{"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":"302 / 303","pdf_page":164,"physical_index":164,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8ad09729f64502aac3ddea2ada9cabbc688a7975d5a92de2c4637cc36ee92e5c"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"The lengthening of the average period spent in school before entry into the “labor force,\" which is the other common ground for assuming that a better-educated working population is needed by modern industry and trade, must also be analyzed and separated into its component parts. Time spent in school has been increasing: the median years of school completed by the employed civilian working population rose from 10.6 in 1948 to 12.4 by the end of the 1960s;'² and this was merely the culmination of a secular trend which had been going on for a century. In this we see first of all the fact that the requirements of literacy and familiarity with the numbers system have become generalized throughout the society. The ability to read, write, and perform simple arithmetical operations is demanded by the urban environment, not just in jobs but also for consumption, for conformity to the rules of society and obedience to the law. Reading and figuring are, apart from all their other meanings, the elementary attributes of a manageable population, which could no more be sold, cajoled, and controlled without them than can symbols be handled by a computer if they lack the elementary characteristics of identity and position. Beyond this need for basic literacy there is also the function of the schools in providing an attempted socialization to city life, which now replaces the socialization through farm, family, community, and church which once took place in a predominantly rural setting. Thus the average length of schooling is generally higher for urban populations, and the shift of a population from farm to city brings with it, almost as an automatic function, an increase in the term of education.\n\nDuring the past century, moreover, the vastly increased practice of the scientific and technical specialties in production, research, management, administration, medicine, and in education itself have called into being a greatly expanded apparatus of higher education for the provision of professional specialists in all these areas. This, of course, has also had a marked effect upon the average length of school attendance.\n\nThese two factors, which tend to define educational requirements from an occupational standpoint, obviously explain some of the increase in mass schooling, but just as clearly they do not explain all of it. A complete picture of the functions and functioning of education in the United States and other capitalist countries would require a thorough historical study of the manner in which the present standards came into being, and how they were related, at each step of their formation, to the social forces of the society at large. But even a sketch of the recent period suffices to show that many causes, most of them bearing no direct relationship to the educational requirements of the job structure, have been at work.\n\nThe Depression was responsible for the enactment, late in the 1930s, of legislation restricting the labor-force participation of youths, the object of which was to reduce unemployment by eliminating a segment of the population from the job market. The anticipated consequence of this was the postponement of the school-leaving age. World War II temporarily solved this problem with its immense mobilization of the population for production and service in the armed forces, but as the war drew to an end fears revived that the return of the demobilized soldiers and sailors, together with the cutback of war orders, would renew the Great Depression. Among the measures enacted to ward this off was the veterans' educational subsidy, which, after both World War II and the Korean War, swelled school enrollment, subsidized educational institutions, and contributed further to the prolongation of the average schooling period. Throughout the postwar period the rapid pace of capital accumulation stimulated demand for specialized managerial and semi-managerial employees and other professionals, and this demand, in the situation of governmental subsidy to education, brought forth, not unexpectedly, so great a supply of college-trained people that by the end of the 1960s it began to manifest itself as an oversupply. The encouragement to an entire generation to train itself for \"careers,\" when all that would be available for at least three-quarters of that generation were working-class jobs requiring minimal education and offering working-class pay, began to backfire.\n\nIn the meanwhile, as a result of the generalization of secondary education, employers tended to raise their screening requirements for job applicants, not because of educational needs but simply because of the mass availability of high school graduates. Herbert Bienstock, New York regional director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, described this trend in these words: “The completion of a high school education has become an important requirement for entry into the labor market of today. Employers, finding persons with high school diplomas becoming more available in a period ofrising educational attainment, have come to use the diploma as a screening device, often seeking people with higher levels of education even when job content is not necessarily becoming more complex or requiring higher levels of skill. This has been true in many of the rapidly growing job categories in the clerical, sales, and service fields.\"i3 This spreading policy reinforced the other pressures tending to postpone the school-leaving age by making the “diploma\" a ticket of admission to almost any kind of job. It was used in factory as well as office: “Most factory type jobs require only 6th grade competency in arithmetic, spelling, reading, and writing, and speaking,\" we are told by the personnel director of the Inorganic Chemicals Division of the Monsanto Chemical Company. \"Too often,\" he continues, \"business has used the requirement of a high school diploma or certificate as an easy means of screening out job applicants.“4\n\n302\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nA Final Note on Skill\n\n303\n\n\\* That self-evident, conventional wisdom can vary with time, place, and social circumstances was strikingly displayed by Jerome Davis in a study he made of the social attitudes of Soviet schoolchildren in the mid-twenties. In rating a list of occupations adapted from one of the common U.S. “prestige\" scales, these children reversed the order of rank found in the use of the scale in the United States, putting farmers first and bankers last.\"","previous_page":163,"next_page":165}