Sociologists and economists, nevertheless, continue to repeat Taylor's argument in a world of labor that has become, for the largest portions of the working population, increasingly devoid of any content of either skill or scientific knowledge. Thus Michel Crozier, in The World of the Office Worker, concedes that as office work has become an immensely enlarged occupational field, its pay and status advantages over factory work have virtually disappeared: “A mass of unskilled employees assigned a series of simple unchanging operations." "It is this general pattern of evolution," he says, “anticipated by Marxist theoreticians, which constitutes the principal argument in favor of the thesis of proletarization of white-collar employees." His response, strikingly similar to Taylor's, differs from the latter only in that, in place of“Italians and Hungarians” he is pleased to use women as that category of the labor force for which any job is good enough: “The proletarization of white-collar employees does not have the same meaning at all if it is women, and not heads of family, who comprise the majority of the group."7 As he explains:
It is true of course, on the other hand, that the 900,000 French office workers of 1920 certainly had a more bourgeois status than the 1,920,000 white-collar employees of 1962. But to the 600,000 male employees of 1920 there now correspond probably 350,000 supervisors and 250,000 highly qualified employees whose status is at least equivalent to that of their predecessors of 1920. As for the 650,000 females newly entered into the profession, thirty years ago they were laborers, seamstresses, or maids. As deadening and as alienating as their assembly-line work may be, for them it may constitute a promotion.
product of well-developed technical skill in a given area of activity. Someone, some skilled worker, has in a reflective moment attempted to make explicit the assumptions that are implicit in the skill itself. . . . Science is rooted deep in skill and can only expand by the experimental and systematic development of an achieved skill. The successful sciences consequently are all of humble origin—the cautious development of lowly skills until the point of logical and experimental expansion is clearly gained."
The profession of engineering is a relatively recent development. Before the engineer, the conceptual and design functions were the province of craftsmanship, as were the functions of furthering the industrial arts through innovation. "The appearance of the modern engineer," Bernal says, "was a new social phenomenon. He is not the lineal descendant of the old military engineer but rather of the millwright and the metal-worker of the days of craftsmanship. Bramah (1748-1814), Maudslay (1771-1831), Muir (1806-1888), Whitworth (1803-1887), and the great George Stephenson (1781-1848) were all men of this type."10 Those even slightly familiar with the history of technology will recognize the importance of the names on this roster, to which can be added James Watt, whose trade was that of mathematical instrument maker; Samuel Crompton, who was himself a spinner from the age of fourteen and continued, in the absence of patent protection, to earn his living as a spinner even after his spinning mule was in widespread use; and many others.\* It should also be noted that up to 1824 it was illegal for a British mechanic to accept work abroad, a restriction inconceivable in our own day; the reasons for this were clear so long as the craftsman remained the repository of the technical knowledge of the production process.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
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. . To be sure, the professions of white-collar employees and minor functionaries are, on the whole, considerably devalued compared to their status only fifty years ago. But this devaluation of the great mass of jobs has been accompanied, we have seen, by a much greater differentiation and a change in recruitment. The majority of white-collar tasks are less interesting, less prestigious, and bring lower remuneration, but they are carried out by women with 8 reduced aspirations. . . .
As craftsmanship is destroyed or increasingly emptied of its traditional content, the remaining ties, already tenuous and weakened, between the working population and science are more or less completely broken. This connection was, in the past, made chiefly through the craftsman or artisan section of the working class, and in the earliest periods of capitalism the connection was quite close. Before the assertion by management of its monopoly over science, craftsmanship was the chief repository of scientific production technique in its then existing form, and historical accounts emphasize the origins of science in craft technique.“Speaking historically," says Elton Mayo, "I think it can be asserted that a science has generally come into being as a
\* Despite the flood of mechanical invention in recent times, it would be impossible to construct such a list for this century. One can think of Frank Whittle, originally a rigger for metal aircraft, who played an important role in the invention of the jet engine, and John Harwood, a watchmaker and watch repairman who invented the self-winding wristwatch, patented in 1923. Hoxie reports that while he was preparing his study of scientific management, during the World War I period, he “saw in one shop an automatic machine invented by a workman which did the work of several hand workers. Did he receive any reward?’ was the question asked. Oh, yes,’ came the answer, his rate of pay was increased from 17 to 22 cents an hour.' Instances of this kind could be multiplied."! But in more recent times such cases are rare. A study of the occupational characteristics of a random sample of persons granted patents in the United States in 1953 showed that “about 60 percent were engineers, chemists, metallurgists, and directors of research and development, and that most of the rest were non-R.&D. executives; almost none were production workers."12 Here we may pause to give a decent burial to Adam Smith's third argument in favor of the technical division of labor: that the worker, with attention focused upon a single repeated operation, would devise machinery to facilitate that operation. Such truth as it once possessed has long since disappeared in the conditions of capitalist production in which the worker is neither encouraged nor permitted to understand his or her work.