---
schema_version: "library-reader-v1"
source_type: "original_book"
title: "Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century"
author: null
edition: null
publisher: null
year: null
isbn: "0853459401"
library_document_id: "bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802"
source_sha256: "b79005d79ff0852b9adcf722ad0f74add38ca455ccd7ac7d8c68208a930c6359"
pdf_physical_page_count: 183
pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0
range_start: 130
range_count: 10
html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802?start=130&limit=10"
markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802.md?start=130&limit=10"
previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802.md?start=120&limit=10"
next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802.md?start=140&limit=10"
---

# Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

> 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=130 | PRINTED_PAGE=234 / 235

The tendency of the labor process exemplified in the various machine jobs is not confined to the workers grouped immediately around the computer. On the contrary, with the exception of a specialized minority whose technical and “systems" skills are expanded, this tendency increasingly affects all clerical workers. The reasons for this may be separated into two parts.

First, the formal demands of computerization extend far beyond those machine operators who work with the raw materials or finished products of the computer. Since coding operations are performed mechanically according to fixed layouts, the materials prepared by others for the machine rooms must also follow strict rules of form. Thus the clerk who uses nothing but paper and writing instruments, and who apprehends the information in the first instance from original source documents, is governed by the same rules of form. This has led to the possibility of transferring the work of the key punch operator to the other grades of clerk, a change which is now under way and which will undoubtedly accelerate. Under this system, the work of transcribing information into a form that can be used by the computer is spread throughout the office instead of being localized in machine rooms, by means of terminals or other simple keyboard machines that can be operated by any clerk. In this way, machine operation is generalized throughout the office. If, in the first instance, this involves a combination of jobs—that of interpreting being combined with that of keyboard operationthe next step is the simplification and even elimination of the judgmental steps involved in interpretation by tying the new keyboard machine to the computer and utilizing its storage and swift-search capacities. Thus, in a variety of ways, the reduction of data to symbolic form with accurate positional attributes becomes, increasingly, the business of the office as a whole, as a measure to economize on labor costs.

Second, a variety of other machines and systems are applied to other work processes not within the immediate orbit of the computer. For example, file clerks serve elaborate and semiautomatic machine systems which eliminate the need to know the sequence of the alphabet, or even the sequence of numbers; everything is eliminated but the task of placing under the photographic apparatus of the machine, as swiftly as possible, one document after another. Typists, mail sorters, telephone operators, stock clerks, receptionists, payroll and timekeeping clerks, shipping and receiving clerks are subjected to routines, more or less mechanized according to current possibilities, that strip them of their former grasp of even a limited amount of office information, divest them of the need or ability to understand and decide, and make of them so many mechanical eyes, fingers, and voices whose functioning is, insofar as possible, predetermined by both rules and machinery. As an important instance of this, we may note the changes in the work of the bank teller, once an important functionary upon whose honesty, judgment, and personality much of the public operation and relations of the bank used to depend. Attached to mechanical and electronic equipment, these employees have been transformed into checkout clerks at a money supermarket counter, their labor power purchased at the lowest rates in the mass labor market, their activities prescribed, checked, and controlled in such a way that they have become so many interchangeable parts. And it should be added that the teller's function, limited as it now is, will gradually be replaced by new mechanical-electronic equipment that originated in England and has been spreading in the United States. A cash machine which, activated by a customer card, supplies cash from the customer's account is no more than the first tentative step in this direction. So-called automated tellers are able, on the same principle, to transact any of a number of banking functions, including deposits to or withdrawals from savings or checking accounts, transfers between accounts, and loan repayments.³º Such equipment requires not so much a revolution in banking technology as the modification ofexisting equipment so that it may be used directly by the customer, with minimal opportunity for error or fraud. The fact that this is becoming increasingly common in trade and service areas indicates that much automated equipment is so simple to operate that it requires no training whatsoever; it also foreshadows the weakening of the demand for labor in fields of employment that have been expanding rapidly.

The trend in what is known as “secretarial work" assumes great importance in this transformation of clerical labor, for two reasons. First, it is an occupational category of enormous size. Some 2.75 million persons were employed as secretaries in the United States in 1970, according to the census for that year, almost all of them women. This is the largest single category of clerical labor. And second, we are at the beginning of a revolution in this field which will transform the office almost to the same extent as it is now being transformed by the computer. To understand this incipient upheaval, we must review this occupation and its fundamental rationale.

From a functional standpoint, the secretary came into existence as a device to extend the administrative scope of the entrepreneur and proprietor. Later, as the managerial structure grew, the secretary, from this same functional standpoint, came to represent a pure expression of the Babbage principle: it was thought “wasteful," from the capitalist point of view, to have a manager spend time typing letters, opening mail, sending parcels, making travel arrangements, answering the telephone, etc., when these duties could be performed by labor power hired at anywhere from one-third to one-fiftieth of the remuneration of the manager. But here the operation of the Babbage principle is further stimulated by the fact that the managers are organizing not the distant labor processes of subordinates, but their own labor. Since they tend to place an exaggerated value upon their own time, and a minimal value upon the time of others as compared with their own, the Babbage principle goes to work in the offices of managing executives with particular force, all the more so as it is intensified by the prestige attaching to managers with large staffs, the usefulness of a retinue of office servants for the transacting of personal matters, and other career, social, and personal considerations.

234

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

235

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=131 | PRINTED_PAGE=236 / 237

Thereafter this system of secretarial assistance spreads to lower ranks as well, as the numbers of managerial and semi-managerial employees increase. Since the Babbage principle operates wherever a mass of work may be subdivided and its “lower" portions separated out and delegated, it invades all the realms of paper work performed by “executives," assistants to executives, heads of small departments sometimes consisting of no more than the “head" and a secretary, professional and even semi-professional employees. The Babbage principle has here transcended its own limits, especially as social and prestige factors come into play and the personal secretary becomes a perquisite of the privileged job as one of its chief privileges. Top managers watched this multiplication of secretaries with nothing more than amusement, until it grew to dimensions which threatened the balance sheet.

For management to tackle this monstrosity in order to reduce the drain on the corporate pocketbook is by no means simple. It is not just a matter of attacking a traditional and entrenched privilege, but one which is enjoyed by the lower reaches of the managerial structure itself, those whose loyalty and interest in the corporation is guaranteed by, among other things, these very trappings and pretenses of managerial status. Corporate managements confront the danger, in any such attack, of alienating their own instruments of control over the administrative structure. True, some managements have not allowed such a situation to develop, or have destroyed it at an earlier stage—stenographic pools as a substitute for personal secretaries, for example, are hardly unknown—but many others have shrunk from the task. There is ample evidence, however, that this situation is ending, and that management is now nerving itself for major surgery upon its own lower limbs.

The reasons for this new attitude are various. The most important has already been mentioned: the extent to which this expensive practice has burgeoned, and the immense amounts of payroll it devours, not just through the multiplication of secretaries but through the effect of this arrangement upon the entire functioning of the office. But there are other factors: the completion of the basic work of rationalization in the factory, so far as it can be carried through, freeing management to turn to the office; the maturation of“systems thinking" among managers to the point where they have reconceptualized the entire problem; the spread of the methods of close calculation throughout smaller firms that might otherwise escape them for a while longer, through the purchase of such firms by conglomerates whose first step is to send in systems engineers (and here the fact that the blame for the changes can be assigned to distant proprietors makes the installation of new systems by corporate management somewhat easier); the perfection of various cheap systems of centralized communications and recording; even the new attitudes of women, who dispute and scorn the body-servant role and make it more difficult to recruit tractable secretaries—all of these are among the factors which both encourage and facilitate the ending of the secretarial explosion.

Office managements have thus entered upon a sweeping campaign to destroy what they call the “social office," to use a phrase which has recently gained popularity.4º It is only necessary to follow the periodicals published for top office managers, such as Administrative Management, to see that they are attacking on this front not only with a newly systematized armamentarium of ideas and procedures, but with a fresh determination, and that the object of this attack is no longer just the clerk but the comfortable arrangements made by their own lower managers.

There is of course no disposition on the part of office managements to reject the Babbage principle and to have those functionaries who are now assisted by secretaries begin to do their own typing and other chores. This would contradict the basic tenet of management that each task must be performed at the lowest possible rate of pay. Rather, they feel that the time has come to end a system which makes of each functionary a supervisor over the labor of one assistant, because the labor time of secretaries is used wastefully and inefficiently, is subject only to relaxed and friendly supervision by a superior who is more interested in personal convenience than in office efficiency, and because such functionaries often cannot delegate enough work to fully occupy the time of another person.

Secretarial work is analyzed into two parts: typing and administrative routine (sometimes reception and telephone answering are separated from the latter as a distinct function). The first is being made the business of what has been named the “word processing center." This center is a modernized version of the stenographic pool; it does not send stenographers to take dictation from executives, but rather gives each executive a link with the stenographic process through the telephone on his end and recording equipment on the other. These recordings are then “processed" by typists, and the finished letter, document, brief, contract, script, or any other form requiring typing is brought by messenger for checking and signature. As distinguished from a stenographic pool, which merely held and dispatched labor power to departments as required, this system visualizes the construction of a separate production department whose business it is to manufacture to order all the correspondence and other documentary work required anywhere throughout the offices of the enterprise. Thus this major portion of the secretarial job now becomes the province of production workers, assisted by electronic equipment. Not unexpectedly, this concept and its application have made the furthest strides in Germany, and an article in Administrative Management describes the stress given there to the use of canned texts and automatic typewriters. Word processing is

236

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

237

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=132 | PRINTED_PAGE=238 / 239

a process of having word originators (executives, sales correspondents lawyers, and the like) select formula clauses from pre-coded, pre-organized clause books. For example, an administrator who would normally dictate the same kind of reply to a letter several times a day, instead selects the appropriate clauses (by code number) from the clause bookor from memory if he's used them often enough. Once selected, clause codes plus individual names, addresses and other variable inserts (such as dates or prices) are either dictated into recorders or jotted down on “to-be-typed" forms. This source dictation or form is then used by the typist to prepare a final letter. Automatic typewriters repetitively type the “canned” clauses, and the typist manually keyboards in the new or variable data. . . . Benefits are word originator and typist efficiency, and more work produced from the same number of hours on the job. In addition, less training is required of all the people involved.ª1

This last "benefit," the reduction of training for "all," indicates the sensitivity of management to the proliferation of correspondents and other such "word originators," each of whom is required to know how to formulate a passable paragraph so that it may be understood by the recipient; under the new system, this requirement disappears, leaving only the ability to select the proper paragraph.

The other functions of the secretary are taken over by an “administrative support center." The superior who formerly had a secretary is known, in relation to this center, not as a “word originator" but as a “principal," and it is considered that a ratio of four to eight principals to each “administrative support secretary" will prove adequate. This support center handles all the nontyping chores formerly required of the secretary, foremost among them being filing, phone answering, and mail handling. "Filing," we are told, “should be performed in the support center—not in the principal's office."The clear objective of such arrangements is to prevent the renewal of the previous situation by imperceptible degrees, and to ensure that all secretarial work is performed under centralized production supervision and not under the supervision of the "principal." Moreover, "principals should answer their own phone, but the phone should also ring in the center so if the principal doesn't pick it up by the third ring the secretary can get it."Like the “word processing center," the “administrative support center" is connected to the various offices by phone 42 and messenger service.

Thus, under the new arrangement, the secretarial function is replaced by an integrated system which aims at centralized management, the breakdown of secretarial jobs into detail operations subdivided among production workers, and the reduction of the number of secretarial workers to one-half, one-quarter, or even smaller fractions of their former number. Among the subsidiary benefits management expects to derive from this arrangement is the reduction and thus cheapening of the skills of administrative employees, and, not the least, the squeezing out of the minutes and hours of labor power lost in the personal relations and contacts among secretaries and between secretaries and their “principals"—which is what they mean when they speak of the “end of the social office." The force and seriousness of this campaign, which has begun in this form only in the past few years, can be seen not only from its conception as a total system with its own jargon, technology, and specialists, and from the space now being devoted to it in office management periodicals, but also from the launching of new periodicals and organizations devoted entirely to this subject (for instance, Word Processing Report and the Word Processing Institute). The total system has been installed in a great variety of corporations, including sophisticated publishing offices in New York, where systems analysts have shown themselves to be sturdy of purpose and impervious to the barbed comments of editors who are being deprived of their secretaries.

We have now described, in its major facets, the conversion of the office routine into a factory-like process in accordance with the precepts of modern management and available technology. The greatest single obstacle to the proper functioning of such an office is the concentration of information and decision-making capacity in the minds of key clerical employees. Just as Frederick Taylor diagnosed the problem of the management of a machine shop as one of removing craft information from the workers, in the same way the office manager views with horror the possibility of dependence upon the historical knowledge of the office past, or of the rapid flow of information in the present, on the part of some of his or her clerical workers. The recording of everything in mechanical form, and the movement of everything in a mechanical way, is thus the ideal of the office manager. But this conversion of the office flow into a high-speed industrial process requires the conversion of the great mass of office workers into more or less helpless attendants of that process. As an inevitable concomitant of this, the ability of the office worker to cope with deviations from the routine, errors, special cases, etc., all of which require information and training, virtually disappears. The number of people who can operate the system, instead of being operated by it, declines precipitously. In this sense, the modern office becomes a machine which at best functions well only within its routine limits, and functions badly when it is called upon to meet special requirements.\*

238

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

239

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=133 | PRINTED_PAGE=241

The Class Position of Clerical Labor

While the working class in production is the result of several centuries of capitalist development, clerical labor is largely the product of the period of monopoly capitalism. Thus the early post-Marx attempts to analyze this phenomenon were severely hampered by the fact that clerical work was as yet little developed as a capitalist labor process. For example, in the discussion of the subject in the German Social-Democracy before the First World War, Emil Lederer (whose Die Privatangestellten in der Modernen Wirtschaftsentwicklung was probably the most substantial and important product of the debate) commented on the stagnant technical conditions of the office:

Indeed, the modern commercial employee resembles the commercial employee of the past more than the labor employed by large-scale industry resembles the journeyman of the Middle Ages. Methods of doing business have hardly changed in the majority of cases. Even large-scale enterprises are only expanded small-scale business. Since no new technique has come to the fore, they 43   
exhibit no essentially new methods.

In these discussions, the participants were impressed by the rapid growth of the office; but the changes in office labor, still in their infancy, could not make so great an impression. The general expectation of commentators, as a result, was the rapid increase of office functionaries of the then-dominant varieties. On this basis, the conclusion seemed inescapable: a very large new “middle class" was coming into being.

This conclusion was further guaranteed by the penchant, which continues down to the present day, for defining the class positions of various varieties of office labor on the basis of secondary characteristics. In keeping with this, all the labor of the office is lumped together under such rubrics as “white collar," or “salaried employees." This is nothing but a hangover from the days in which all office labor did share the characteristics of privilege in pay, tenure, authority, etc. In that earlier situation, such designations, when applied to all who worked in offices, served as shorthand expressions for the special position of such employees. It was not the color of the employee's collar, still less the mode of payment on an annual or monthly basis as distinguished from the daily or hourly wage of the manual worker, that in themselves had a determinate meaning, but rather the whole complex of social position and position in the enterprise and the labor process that these terms symbolized.\*

In 1896, Charles Booth was able to write: “The average, undifferentiated human labour power' upon which Karl Marx bases his gigantic fallacy does not exist anywhere on this planet, but least of all, I think, is it to be found among clerks."44 At the time there were few Marxists bold enough to try to counter this thrust. But within less than forty years the development of the capitalist office made it possible for some to comprehend all the essential elements of the process, although it was even then far from being well advanced. Thus Hans Speier, drawing chiefly on German experience, was able to write in 1934:

The social level of the salaried employee sinks with the increasing extent of the group. This qualitative change, which has been termed “the proletarianization of the white collar worker," shows itself in a number of ways. It is most evident, perhaps, in the especially great increase in the women salaried workers, who mostly perform subordinate work. . . . It is the man who typically has the principal authority, the girl who is typically the subordinate. . . . The great increase in salaried employees is especially traceable to a demand for subordinates, not for fully qualified responsible persons. As a result the average chance of advancing has declined. The majority of the subordinate employees in the large offices perform duties which are specialized and schematized down to the minutest detail. They no longer require general training; in part only a very limited and brief training is necessary, in part previous training has become quite unnecessary. The process in the course of which the body of salaried employees become a mass group rests on the successful attempt to replace the personal experience of the individual by a rational scientific business administration, so that an increasing proportion of the workers can be changed without danger to the efficiency of the enterprise. One social result of this development is the rise of the unskilled and semi-skilled salaried workers, whose designation already indicates the assimilation of the processes of work in the office to that in the factory. In the case of the salaried workers who serve as subordinates on one of the many modern office machines, or, for example who sell in a one-price store, the difference in the nature of the duties between such workers and manual workers is completely wiped out . . . especially revealing with regard to the sinking of the social level of the white-collar workers is, finally, the change in the social antecedents. The growing tendency to employ salaried workers of“proletarian origin" indicates that the number of untrained and poorly paid positions is increasing faster than the number of middle and principal positions. In other words, the salaried employees as a 45 whole are being subjected to a process of decreasing social esteem.

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

241

\* The continued use of this terminology long after the realities behind it have disappeared is one of the greatest sources of confusion in the analysis of this subject. A term which lumps together into a single class grouping the authoritative executive representing capital on the one hand, and the interchangeable parts of the office machine which serves him on the other, can no longer be considered useful. This terminology is, however, considered serviceable by those who are alarmed by the results of a more realistic terminology—those, for instance, whose “sociology" pursues apologetic purposes. For them, such terms as “white-collar employees" conveniently lump into a single category the well-paid, authoritative, and desirable positions at the top of the hierarchy and the mass of proletarianized inferiors in a way that makes possible a rosier picture: higher “average" pay scales, etc. In this use of the term, the “white-collar" category tends to get its occupational flavor from the engineers, managers, and professors at the top of the hierarchy, while its impressive numerical masses are supplied by the millions of clerical workers, in much the same way that the stars of an opera company occupy the front of the stage while the spear-carriers provide the massive chorus.

\* Managers often wag their heads over the “poor quality of office help" available on the labor market, although it is their own system of office operations which is creating the office population suited to it. This complaint is, unfortunately, too often echoed by unthinking "consumers" when they run into trouble with an office, as they often do. Such difficulties will tend to increase in the same way that the quality of factory production tends to decline and the servicing of consumer appliances tends to worsen even as it becomes more expensive, and for the same reasons.

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=134 | PRINTED_PAGE=242 / 243

This was written before the mechanization of the office. Writing at about the same time, Lewis Corey was anticipating future events when he said: “The mechanization of clerical labor becomes constantly greater; a typical large office is now nothing but a white-collar factory."46 But by 1951, much of the anticipatory element had disappeared and C. Wright Mills was able to write, upon a solid basis of fact:

The introduction of office machinery and sales devices has been mechanizing the office and the salesroom, the two big locales of white-collar work. Since the twenties it has increased the division of white-collar labor, recomposed personnel, and lowered skill levels. Routine operations in minutely subdivided organizations have replaced the bustling interest of work in well-known groups. Even on managerial and professional levels, the growth of rational bureaucracies has made work more like factory production. The managerial demiurge is constantly furthering all these trends, mechanization, more minute division of labor, the use of less skilled and less expensive workers.

In its early stages, a new division of labor may specialize men in such a way as to increase their levels of skill; but later, especially when whole operations are split and mechanized, such division develops certain faculties at the expense of others and narrows all of them. And as it comes more fully under mechanization and centralized management, it levels men off again as automatons. Then there are a few specialists and a mass of automatons; both integrated by the authority which makes them interdependent and keeps each in his own routine. Thus, in the division of labor, the open development and free exercise of skills are managed and closed.

The alienating conditions of modern work now include the salaried employees as well as the wage-workers. There are few, if any, features of wage-work (except heavy toilwhich is decreasingly a factor in wage-work) that do not also characterize at least some white-collar work. For here, too, the human traits of the individual, from his physique to his psychic disposition, become units in the functionally rational calculations of managers.

To these pictures of the merging characteristics of clerical and production labor, it is now possible to add a number of important details.

The use of automatic and semi-automatic machine systems in the office has the effect of completely reversing the traditional profile of office costs. A situation in which the cost of operating a large office consisted almost entirely of the salaries paid to clerical employees has changed to one in which a large share of the total is now invested in the purchase (or paid out monthly for the leasing) of expensive equipment. Past or “dead" labor in the form of machinery owned by capital, now employs living labor, in the office just as in the factory. But for the capitalist, the profitability of this employment is very much a function of time, of the rapidity with which dead labor absorbs living. The use of a great deal of expensive equipment thus leads to shift work, which is particularly characteristic of computer operations.

At the same time, the employment of machinery pushes the office installation toward the warehouse and industrial districts of the cities. This is facilitated by the development of remote terminals and other communications devices which annihilate distance and do away with almost all the inconveniences of separate installations, so that executive offices can be maintained in the more expensive and accessible locations while the mass of clerical workers can be moved into lower-rent districts, often together with warehousing or production facilities. Thus the convenience and cachet of working in the central part of town, with its greater shopping interest and more varied lunching facilities, etc., begins for many clerical workers to disappear.

At the same time, the labor market for the two chief varieties of workers, factory and office, begins to lose some of its distinctions of social stratification, education, family, and the like. Not only do clerical workers come increasingly from families of factory background, and vice-versa, but more and more they are merged within the same living family. The chief remaining distinction seems to be a division along the lines of sex. Here the distribution within the clerical and operative groups is strikingly congruent: in 1971, the category of operatives was made up of 9 million men and 4 million women, while that of clerical workers was made up of 10.1 million women and 3.3 million men. The sex barrier that assigns most office jobs to women, and that is enforced both by custom and hiring practice, has made it possible to lower wage rates in the clerical category, as we have seen, below those in any category of manual labor. The growing participation of women in employment has thus far been facilitated by the stronger demand for clerical employees and the relatively stagnating demand for operatives. The existence of two giant categories of labor, operatives and clerical workers, as the two largest major occupational classifications, and the composition by sex of each of these categories, leads to the supposition that one of the most common United States occupational combinations within the family is that in which the husband is an operative and the wife a clerk.

242

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

243

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=135 | PRINTED_PAGE=244 / 245

The tendency of modern capitalist employment, in which a vast mass is occupied on a less and less differentiated level of general labor, was recognized early by Theodore Caplow and well portrayed by him in the following passage:

Near the midpoint of the occupational status scale, where white-collar and manual levels overlap, there are a vast number of employments which are usually called“semiskilled." As a matter of fact, most of them cannot be readily evaluated in terms of skill. Their common characteristic is that no lengthy experience is required to perform the work, and that movement from one occupation to another is easy and frequent. Indeed, the mark of a semiskilled occupation is its vagueness. Unlike the higher and lower portions of the scale this great central cluster of factory and office jobs is not clearly compartmentalized. Lifetime involvement in a job is rare. Men and women perform comparable work under comparable conditions. Job titles do not correspond to organized social groupings; and each occupation merges into many others. All these factors together contribute to the very high and sustained rate of horizontal mobility which is characteristic of semiskilled workers.48

The increasing similarity of the work in factory and office is noted by Caplow, and particularly the similarity of requirements in the form of a high-school diploma to provide the background of general familiarity with the commonplace routines of modern society:

The characteristic jobs of machine operators in modern factories, of clerical workers in large offices, and of sales clerks, inspectors, and other minor functionaries require a general familiarity with technical and commercial operations, together with a minimum command of the number system, the written language, and the technic of operating such devices as automobiles and cash registers. Although the emphasis upon mechanical insight and manual dexterity is greater in the factory trades than in the office jobs, the two broad branches of semiskilled work tend to become increasingly alike in many ways. Movement from one to the other takes place very readily. Tests carefully devised to measure clerical aptitude sometimes turn out to be better indicators of mechanical aptitude, and vice versa. This is apparently explained by the fact that the tests are patterned after operations actually required in typical jobs, and that operations required in machine production and clerical work are often very similar.

The modern technics of job classification and personnel selection, developed in connection with large-scale production, are designed above all to facilitate the interchangeability of personnel. One method of ensuring interchangeability is to reduce each complex operation to a series of simple operations which require no extraordinary ability. When this is done, an automatic effect is to standardize output throughout the series of related operations at a point well below the maximum output of which individual workers might be capable. At the same time, the formal qualifications required for employment are standardized by the educational process, so that there are comparatively few differences that matter between one worker and another.49

The problem of the so-called employee or white-collar worker which so bothered early generations of Marxists, and which was hailed by anti-Marxists as a proof of the falsity of the "proletarianization" thesis, has thus been unambiguously clarified by the polarization of office employment and the growth at one pole of an immense mass of wage-workers. The apparent trend to a large nonproletarian “middle class" has resolved itself into the creation of a large proletariat in a new form. In its conditions of employment, this working population has lost all former superiorities over workers in industry, and in its scales of pay it has sunk almost to the very bottom. But beneath them, in this latter respect at least, are the workers in service occupations and retail trade, whom we must consider next.

Notes

244

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

245

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=136 | PRINTED_PAGE=246 / 247

246

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

247

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=137 | PRINTED_PAGE=249 / 248

Chapter 16

Service Occupations and Retail Trade

The giant mass of workers who are relatively homogeneous as to lack of developed skill, low pay, and interchangeability of person and function (although heterogeneous in such particulars as the site and nature of the work they perform) is not limited to offices and factories. Another huge concentration is to be found in the so-called service occupations and in retail trade. We have already discussed, particularly in Chapter 13, “The Universal Market," the reasons for the rapid growth of service occupations in both the corporate and governmental sectors of the economy: the completion by capital of the conquest of goods-producing activities; the displacement of labor from those industries, corresponding to the accumulation of capital in them, and the juncture of these reserves of labor and capital on the ground of new industries; and the inexorable growth of service needs as the new shape of society destroys the older forms of social, community, and family cooperation and self-aid. Now we must examine the labor processes of the service occupations themselves more closely.

“A service," Marx pointed out, “is nothing more than the useful effect of a use-value, be it of a commodity, or be it of labour."1 The worker who is employed in producing goods renders a service to the capitalist, and it is as a result of this service that a tangible, vendible object takes shape as a commodity. But what if the useful effects of labor are such that they cannot take shape in an object? Such labor must be offered directly to the consumer, since production and consumption are simultaneous. The useful effects of labor, in such cases, do not serve to make up a vendible object which then carries its useful effects with it as part of its existence as a commodity. Instead, the useful effects of labor themselves become the commodity. When the worker does not offer this labor directly to the user of its effects, but instead sells it to a capitalist, who re-sells it on the commodity market, then we have the capitalist form of production in the field of services.

Such a strict or scientific definition of services is far more limited than the usual use of the term by statistical agencies, such as the bureaus of the census and of labor statistics in the United States. For example, restaurant labor, which cooks, prepares, assembles, serves, cleans dishes and utensils, etc., carries on tangible production just as much as labor employed in many another manufacturing process; the fact that the consumer is sitting nearby at a counter or table is the chief distinction, in principle, between this industry and those food-processing industries which are classified under “manufacturing." Laundry workers, workers in cleaning and pressing establishments, workers in automobile repair shops and in machine servicing or repair work of other sorts perform the same sort of work as many workers in manufacturing industries, and they are classified, occupationally, in the same way, but the Bureau of the Census classifies them in service industries.\* Workers in transportation are often regarded as workers in a“service" industry, but if the location of a commodity is taken as an important physical characteristic, transportation is a part of the process of production. And if we do not take this view we fall into insuperable difficulties, because we are forced to extend the distinction between “making" and “moving" back into the factory, where many workers do not play a role in fashioning the object with their own hands but merely move it through the plant, or through the process. The distinction so applied becomes meaningless and even ridiculous. Chambermaids are classed as service workers, but their labors are not always different, in principle, from those of many manufacturing workers in that they take shape in a tangible result. When the chambermaids in hotels and motels, or the aides in hospitals and other institutions, make beds they do an assembly operation which is not different from many factory assembly occupationsa fact recognized by management when it conducts motion and time studies of both on the same principles—and the result is a tangible and vendible commodity. Does the fact that porters, charwomen, janitors, or dishwashers perform their cleaning operations not on new goods that are being readied at the factory or construction sites for their first use, but on constantly reused buildings and utensils render their labor different in principle, and any less tangible in form, from that of manufacturing workers who do the factories' final cleaning, polishing, packaging, and so forth?

Service Occupations and Retail Trade

249

\* Stigler has pointed out that in this respect the census practice has changed, and that early in the century all such workers in power laundries, automobile repair shops and other repair and servicing industries were included in manufacturing, whereas today they are included in service industries. As he notes, this change in statistical practice, when applied to such rapidly growing industries as these, has in itself accounted for a significant part of the shift from “manufacturing"to “services” in the statistics used for long-run comparisons.² Today, hand and machine finish pressers, when employed by makers of clothing, are counted as manufacturing workers, but when employed by dry-cleaning plants they are workers in service industries, although the difference in the form of labor is slight; the chief difference is in rates of pay, which is substantially lower in the service industries.3 The same holds true for a great variety of craftsmen whose work in fabrication is distinguished from repair and servicing; and in fact even when they do the very same work of repair and servicing they are counted as manufacturing workers only when this is done as plant maintenance work.

248

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=138 | PRINTED_PAGE=250 / 251

These are only some of the many difficulties that arise from the attempts to draw strict classifications of the labor in capitalist society on the basis of its determinate form—the particular operations it pursues. They merely illustrate the principle that for capitalism, what is important is not the determinate form of labor but its social form, its capacity to produce, as wage labor, a profit for the capitalist. The capitalist is indifferent to the particular form of labor; he does not care, in the last analysis, whether he hires workers to produce automobiles, wash them, repair them, repaint them, fill them with gasoline and oil, rent them by the day, drive them for hire, park them, or convert them into scrap metal. His concern is the difference between the price he pays for an aggregate of labor and other commodities, and the price he receives for the commodities——whether goods or“services"—produced or rendered.

From this point of view, the distinction between commodities in the form of goods and commodities in the form of services is important only to the economist or statistician, not to the capitalist. What counts for him is not the determinate form of the labor, but whether it has been drawn into the network of capitalist social relations, whether the worker who carries it on has been transformed into a wage-worker, and whether the labor of the worker has been transformed into productive labor—that is, labor which produces a profit for capital. Beds were made, floors were scrubbed, food prepared and served, children minded, the sick tended long before people were hired to do any of these things. And even after the hiring of servants to do them had begun, these activities were of no interest to the capitalist except in terms of his comfort and household expenses. They became of interest to him as a capitalist when he began to hire people to do services as a profitable activity, a part of his business, a form of the capitalist mode of production. And this began on a large scale only with the era of monopoly capitalism which created the universal marketplace and transformed into a commodity every form of the activity of humankind including what had heretofore been the many things that people did for themselves or for each other. With this began the changed attitude of the capitalist toward service labor, a change which can be seen both in his own massive ventures into the field and, on the ideological side, in the change in the view of service labor taken by economists.

Thus, service occupations have formed a large share in the social division of labor throughout the capitalist era—not to speak of earlier times—but they have not formed a “productive” or profitable part until recently. The multitude of personal servants was, in the early period of capitalism, both a heritage of feudal and semi-feudal relations in the form of a vast employment furnished by the landowning aristocracy, and a reflection of the riches created by the Industrial Revolution in the form of similar employment furnished by capitalists and the upper middle class. In the United States in 1820, according to the first occupational census, employment in domestic and personal services was three-fourths as great as the combined employment of the manufacturing, mining, fishing, and lumbering industries; even in 1870 such employment was not much less than half as great as these nonagricultural employments.ª (A statistician who calculated the amount of domestic and personal service employment as a percent of the population between 1820 and 1920 found it remarkably stable, in the range between 4.5 and 6 percent.)³ In England, according to the census of 1861, more than 1.2 million people were employed as servants, and this does not include male or female servants on farms. This, as Marx pointed out, was greater than the total employment in the textile and metal-working industries.\*

But from the capitalist point of view, such employment was not an addition to national wealth or income, but a deduction from it. This view, as set forth by classical political economy and especially in Adam Smith, had nothing to do with the nature of the duties performed by these workers (although this point was sometimes confused) but arose rather from the fact that these duties were not performed under the auspices of capital qua capital. It was not when he was accumulating capital that the capitalist employed service labor, but when he was spending his profits. "Thus," said Adam Smith, "the labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance and of his master's profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. . . . A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers: he grows poor, by maintaining a multitude of menial servants." And so zealous was Adam Smith in his pursuit of this point that he turned it against all “service" labor in general and found the fault to be not in the fact that the master was so foolish as to employ servants instead of investing in more workers, but rather in the fact that “service" labor did not congeal into a tangible commodity. The clarification of this error on Smith's part occupies many pages ofMarx's Theories of Surplus Value. Smith's modern editor, Edwin Cannan, more familiar with the profitable uses to which service labor can be put, corrected him by pointing out that “this is only true when the manufacturers are employed to produce commodities for sale and when the menial servants are employed merely for the comfort of the employer. A man may and often does grow poor by employing people to make particular subjects or vendible commodities' for his own consumption, and an innkeeper may and often does grow rich by employing menial servants."8

250

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Service Occupations and Retail Trade

251

\* This is cited by Marx, significantly, in the section of Capital called "The Theory of Compensation as Regards the Workpeople Displaced by Machinery."6 In his Theories of Surplus Value, this thought is rendered more fully: “According to the latest report (1861 or 1862), on the factories, the total number of persons (managers included) employed in the factories properly so called of the United Kingdom was only 775,534, while the number of female servants in England alone amounted to 1 million. What a convenient arrangement it is that makes a factory girl to sweat twelve hours in a factory, so that the factory proprietor, with a part of her unpaid labour, can take into his personal service her sister as maid, her brother as groom and her cousin as soldier or policeman!"7

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=139 | PRINTED_PAGE=252 / 253

In modern bourgeois economics, service labor which does not in Adam Smith's words "fix or realize itself in any particular subject or vendible commodity" is no longer held in disfavor, but is rather, since it has been developed as a prime source of profit, celebrated. Colin Clark found “the most important concomitant of economic progress”" to be “the movement of the working population from agriculture to manufacture and from manufacture to commerce and services."9 Few economists would today call service labor “unproductive"except when performed by the worker on his or her own account, as the housewife does at home. Instead, they tend to extol service as the characteristic form of production of our time, superior to manufacturing and with a greater future before it. In this we see a continuation of the succession of economic theories which assigned the most productive role to the particular form of labor that was most important or growing most rapidly at the time: the mercantilists to labor which brought precious metals into the country; the physiocrats to agricultural labor; the classical economists to manufacturing labor.

In the history of capitalism, while one or another form of productive labor may play a greater role in particular eras, the tendency is toward the eradication of distinctions among its various forms. Particularly in the era of monopoly capitalism, it makes little sense to ground any theory of the economy upon any specially favored variety of labor process. As these varied forms come under the auspices of capital and become part of the domain of profitable investment, they enter for the capitalist into the realm of general or abstract labor, labor which enlarges capital. In the modern corporation, all forms of labor are employed without distinction, and in the modern “conglomerate" corporation some divisions carry on manufacturing, others carry on trade, others banking, others mining, and still others “service” processes. All live peacefully together, and in the final result as recorded in balance sheets the forms oflabor disappear entirely in the forms of value.

The service occupations (excluding private household employment, which has not grown in the form of servants directly hired, and is being replaced by commercial companies which contract to perform household cleaning) now include a mass of labor some nine times larger than the million workers they accounted for at the turn of the century. This represents a much more rapid growth than that of employment as a whole, which in the same period (1900-1970), less than tripled.\* The nature of these occupations and the labor processes which they carry on will be readily understood from the listing as given in the 1970 census.1º

To this 9 million should be added, as workers of the same general classification and wage level, that portion of sales workers employed in retail trade, or some 3 million out of the total of 5.5 million sales workers of all kinds (the rest being employed in wholesale trade, as manufacturers' representatives, and as salesmen of advertising, insurance, real estate, stocks and bonds, etc., and thus representing a different order of work). These service and retail sales workers, taken together, account for a massive total of more than 12 million workers.

The occupations classified in these two categories require little description and analysis because they are conducted, for the most part, in the public eye, and the labor tasks assigned to most of them are readily visualized. In the case of almost every occupation in the service and retail groups the mass of labor is drawn into these growing fields of employment from a vast pool of common labor which is made available by the relative falling off of employment in other fields. The average pay scales confirm this: the median of the usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers in the service occupations is lower than that of any occupational group except farmworkers. In May 1971 it was \$91 a week (if one includes the half million private household workers; excluding these it was \$96), as against \$115 for clerical workers, \$117 for laborers (nonfarm), and \$120 for operatives. In the same month, the median for full-time retail sales workers was \$95, which in terms of pay located that grouping closer to the service occupation than to any other major occupational category."

Except for the special cases of police and firemen, the incidence of developed skill, knowledge, and authority in the labor processes of society is naturally very small in these categories, and can be found only in that small layer of housekeepers and stewards who have the function of superintending institutional labor, and among the tiny number of cooks who practice the art

following distinction must be kept in mind: The Commerce Department groups enterprises according to a Standard Industrial Classification, and the broad groups within this classification, such as Agriculture, Manufacturing, Mining, Trade, etc. include a group called Service Industries. Occupational figures for this group of industries are available, and employment in the group is sometimes referred to as “service employment." But this employment includes workers in a great many occupations: in 1970 it included more than 3 million clerical workers, over a million craftsmen, another million operatives, and almost 7.5 million professional and technical employees; at the same time, it did not include all the service occupations, but only about three-quarters of them, the rest being scattered through all the other industrial classifications. To confuse labor in so-called “service industries" with the service occupations would mean, therefore, to duplicate much of the employment that has been and will be herein discussed in other connections. Our present discussion therefore deals only with those workers who are grouped in the occupational statistics as service workers, and not those so grouped in the industrial statistics.

252

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Service Occupations and Retail Trade

253

\* Because the term “service labor" is used by statistical agencies of the United States in two different connotations, one industrial and the other occupational, the

下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802.md?start=140&limit=10)