{"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":"249 / 248","pdf_page":137,"physical_index":137,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"18d2d9c5986d594330c7ab58f8be87cd4221d9526ed23bfab44b9c6c63cfeec5"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Chapter 16\n\nService Occupations and Retail Trade\n\nThe giant mass of workers who are relatively homogeneous as to lack of developed skill, low pay, and interchangeability of person and function (although heterogeneous in such particulars as the site and nature of the work they perform) is not limited to offices and factories. Another huge concentration is to be found in the so-called service occupations and in retail trade. We have already discussed, particularly in Chapter 13, “The Universal Market,\" the reasons for the rapid growth of service occupations in both the corporate and governmental sectors of the economy: the completion by capital of the conquest of goods-producing activities; the displacement of labor from those industries, corresponding to the accumulation of capital in them, and the juncture of these reserves of labor and capital on the ground of new industries; and the inexorable growth of service needs as the new shape of society destroys the older forms of social, community, and family cooperation and self-aid. Now we must examine the labor processes of the service occupations themselves more closely.\n\n“A service,\" Marx pointed out, “is nothing more than the useful effect of a use-value, be it of a commodity, or be it of labour.\"1 The worker who is employed in producing goods renders a service to the capitalist, and it is as a result of this service that a tangible, vendible object takes shape as a commodity. But what if the useful effects of labor are such that they cannot take shape in an object? Such labor must be offered directly to the consumer, since production and consumption are simultaneous. The useful effects of labor, in such cases, do not serve to make up a vendible object which then carries its useful effects with it as part of its existence as a commodity. Instead, the useful effects of labor themselves become the commodity. When the worker does not offer this labor directly to the user of its effects, but instead sells it to a capitalist, who re-sells it on the commodity market, then we have the capitalist form of production in the field of services.\n\nSuch a strict or scientific definition of services is far more limited than the usual use of the term by statistical agencies, such as the bureaus of the census and of labor statistics in the United States. For example, restaurant labor, which cooks, prepares, assembles, serves, cleans dishes and utensils, etc., carries on tangible production just as much as labor employed in many another manufacturing process; the fact that the consumer is sitting nearby at a counter or table is the chief distinction, in principle, between this industry and those food-processing industries which are classified under “manufacturing.\" Laundry workers, workers in cleaning and pressing establishments, workers in automobile repair shops and in machine servicing or repair work of other sorts perform the same sort of work as many workers in manufacturing industries, and they are classified, occupationally, in the same way, but the Bureau of the Census classifies them in service industries.\\* Workers in transportation are often regarded as workers in a“service\" industry, but if the location of a commodity is taken as an important physical characteristic, transportation is a part of the process of production. And if we do not take this view we fall into insuperable difficulties, because we are forced to extend the distinction between “making\" and “moving\" back into the factory, where many workers do not play a role in fashioning the object with their own hands but merely move it through the plant, or through the process. The distinction so applied becomes meaningless and even ridiculous. Chambermaids are classed as service workers, but their labors are not always different, in principle, from those of many manufacturing workers in that they take shape in a tangible result. When the chambermaids in hotels and motels, or the aides in hospitals and other institutions, make beds they do an assembly operation which is not different from many factory assembly occupationsa fact recognized by management when it conducts motion and time studies of both on the same principles—and the result is a tangible and vendible commodity. Does the fact that porters, charwomen, janitors, or dishwashers perform their cleaning operations not on new goods that are being readied at the factory or construction sites for their first use, but on constantly reused buildings and utensils render their labor different in principle, and any less tangible in form, from that of manufacturing workers who do the factories' final cleaning, polishing, packaging, and so forth?\n\nService Occupations and Retail Trade\n\n249\n\n\\* Stigler has pointed out that in this respect the census practice has changed, and that early in the century all such workers in power laundries, automobile repair shops and other repair and servicing industries were included in manufacturing, whereas today they are included in service industries. As he notes, this change in statistical practice, when applied to such rapidly growing industries as these, has in itself accounted for a significant part of the shift from “manufacturing\"to “services” in the statistics used for long-run comparisons.² Today, hand and machine finish pressers, when employed by makers of clothing, are counted as manufacturing workers, but when employed by dry-cleaning plants they are workers in service industries, although the difference in the form of labor is slight; the chief difference is in rates of pay, which is substantially lower in the service industries.3 The same holds true for a great variety of craftsmen whose work in fabrication is distinguished from repair and servicing; and in fact even when they do the very same work of repair and servicing they are counted as manufacturing workers only when this is done as plant maintenance work.\n\n248","previous_page":136,"next_page":138}