{"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":"276 / 277","pdf_page":151,"physical_index":151,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d2d81cf3d1e4f818a45f927076f98e9921dbbbe2bd465d36481c3c046fe47c41"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"How many such discouraged nonseekers are there? The C.E.S. enables us to make a dependable estimate. For example, in New York City, the conventional unemployment rate in 1970 averaged 8.1 per cent in the survey areas (compared with 4.4 per cent for the labor force of the city as a whole), but jumped to 11 per cent when the discouraged workers were added.\n\nThis adjustment begins to give us a picture of realities of economic life at the bottom of a city's social structure. But to this we must now add another category——part-time employed workers who would like to work full time but cannot find full-time jobs. The C.E.S. survey carefully separates people who wanted to work only part time from those who wanted to work full time, and in this way adds (again, for New York) another 2.3 percentage points to our emerging index of urban poverty. In other words, adding together the officially unemployed, the discouraged jobless and the involuntary part-time workers, we can now account for at least 13.3 per cent of the labor force in the New York City sample areas.\n\nOur adjustments have nearly doubled the official unemployment figures for the sample areas and tripled the national rate of unemployment. But, still, they are far from complete. The last and most important part of the index is the worker who has a full-time job but does not earn enough to make ends meet.2º\n\nFor a definition of the income needed to “make ends meet,\" the authors go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ itemized budget of consumption needs for a family of four in New York City. The Bureau compiled three such budgets, for the upper level at about \\$19,000, for the middle level at about \\$12,000, and for the lower levels at about \\$7,000, all before taxes. The nature of the lower-level budget may be judged from the fact that it allows only \\$100 a month for rent; all the rest of the budgeting is in line with this.\n\nIf we accept the B.L.S. figure of \\$7,183 as the least a family of four must earn to keep its head above water in New York City in 1970 (the B.L.S.'s national urban average for 1970 was \\$6,960), what does this require for the family's income earner? If he or she works 50 weeks a year, 40 hours a week (which is itself unlikely in the inner city), the answer is \\$3.50 an hour. Here is the final link in our chain of employment statistics. For when we add those individuals who earn less than \\$3.50 an hour to the discouraged nonseekers, the involuntary part-timers and the officially unemployed, the statistics take a horrifying leap. In the seven New York City sample areas, the subemployment rate rises to between 39.9 per cent and 66.6 per cent of the labor force. Indeed, the average\n\nWhat other result could have been expected, when, as we have seen, in May 1971 the median usual weekly earnings of full-time workers in all occupational categories of the working class with the exception only of craftsmen and foremen were far below this minimal earnings level, and when the fastest growing occupational categories, those of clerical and service workers, were lowest of all?\n\nFinally, the immense reservoir of subemployed labor holds on its lowest levels the pauperized layers of the population, that bottom sediment which is drawn into employment only infrequently, sporadically, and at peaks of“prosperity.\" “The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class,\" Marx wrote, “and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism.\" According to his figures, the official list of paupers in England and Wales in 1865 was 971,433, and since the population count in the 1861 census was just over 20 million, official pauperism then constituted some 4.6 percent of the total population. In the United States, the closest thing we have to an official paupers' list is the roll of those requiring welfare assistance. In 1973, these rolls contained 14.8 million persons out of a total population of 210.4 million or 7 percent of the population (and 1973 was the fourth successive year when 7 percent or more of the population was to be found on the welfare rolls).²2 In this startling proportion one may see the post-World War II “prosperity\" cycle in accordance with Marx's absolute general law of capitalist accumulation: the immense mass of social wealth and functioning capital, the extent and energy of capital accumulation, the growth of the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labor, the increasing relative mass of the industrial reserve army, of the mass of consolidated surplus population, and finally, the misery of “official pauperism.\" That this is a chain in which each link presupposes the rest, and in which “accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery\" at the other, may no longer be doubted.\n\nNotes\n\n276\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nThe Structure of the Working Class\n\n277","previous_page":150,"next_page":152}