society there is always a pool of unused labor power, an industrial reserve army. It has almost always been a very sizable mass in United States industrial history, at least during this century. And it shrinks to a small size only on those rare occasions when the upswings in the business cycle are unusually strong and correspond as well to longer-term upswings in the process of capitalist accumulation, especially during wars.
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