{"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":"252 / 253","pdf_page":139,"physical_index":139,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ef3fd441ada88c0f237b66fb75714a84e5ad1b10bde6df2953a48e125899328c"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"In modern bourgeois economics, service labor which does not in Adam Smith's words \"fix or realize itself in any particular subject or vendible commodity\" is no longer held in disfavor, but is rather, since it has been developed as a prime source of profit, celebrated. Colin Clark found “the most important concomitant of economic progress”\" to be “the movement of the working population from agriculture to manufacture and from manufacture to commerce and services.\"9 Few economists would today call service labor “unproductive\"except when performed by the worker on his or her own account, as the housewife does at home. Instead, they tend to extol service as the characteristic form of production of our time, superior to manufacturing and with a greater future before it. In this we see a continuation of the succession of economic theories which assigned the most productive role to the particular form of labor that was most important or growing most rapidly at the time: the mercantilists to labor which brought precious metals into the country; the physiocrats to agricultural labor; the classical economists to manufacturing labor.\n\nIn the history of capitalism, while one or another form of productive labor may play a greater role in particular eras, the tendency is toward the eradication of distinctions among its various forms. Particularly in the era of monopoly capitalism, it makes little sense to ground any theory of the economy upon any specially favored variety of labor process. As these varied forms come under the auspices of capital and become part of the domain of profitable investment, they enter for the capitalist into the realm of general or abstract labor, labor which enlarges capital. In the modern corporation, all forms of labor are employed without distinction, and in the modern “conglomerate\" corporation some divisions carry on manufacturing, others carry on trade, others banking, others mining, and still others “service” processes. All live peacefully together, and in the final result as recorded in balance sheets the forms oflabor disappear entirely in the forms of value.\n\nThe service occupations (excluding private household employment, which has not grown in the form of servants directly hired, and is being replaced by commercial companies which contract to perform household cleaning) now include a mass of labor some nine times larger than the million workers they accounted for at the turn of the century. This represents a much more rapid growth than that of employment as a whole, which in the same period (1900-1970), less than tripled.\\* The nature of these occupations and the labor processes which they carry on will be readily understood from the listing as given in the 1970 census.1º\n\nTo this 9 million should be added, as workers of the same general classification and wage level, that portion of sales workers employed in retail trade, or some 3 million out of the total of 5.5 million sales workers of all kinds (the rest being employed in wholesale trade, as manufacturers' representatives, and as salesmen of advertising, insurance, real estate, stocks and bonds, etc., and thus representing a different order of work). These service and retail sales workers, taken together, account for a massive total of more than 12 million workers.\n\nThe occupations classified in these two categories require little description and analysis because they are conducted, for the most part, in the public eye, and the labor tasks assigned to most of them are readily visualized. In the case of almost every occupation in the service and retail groups the mass of labor is drawn into these growing fields of employment from a vast pool of common labor which is made available by the relative falling off of employment in other fields. The average pay scales confirm this: the median of the usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers in the service occupations is lower than that of any occupational group except farmworkers. In May 1971 it was \\$91 a week (if one includes the half million private household workers; excluding these it was \\$96), as against \\$115 for clerical workers, \\$117 for laborers (nonfarm), and \\$120 for operatives. In the same month, the median for full-time retail sales workers was \\$95, which in terms of pay located that grouping closer to the service occupation than to any other major occupational category.\"\n\nExcept for the special cases of police and firemen, the incidence of developed skill, knowledge, and authority in the labor processes of society is naturally very small in these categories, and can be found only in that small layer of housekeepers and stewards who have the function of superintending institutional labor, and among the tiny number of cooks who practice the art\n\nfollowing distinction must be kept in mind: The Commerce Department groups enterprises according to a Standard Industrial Classification, and the broad groups within this classification, such as Agriculture, Manufacturing, Mining, Trade, etc. include a group called Service Industries. Occupational figures for this group of industries are available, and employment in the group is sometimes referred to as “service employment.\" But this employment includes workers in a great many occupations: in 1970 it included more than 3 million clerical workers, over a million craftsmen, another million operatives, and almost 7.5 million professional and technical employees; at the same time, it did not include all the service occupations, but only about three-quarters of them, the rest being scattered through all the other industrial classifications. To confuse labor in so-called “service industries\" with the service occupations would mean, therefore, to duplicate much of the employment that has been and will be herein discussed in other connections. Our present discussion therefore deals only with those workers who are grouped in the occupational statistics as service workers, and not those so grouped in the industrial statistics.\n\n252\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nService Occupations and Retail Trade\n\n253\n\n\\* Because the term “service labor\" is used by statistical agencies of the United States in two different connotations, one industrial and the other occupational, the","previous_page":138,"next_page":140}