{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","uuid":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","normalized_title":"laborandmonopolycapitalthedegradationofworkinthetwentiethcentury","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","isbns":["0853459401"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital%20The%20Degradation%20of%20Work%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"206 / 207","pdf_page":116,"physical_index":116,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3f9e2689bb417096a925c55ca25931ddcea927a1da8b6d28524cc0513ffc42b0"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Nor does the fact that these medians are a form of averaging distort the picture of relative pay. In fact, the earnings distribution simply bears out the impression conveyed by the medians:\n\nFrom this tabulation it is clear how similar the pay scales and distributions are in the clerical and operative categories, the differences between the two—both in overall medians and in distribution—favoring the operatives.\\*\n\nClerical work in its earlier stages has been likened to a craft.² The similarities are indeed apparent. Although the tools of the craft consisted only of pen, ink, other desk appurtenances, and writing paper, envelopes, and ledgers, it represented a total occupation, the object of which was to keep current the records ofthe financial and operating condition of the enterprise, as well as its relations with the external world. Master craftsmen, such as bookkeepers or chief clerks, maintained control over the process in its totality, and apprentices or journeymen craftsmen—ordinary clerks, copying clerks, office boys——learned their crafts in office apprenticeships, and in the ordinary course of events advanced through the levels by promotion. The work involved, in addition to ordinary bookkeeping on the double-entry or Italian model (to which was added the rudiments of cost as well as profit-and-loss accounting at the beginning of the nineteenth century), such tasks as timekeeping and payroll, quality control, commercial traveling, drafting, copying duplicates by hand, preparing accounts in several copies, etc.\n\nIn its most general aspects, office work entails accounting and recordkeeping, planning and scheduling, correspondence and interviewing, filing and copying, and the like. But with the development of the modern corporation these functions assume the particular forms of the various departments and branches of the enterprise.\n\nThe factory office, which began with its first and original functionary, the timekeeper, usually added as its second functionary a foreman's clerk, whose task was to assist the foreman by keeping track of the work in process and its stages of completion. These clerks had as their responsibility the records of workers, materials, and tasks. Out of these rudimentary functions grew the modern cost, planning and scheduling, purchasing, and engineering and design sections.\n\nSales, previously handled chiefly by the owner himself, perhaps assisted by a clerk who doubled as traveler, became the function of a marketing division, subdivided into sections to handle sales traveling, correspondence with customers, salesmen, and manufacturers, order processing, commissions, sales analyses, advertising, promotion, and publicity. A separate financial office takes care of financial statements, borrowing, extending credit, ensuring collections, assessing and regulating cash flow, etc. And so on for other office divisions, among which the most important is an administration office where corporate policy is made and enforced upon all divisions.\n\nThe offices so described are those of a producing corporation, in which commodities in the form of goods or services are made and sold; these offices are thus subsidiary and complementary to the productive labor processes carried on elsewhere within the same corporation. But with the development of monopoly capitalism came the extraordinary enlargement of those types of enterprises which, entirely separated from the process of production, carry on their activities either chiefly or entirely through clerical labor.\n\nCommercial concerns which deal only with the purchase and resale of commodities generally require three types oflabor in large masses: distributive (for warehousing, packing, shipping), sales, and clerical. This is particularly true on the wholesale level, in which the clerks are the largest category of. workers, outnumbering even sales workers. But even in retail trade, some kinds of enterprises, such as general merchandising and mail order houses, show a very large percentage of clerical labor.\n\n206\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nClerical Workers\n\n207\n\n\\* In Great Britain the trend has been similar. Writing in 1958 and basing himself upon data up to 1956, Lockwood says: “. . . the gross change in income relativities is unmistakable. The main result of this change is that the average clerk is now very roughly on the same income level as the average manual worker, or perhaps even slightly below.\"10 And the same conclusion was reached by David M. Gordon on the basis of 1959 data for the United States: “The full distributions of clerical and sales jobs and blue-collar manual jobs were almost exactly comparable,\" so far as earnings are concerned.\" But within only a decade, the rapidly worsening relative pay position of clerical workers brought them, on the average, below all forms of so-called blue-collar jobs.","previous_page":115,"next_page":117}