{"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":"295 / 294","pdf_page":160,"physical_index":160,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2aa28bbda74a2492ae30e7a0de07bd5de4f7e65e6ca1a387bd9ee957c670d547"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Chapter 20\n\nA Final Note on Skill\n\nIn a study of the mechanization of industry conducted for the National Bureau of Economic Research in the 1930s, Harry Jerome concluded: “As to the effect on skill of further mechanization in the future .. . there is considerable reason to believe that the effect of further changes will be to raise the average skill required.\" Forty years later there are few who would disagree with this judgment. The idea that the changing conditions of industrial and office work require an increasingly “better-trained,\"“better-educated,\" and thus “upgraded\" working population is an almost universally accepted proposition in popular and academic discourse. Since the argument that has been thus far made in this work appears to clash directly with this popular idea, it is now necessary to confront the conventional view. The concepts of “skill,\" “training,\"” and “education” are themselves sufficiently vague, and a precise investigation of the arguments which are used to support the thesis of“upgrading\"” is further hampered by the fact that they have never been made the subject of a coherent and systematic presentation. We can grapple with the issue only by attempting to give coherence to what is essentially an impressionistic theory, one which is obviously considered so self-evident as to stand above the need for demonstration.\n\nIn the form given to it by Jerome in the sentence cited above, the phrase upon which the issue turns is “average skill.\" Since, with the development of technology and the application to it of the fundamental sciences, the labor processes of society have come to embody a greater amount of scientific knowledge, clearly the “average\" scientific, technical, and in that sense “skill\" content of these labor processes is much greater now than in the past. But this is nothing but a tautology. The question is precisely whether the scientific and “educated” content oflabor tends toward averaging, or, on the contrary, toward polarization. If the latter is the case, to then say that the “average\" skill has been raised is to adopt the logic of the statistician who, with one foot in the fire and the other in ice water, will tell you that “on the average,\" he is perfectly comfortable. The mass of workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labor process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers. On the contrary, not only does their skill fall in an absolute sense (in that they lose craft and traditional abilities without gaining new abilities adequate to compensate the loss), but it falls even more in a relative sense. The more science is incorporated into the labor process, the less the worker understands of the process; the more sophisticated an intellectual product the machine becomes, the less control and comprehension of the machine the worker has. In other words, the more the worker needs to know in order to remain a human being at work, the less does he or she know. This is the chasm which the notion of “average skill\" conceals.\n\nThe same ambiguity is to be seen in another common formulation of the “upgrading\" thesis, one which points to the proliferation of trained and educated specialties. Omar Pancoast, for instance, says: “It is an historical fact that an increasing number of positions require special skills. The evidence for this is well summarized by J. K. Norton with the comment: No extensive study of occupational trends arrives at an opposite conclusion.\" \"² In this form the claim is probably unexceptionable, but it may not be taken, as it often is, to mean that an increasing portion of the working population occupies positions that require special skills, if the word “skill\" is given an interpretation of substance. This approach tends to rest exclusively upon the increase in the number of specialized technical occupations, without recognizing that the multiplication of technical specialties is the condition for dispossessing the mass of workers from the realms of science, knowledge, and skill.\n\nFor most of those who hold it, the “upgrading\" thesis seems to rest upon two marked trends. The first is the shift of workers from some major occupational groups into others; the second is the prolongation of the average period of education. It will repay our efforts to consider both of these matters in some detail, not only because such a consideration is necessary to establish a realistic picture of the historical trends of skill, but also because in this consideration we shall see a splendid example of the manner in which conventional social science accepts carefully tailored appearances as a substitute for reality.\n\nLet us begin first with the shifts that have taken place within the occupational categories used by statisticians to identify the various portions of the “manual\" working class. At the turn of the century the three classifications of workers today known as craftsmen, foremen, and kindred, operatives and kindred, and nonfarm laborers together made up slightly less than 36 percent of employed persons. Seventy years later these three categories made up just over 36 percent (although in the intervening decades their total had risen to around 40 percent—in the 1920 to 1950 censuses—and then fallen back again). But during these seventy years the distribution of this group among its three statistical components had changed sharply. In terms of percentages of the entire employed population, the changes were as follows:³\n\nA Final Note on Skill\n\n295\n\n294","previous_page":159,"next_page":161}