{"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":"300 / 301","pdf_page":163,"physical_index":163,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"fc5d297fa03c211014f5bfee7257e8f1a5a5099c6747a0a2702eefe1f4adbeda"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"The imaginary creation of higher categories of skill by nomenclatural exercises does not end with the transformation of most urban labor into “semi-skilled\" work. We have yet to consider the phenomenon of the decline of farm laborers. Here the statistical category involved was especially large and the transformation especially illusory. At the turn of the century, 17.7 percent of the working population was classified as “farm laborers and foremen\" (almost all of them “laborers,\" few of them foremen). But here there is not even a hint in the census classification of an attempt to sort workers by skill. For the population employed on farms, the census has no differentiated categories at all, no class of“skilled farmers,\" or“farming craftsmen.\"All farm labor employed by farm owners is classified in the “farm laborers and foremen\" category. The only distinction drawn by the census is a purely proprietary one, between owners on the one side (with a very small group of managers included with owners), and “laborers and foremen\" on the other. Among the 17.7 percent of the working population of the United States which, at the time of the 1900 census, was employed by farm proprietors, a great many—perhaps most were fully qualified farmers who had themselves owned and operated farms and lost them, or who had grown up in farm families and learned the entire broad craft. The farm hired hand was able to be of assistance to the farmer because he was the product of years of farm life and had a mastery of a great many skills involving a knowledge of land, fertilizer, animals, tools, farm machinery, construction skills, etc., and the traditional abilities and dexterities in the handling of farm tasks. Only in this way could he be set to work by the farmer in plowing, milking, caring for animals, mending fence, harvesting, etc. To be sure, there was unquestionably a distribution of skills, and many farmworkers, such as those employed in cotton or fruit picking and other such “plantation\" tasks, did not possess the all-around skills of the working farmer. But to disregard, as is now customary, the broad range of abilities required of so many farmworkers and to be deceived by the use of the catch-all designation of “laborer\" is to deal not in social science but in promotional labeling. Of all categories of labor, this one has suffered the most complete decimation, having plunged to 1.7 percent by 1970. In the world of the sociologists, this represents a triumphant ascent of an enormous mass of workers to higher levels, since every classification of labor is rated by them above farm labor in \"skill.\"\n\nOn the other side, the labor classifications whose names conceal a woeful lack of skill or training have, like the “semi-skilled,\" grown rapidly. For example, beginning with the 1950 census another change was introduced into the classification schema. The Alba Edwards system was modified, for that and subsequent censuses, by the introduction of the new category of nonhousehold “service\" workers, and again this classification was used to reinterpret the figures of earlier censuses. At one stroke this reclassification significantly reduced the major occupational groups usually included in the so-called blue-collar categories. The new service category was composed of approximately one-fourth of workers who had previously been classified as “semiskilled,\" and three-fourths of workers previously classed as “unskilled.\" Since, by the common consent of social scientists, “service workers\" are at least several cuts above “laborers,\" and since some even think that because they produce “services” instead of working in factories and wearing “blue collars\" while producing goods, they should be rated above operatives, another substantial “upgrading” was brought about. There is no need to add here to what is known about the jobs of the mass of service workers as shown in the listing of the occupations in this category (see pp. 274-75 above), or the relative pay of these workers compared not only to operatives but even to laborers (see p. 226 above).\n\nWe must finally mention the strength drawn by the illusory upgrading of skills from the statistics which show the very rapid growth of clerical and sales occupations. The reflex response which causes governmental and academic social scientists automatically to accord a higher grade of skill, training, prestige, and class position to any form of office work as against any and all forms of manual work is a tradition oflong standing in American sociology which few have ventured to challenge. Caplow has pointed out that the “superiority of white-collar work\" is “undoubtedly the most important\" of the assumptions underlying not only the census scale but a number of other socioeconomic occupational scales used by American sociology.1º (Those scales which break with this tradition go no further than to put skilled craftsmen on approximately the same level as clerical workers!) The weight of the prejudice which rates all \"white-collar\" above all \"blue-collar\" work is such that the growth of the former at the expense of the latter is again taken as evidence of an increase in skill and training for which no real factual backing is required, so self-evident is this conclusion for the conventional wisdom.\\*\n\n300\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nA Final Note on Skill\n\n301\n\n\\* It must not be imagined that these training times—so short as to mock the very term “training\"—are characteristic only of assembly line and other factory work. Charles Silberman, a Fortune editor, reports: “A detailed manpower survey by the New York State Department of Labor, for example, revealed that approximately two-thirds of all the jobs in existence in that state involve such simple skills that they can be—and ,9 are—learned in a few days, weeks, or at most months of on-the-job training. \"Two-thirds of all the jobs in existence\" would have to include all operatives, clerical workers, service workers, sales workers on the retail level, laborers—and some portions of other occupational categories as well.","previous_page":162,"next_page":164}