{"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":"306 / 307","pdf_page":166,"physical_index":166,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f03da561d64de87a98fefb6a851ef7ff6a1a820a44cd8889c27c2ddc564661ba"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"As one consequence of the recognition by managers of these facts, the emphasis on more years of education has begun to disappear from the hiring policies of many firms. During the period when high school education had not yet become so general as it is now, unemployment tended to settle more heavily among those with less formal schooling. This was of course given enormous publicity during the 1950s and early 1960s, both as evidence for the educational requirements of modern scientific industry and also in the simpleminded hope that giving everyone a high school education would eliminate unemployment. The latter conclusion, of course, rested upon the assumption that unemployment was a consequence of the functional inadequacy of the unemployed in an economy that demanded higher educational attainments. This notion, as Stanley Lebergott pointed out, “misapprehends at least one fundamental characteristic of the unemployed,\" which is that they “are marginal in the existing state of offer and demand in the labor market. If all workers in the labor force had their education improved, some would still be marginal,\" but \"their marginality would then appear to be associated with some other simple single characteristic.\"20\n\nThis is in fact what has happened, although the change has not received the same publicity as the earlier disparity between educational levels of employed and unemployed. A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1971 reaches this unequivocal conclusion: “In the past, jobholders had more education than did jobseekers—in 1959, for example, the median education of the employed was 12.0 years, while that of the unemployed was only 9.9 years. Since then, the average education of unemployed workers has risen so that by 1971 the difference between the median education of employed and unemployed workers, 12.4 and 12.2 years respectively, is no longer statistically significant.\"21 This convergence between the schooling of employed and unemployed has been more rapid for women than for men, so that by the mid-1960s there was no longer any significant difference between the median educational attainments of employed and unemployed women. In the case of men, the difference in the late 1950s was much greater than it was for women, but by the start of the 1970s that gap had also been closed. Thus a chart of educational attainments by sex and employment status begins as a broad fan in 1957, with unemployed men averaging below 9 years of school, unemployed women 10½ years, employed men above 11 years, and employed women just above 12 years. By the date of the above-cited study, March 1971, this fan had closed completely and all were bunched together in the same narrow range between 12 and 12½ years: men and women, employed and unemployed.\n\nFor the worker, the concept of skill is traditionally bound up with craft mastery that is to say, the combination of knowledge of materials and processes with the practiced manual dexterities required to carry on a specific branch of production. The breakup of craft skills and the reconstruction of production as a collective or social process have destroyed the traditional concept of skill and opened up only one way for mastery over labor processes to develop: in and through scientific, technical, and engineering knowledge. But the extreme concentration of this knowledge in the hands of management and its closely associated staff organizations have closed this avenue to the working population. What is left to workers is a reinterpreted and woefully inadequate concept of skill: a specific dexterity, a limited and repetitious operation, “speed as skill,\" etc.\\* With the development of the capitalist mode of production, the very concept of skill becomes degraded along with the degradation of labor and the yardstick by which it is measured shrinks to such a point that today the worker is considered to possess a “skill\" if his or her job requires a few days’ or weeks' training, several months of training is regarded as unusually demanding, and the job that calls for a learning period of six months or a yearsuch as computer programming—inspires a paroxysm of awe. (We may compare this with the traditional craft apprenticeship, which rarely lasted less than four years and which was not uncommonly seven years long.)\n\nIn the early 1920s, Georges Sorel wrote that “the modern factory is a field of experiment constantly enlisting the worker in scientific research,\" and Albert Thierry said in the same vein: “Our entire civilization is a system of physics, the simplest worker is a physicist.\"23Georges Friedmann quotes these two remarks with his customary ambiguity, not knowing whether to applaud them for their optimism or deprecate them as pious but unfounded hopes. The past half-century has removed all doubt, if there ever was any, about the falsity of these views.\n\nThe worker can regain mastery over collective and socialized production only by assuming the scientific, design, and operational prerogatives of modern engineering; short of this, there is no mastery over the labor process. The extension of the time of education which modern capitalism has brought about for its own reasons provides the framework; the number of years spent in school has become generally adequate for the provision of a comprehensive polytechnical education for the workers of most industries. But such an education can take effect only if it is combined with the practice of labor during the school years, and only if education continues throughout the life of the worker after the end of formal schooling. Such education can engage the interest and attention of workers only when they become masters of industry in the true sense, which is to say when the antagonisms in the labor process between controllers and workers, conception and execution, mental and manual labor are overthrown, and when the labor process is united in the collective body which conducts it.\\*\n\n306\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nA Final Note on Skill\n\n307\n\n\\* “With reference to Marshall and Smith on the subject of ‘dexterity,’ \" says M. C. Kennedy in his unpublished Ph.D. dissertation on the division of labor, “one thing should be made clear. Both men confuse increased dexterity with skill or talent. When a cabinet maker is skilled in his craft, skill covers his ability to imagine how things would appear in final form if such and such tools and materials were used. When he can estimate accurately both aesthetic appeal and functional utility, organize his tools his power and his materials in a way which accomplishes his task and gives him livelihood and recognition—then, we are speaking of his skill. But if the man should be able rapidly and with facility to do nothing but snap his fingers over and over again for livelihood, then we would be speaking of dexterity. It is the latter that Marshall calls skill. Yet, in large industry today, increased dexterity means decreased skill.\"22","previous_page":165,"next_page":167}