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

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Chapter 20

A Final Note on Skill

In 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.

In 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.

The 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.

For 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.

Let 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

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The most marked feature of this tabulation is the decline in laborers. A large part of this classification had become operatives (we are still speaking in terms of percentages, since in terms of absolute numbers the total of the three groups was about 222/3 times larger in 1970 than at the turn of the century, and each percentage point now represents about 222/3 times as many people) and the rest had become craftsmen and foremen. This shift is taken, on its face, to represent a massive “upgrading" of workers to higher categories of skill.\*

Classifications of workers, however, are neither “natural" nor self-evident, nor is the degree of skill a self-evident quality which can simply be read from the labels given to various such classifications. The first socioeconomic occupational classifications used in the United States were those of William C. Hunt, an employee of the Bureau of the Census who, in 1897, grouped all gainful workers into four categories: proprietors, clerical employees, skilled workers, and laborers. The group we now call “operatives" did not exist in this classification, and the division of manual workers into two classes was a clear and unambiguous one: There were the craftsmen—the mechanics in various trades, whose admission into this category of skilled workers was thus dependent upon satisfying the traditional requirements of craft mastery. Laborers were all others; they were thus a residual category.

In the 1930s a revision of these classifications was carried out by Dr. Alba Edwards, for many years an official of the Bureau of the Census, who reconstructed the conceptual basis of occupational statistics in a fundamental fashion. The change which he made that is of concern to this discussion is his division of the former group of laborers into two parts. Those who tended or operated machines, or attended mechanized processes, he called operatives. Laborers, still a residual category, now consisted of those nonfarm workers who were neither craftsmen nor machine operatives. These classifications were first applied in the census of 1930. Edwards, however, did the massive work of reconstructing the census data back to the turn of the century, and even earlier, in accord with his new classification scheme. The class of workers known as “operatives," therefore, insofar as we find it in the census statistics earlier than those of 1930, is a backward projection of a category that did not exist in these earlier censuses. Edwards' work has been the chief basis for all similar reconstructions since done by others.ª

The three Edwards classifications were taken to correspond, both in official terminology and in common parlance, to levels of skill. Craftsmen continued to be called skilled workers and laborers “unskilled"; operatives were now called “semiskilled."But it must be noted that the distinction between the skills of the two latter categories was based not upon a study of the occupational tasks involved, as is generally assumed by the users of the categories, but upon a simple mechanical criterion, in the fullest sense of the word. The creation of “semi-skill" by Edwards thus brought into existence, retroactively to the turn of the century and with a mere stroke of the pen, a massive “upgrading" of the skills of the working population. By making a connection with machinery—such as machine tending or watching, machine feeding, machine operatinga criterion of skill, it guaranteed that with the increasing mechanization of industry the category of the “unskilled" would register a precipitous decline, while that of the “semiskilled"would show an equally striking rise. This statistical process has been automatic ever since, without reference to the actual exercise or distribution of “skills."

Let us take as an example the categories of teamster on the one side, and the operators of motor vehicles (such as truckdrivers, chauffeurs and taxi drivers, routemen and deliverymen, etc.) on the other. These categories are important because that of teamster was, before World War I, one of the largest of occupational groups, while the drivers of various sorts are, taken together, one of the largest today. The former are classified, retroactively, among the “unskilled" laborers, while the latter, because of their connection with machinery, are classed as operatives and hence “semi-skilled." When the Edwards scale is applied in this fashion, a skill upgrading takes place as a consequence of the displacement of horse-drawn transport by motorized. Yet it is impossible to see this as a true comparison of human work skills. In the circumstances of an earlier day, when a largely rural population learned the arts of managing horses as part of the process of growing up, while few as yet knew how to operate motorized vehicles, it might have made sense to characterize the former as part of the common heritage and thus no skill at all, while driving, as a learned ability, would have been thought of as a “skill." Today, it would be more proper to regard those who are able to drive vehicles as unskilled in that respect at least, while those who can care for, harness, and manage a team of horses are certainly the possessors of a marked and uncommon ability. In reality, this way of comparing occupational skill leaves much to be desired, depending as it does on relativistic or contemporary notions. But there is certainly little reason to suppose that the ability to drive a motor vehicle is more demanding, requires longer training or habituation time, and thus represents a higher or intrinsically more rewarding skill than the ability to manage a team of horses.

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\* It would be wrong to try to derive any comforting conclusions from the rise in the category of craftsmen and foremen between 1900 and 1970. We have already discussed the dispersal and deterioration of craft skills in the machine shop, for example, and many of the possessors of partial skills continue to carry the label of craftsmanship. In a discussion of traditional apprenticeships in British industry, for example, one British authority points out that “although apprentices theoretically emerge as skilled craftsmen much of the work they are put to would be regarded as semi-skilled, because of the fragmentation of many industrial processes." Because, this writer says, the need is for “semi-skilled” workers, “the apprenticeship system encourages unrealistic and rigid job definitions."4 In the United States such attacks against the apprenticeship system are no longer necessary, since there is little left of it. And it should also be noted that much of the growth of the craftsmen classification is due to the rapid increase of the "mechanics and repairmen" category (the largest grouping of which is that of automobile mechanics) which does not conform to traditional standards of craftsmanship and represents an ever slighter level of technical capacity and training.

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It is only in the world of census statistics, and not in terms of direct assessment, that an assembly line worker is presumed to have greater skill than a fisherman or oysterman, the forklift operator greater skill than the gardener or groundskeeper, the machine feeder greater skill than the longshoreman, the parking lot attendant greater skill than the lumberman or raftsman. And with the routinization of machine operation, there is less and less reason to rate the operative above many other classifications of laborers, such as craftsmen's helpers. The entire concept of “semi-skill," as applied to operatives, is an increasingly delusory one. The prefix semi means “half' or“partly." When this prefix is attached to the noun skill, the resulting compound word leaves the impression of a level of training and ability that lies somewhereperhaps about halfway—between skill and the total lack of it. But for the category of operatives, training requirements and the demands of the job upon the abilities of the worker are now so low that one can hardly imagine jobs that lie significantly below them on any scale of skill. If we turn, for example, to the United States Department ofLabor's Occupational Outlook Handbook, which is virtually the only systematic and official attempt to describe occupational skills and training, we find the category of operatives described as follows:

Semiskilled workers ordinarily receive only brief on-the-job training. Usually they are told exactly what to do and how to do it, and their work is supervised closely. They often repeat the same motions or the same jobs throughout the working day.

Semiskilled workers do not need to invest many years in learning their jobs. The simplest repetitive and routine semiskilled jobs can be learned in a day and mastered in a few weeks. Even those jobs that require a higher degree of skill, such as truckdriver, can be learned in a few months. At the same time, adaptability—the ability to learn new jobs quickly, including the operation of new machines—is an important qualification for semiskilled workers.

New employees starting out in semiskilled jobs are not expected to be highly proficient, After a short training period, however, they must work at a standard, fast, and steady pace. Frequently, good eyesight and good coordination are required.⁶

Jobs which require merely the ordinary physical characteristics of human beings in a fair state of health; where duties are learned in periods ranging from as little as a day to, at a maximum, a few months; in which the worker is “told exactly what to do and how to do it"; which are “supervised closely," repeat the “same motions or the same jobs throughout the working day," and of which the Department of Labor analysts can find nothing more favorable to say than that they demand “adaptability"—is this not a definition of unskilled labor? Here is another description, by a British authority:

The oldest and most traditional differentiation between hourly-paid workers in British industry is based upon skill; skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled categories being recognized in the wage structure of most industries, and in the class structure of society. Although it is impossible to define these categories with any degree of precision, the terms are commonly used and understood throughout industry. It is generally accepted that a skilled worker is a craftsman whose training has been spread over several years and is formally recognized outside an individual firm; a semi-skilled worker is one who, during a limited period of training, usually between two and twelve weeks, has acquired the manual dexterity or mechanical knowledge needed for his immediate job, and an unskilled worker is one whose job requires no formal training of any kind.

If we take Joan Woodward at her word, the gap between the skilled and the semi-skilled worker is a matter of“years" of training, while the creation of “semi-skill" as against “no skill" is accomplished in “two to twelve weeks." Clearly, what we have here is not a realistic distinction but an artifact of the classifiers (which, at least in United States industry, is not reflected in wage structure or class structure). There are few if any jobs, including all those classified as “unskilled," in which the training period is actually zero. The carpenter's helper (or other craft helpers classified as “unskilled labor" because they fall neither into the craft nor into the machine-operative categories) is of little use to the carpenter until he learns a great variety of tools and materials in their various sizes and dimensions, and until he gains a familiarity with the craftsman's operations; it is unquestionable that this large section of the “laborers" grouping requires a longer training period than most operatives. Even pick and shovel work takes more learning before it can be done to required standards than many assembly or machine-feeding jobs. “Studies of final assembly line work in a major automobile company by the Technology Project of Yale University found the average time cycle for jobs to be 3 minutes. As to learning time, a few hours to a week sufficed. Learning time for 65 percent of the work force was less than a month."8 And yet assembly jobs are the most representative type of operative jobs into which there has been so great an influx in the past three-quarters of a century, and which, by a marvel of definition have produced a striking upgrading of the skills of the working population.\*

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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."

On 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).

We 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.\*

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\* 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.

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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.

During 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.

These 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.

The 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.

In 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

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\* 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."

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Thus the continuing extension of mass education for the nonprofessional categories of labor increasingly lost its connection with occupational requirements. At the same time, its place in the social and economic structure became ever more firmly guaranteed by functions which have little or nothing to do with either job training or any other strictly educational needs. The postponement of school leaving to an average age of eighteen has become indispensable for keeping unemployment within reasonable bounds. In the interest of working parents (the two-parent-job-holding family having become ever more common during this period), and in the interest of social stability and the orderly management of an increasingly rootless urban population, the schools have developed into immense teen-sitting organizations, their functions having less and less to do with imparting to the young those things that society thinks they must learn. In this situation the content of education deteriorated as its duration lengthened. The knowledge imparted in the course of an elementary education was more or less expanded to fill the prevalent twelve-year educational sojourn, and in a great many cases school systems have difficulty in instilling in twelve years the basic skills of literacy and numbers that, several generations ago, occupied eight. This in turn gave a greater impetus to employers to demand of job applicants a high school diploma, as a guarantee—not always validof getting workers who can read.

We cannot neglect the direct economic impact of the enlarged school system. Not only does the postponement of the school-leaving age limit the growth of recognized unemployment, but it also furnishes employment for a considerable mass of teachers, administrators, construction and service workers, etc. Moreover, education has become an immensely profitable area of capital accumulation for the construction industry, for suppliers of all sorts, and for a host of subsidiary enterprises. For all these reasons—which have nothing to do with either education or occupational training—it is difficult to imagine United States society without its immense “educational" structure, and in fact, as has been seen in recent years, the closing of even a single segment of the schools for a period of weeks is enough to create a social crisis in the city in which this happens. The schools, as caretakers of children and young people, are indispensable for family functioning, community stability, and social order in general (although they fulfill even these functions badly). In a word, there is no longer any place for the young in this society other than school. Serving to fill a vacuum, schools have themselves become that vacuum, increasingly emptied of content and reduced to little more than their own form. Just as in the labor process, where the more there is to know the less the worker need know, in the schools the mass of future workers attend the more there is to learn, the less reason there is for teachers to teach and students to learn. In this more than in any other single factorthe purposelessness, futility, and empty forms of the educational systemwe have the source of the growing antagonism between the young and their schools which threatens to tear the schools apart.

It follows that the growing recognition among corporate managers and educational researchers that the commonly made connection between education and job content is, for the mass of jobs, a false one, will not necessarily result in a reversal of the educational trend and bring about an earlier schoolleaving age. Capitalist society in the United States has little choice but to maintain this educational establishment as a social institution with transcendent functions. Yet the recognition of how little is accomplished in the years of elementary and high school attendance in the way of job preparation, and how little in the way of educational preparation these jobs require, is spreading.

Ivar Berg, for example, in one of the more detailed examinations of this subject carried out in recent years, arrives at the conclusion that educational “achievements" have already“exceeded requirements in most job categories," and that the demand for “better-educated"labor cannot therefore be explained by “technological and related changes attending most jobs."15His most startling finding is that investigations show that education may in fact be a liability for the employer. His study of productivity, turnover, and absenteeism in a group of textile workers found that “educational achievement was inversely related to performance thus conceived."16 A sample study in the clerical field yielded the same conclusion: “Performance in 125 branch offices of a major New York bank, measured by turnover data and by the number oflost accounts per teller, was inversely associated with the educational achievements of these 500 workers. The branches with the worst performance records were those in which a disproportionately (and significantly) high number of employees were attending educational programs after working hours! There was also evidence that performance was worst in precisely those branches in which, besides the educational achievements being higher, the managers stressed education in consultation with tellers concerning their futures with the bank."17 Berg was able to report instances in which managers automatically assumed that their most competent workers had more education, when the opposite was true, “as in one company in which managers reported that the better-educated technicians in their employ were the best' technicians." The data from this company showed that “the less-educated technicians received higher evaluations from supervisors and had longer service than technicians with higher educational achievements in comparable jobs; the managers, however, assumed that these better’ employees had completed more years of schooling!"!8 In part, the explanation for this may lie in the finding, also reported by Berg, that “education is more often than not an important factor accounting for dissatisfaction among workers in many occupational categories. . . .9

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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

This 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.

For 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.)

In 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.

The 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.\*

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\* “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

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In the capitalist mode of production, the prolongation of an ever emptier “education” combined with the reduction of labor to simple and ignorant tasks represent a waste of the educational years and a wasting of humanity in the years thereafter. This system is understood by its apologists to exemplify efficiency raised to its highest point; where one engineer can direct fifty workers, they argue, there is no need for “wasting" the resources of society in educating all to the engineering standard. So goes the logic of the capitalist mode of production, which, rather than threaten the hierarchical social relations by which it accumulates wealth in the hands of the owners of society, prefers to leave the worker ignorant despite years of schooling, and to rob humanity of its birthright of conscious and masterful labor.

The perfect expression of the concept of skill in capitalist society is to be found in the bald and forthright dictums of the early Taylorians, who had discovered the great truth of capitalism that the worker must become the instrument of labor in the hands of the capitalist, but had not yet learned the wisdom of adorning, obfuscating, and confusing this straightforward necessity in the manner of modern management and sociology. "What happens to unskilled labor under Scientific Management?" ask the Gilbreths in their Primer on this subject. "Under Scientific Management there is no unskilled labor; or, at least, labor does not remain unskilled. Unskilled labor is taught the best method obtainable. . . . No labor is unskilled after it is taught."25 The instruction of the worker in the simple requirements of capital: here, in the minds of managers, is the secret of the upgrading of skills so celebrated in the annals of modern industrial sociology. The worker may remain a creature without knowledge or capacity, a mere “hand" by which capital does its work, but so long as he or she is adequate to the needs of capital the worker is no longer to be considered or called unskilled. It is this conception that lies behind the shabby nominal sociology in which the sociologists find “upgrading" in the new names given to classifications by the statisticians.“Training a worker," wrote Frank Gilbreth, “means merely enabling him to carry out the directions of his work schedule. Once he can do this, his training is over, whatever his age." Is this not a perfect description of the mass of jobs in modern industry, trade, and offices?

Notes

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\* The demands for“workers'participation"and “workers' control," from this point of view, fall far short of the Marxist vision. The conception of a democracy in the workplace based simply upon the imposition of a formal structure of parliamentarism election of directors, the making of production and other decisions by ballot, etc.—upon the existing organization of production is delusory. Without the return of requisite technical knowledge to the mass of workers and the reshaping of the organization of labor—without, in a word, a new and truly collective mode of production—balloting within factories and offices does not alter the fact that the workers remain as dependent as before upon “experts," and can only choose among them, or vote for alternatives presented by them. Thus genuine workers' control has as its prerequisite the demystifying of technology and the reorganization of the mode of production. This does not mean, of course, that the seizure of power within industry through demands for workers\* control is not a revolutionary act. It means rather that a true workers' democracy cannot subsist on a purely formal parliamentary scheme.

It is a mistake to think, therefore, as some apparently do, that the raising of the idea of workers' control in industry—in the sense of an electoral structure within each workplace is a demand that goes beyond Marxism. Those who incline to this belief should note how Marx's entire discussion of the capitalist mode of production in the first volume of Capítal is permeated by a much more revolutionary conception, which is the return of the process of production itself to the control of the workers in the fullest and most direct way. Marx would have viewed a philosophy of"workers' control" which made no mention of this kind of a revolution in the mode of production to be a feeble and illusory remedy, just as he would have considered a revolution, such as that in the Soviet Union, which altered property relations but left the mode of production untouched, as a hybrid form which, so long as it went no further, remained only the abortive first stage of revolution.

In this connection, see Paul Blumberg's book on workers' control. Blumberg, although he provides one of the best surveys available on the subject, fails, like so many others, to grasp the Marxist view when he complains of the “silence" of Marx and Engels on workers' control; he attributes this chiefly to “their reluctance to spell out the nature of the coming Communist social order," and goes on to say: “Nevertheless, taking their work as a whole, it is clear that, had they been more articulate about the nature of Socialism, they might have expressed sympathy for the idea of workers' control. Such sympathy is often implied in their works."24 There is no question that Marx and Engels took for granted the democratic control of workers over their own workplace and their own society as a whole. But they were concerned with a far more revolutionary concept, and one without which the idea of “industrial democracy" becomes an illusion.

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Appendix 1

Two Comments

In the following notes, Harry Braverman responded to a number of contributors to a special issue of Monthly Review (Vol. 28, no. 3, July-August, 1976) entitled "Technology, the Labor Process, and the Working Class.'

I would like to take this opportunity to comment on two of the many issues that have been raised in the accompanying articles. The same issues have been raised in a number of other reviews and communications on Labor and Monopoly Capital. The first has to do with the connections between the subject matter of the book and the women's movement. The second has to do with the consciousness of the working class as a class for itself, struggling in its own behalf, apart from its objective existence in itself.

I

The authors of "The Working Class Has Two Sexes" (Rosalyn Baxandall Elizabeth Ewen, and Linda Gordon) generously conclude that "Labor and Monopoly Capital . . . makes a major contribution, perhaps unbeknownst to its author, to feminist analysis." Be that as it may, the connection did not come as a post-publication surprise to me. During the earliest period of my research, I became convinced of the importance ofrecent trends in the working population for the feminist movement. I have been gratified to see that many of the conclusions I had drawn in my own mind have now been drawn by readers, and particularly by women readers.

In comments both public and private, many of these readers have expressed some disappointment that I omitted from my discussion any direct comments on matters of special concern to the women's movement, and particularly household, or non-wage family, labor. Since these readers have all been most understanding of the self-imposed limits of my study, and (as in the two articles contained in this collection which address themselves directly to the subject) have adapted their critiques to these limits, I do not raise this here in order to make an unnecessary explanation. But I would like to add one thing to what has been said on this particular point. Beyond the fact that a consideration of household work would have fallen far outside the bounds of my subject (not to mention my competence), there is also this to consider; that household work, although it has been the special domain of women, is not thereby necessarily so central to the issues of women's liberation as might appear from this fact. On the contrary, it is the breakdown of the traditional household economy which has produced the present-day feminist movement. This movement in its modern form is almost entirely a product of women who have been summoned from the household by the requirements of the capital accumulation process, and subjected to experiences and stresses unknown in the previous thousands of years of household labor under a variety of social arrangements. Thus it is the analysis of this new situation that in my opinion occupies the place of first importance in the theory of modern feminism.

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Let me add at once that none of this is said in order to disparage the need for an understanding of the specific forms and issues of household labor, of the working-class family, and of sexual divisions and tensions both within and outside the family. But the unraveling of every complex of social reality requires a starting point, and it is my strong conviction that the best starting point in every case is the analysis of the dynamic elements rather than the traditional and static aspects of a given problem. Thus I have a feeling that the most light will be shed on the totality of problems and issues embraced in the feminist movement, including those of household work, by an analysis that begins not with the forms of household work that have been practiced for thousands of years, but by their weakening and by the dissociation of an increasing number of women from them in the last few decades.

To move to a different, although related, point, which has figured in a number of reviews as well as private comments that have reached me: Baxandall, Ewen, and Gordon raise in this connection my use of the distinction between the social and the technical or detailed division of labor. In common with some other reviewers, they treat this as my own invention, calling it "Braverman's distinction." Actually, as my references to this chapter and my use of quoted materials from Marx should make clear, the entire treatment comes from Chapter 14, especially Section 4 of the first volume of Capital, called by Marx “Division of Labor in Manufacture, and Division of Labor in Society." In connection with this topic, there is nothing more important to be studied by any modern reader. On the one hand, it is a brilliant example of Marx's historical method. On the other, it contains in fully developed form Marx's most mature conclusions on the subject of the division of labor, and it becomes ever more mystifying with every passing day how so many can discuss Marx's opinions on this subject as though all he ever wrote on it is contained in the few scrappy paragraphs of The German Ideology or other early manuscripts unpublished by him, which represent his first reactions to the problem.

Baxandall, Ewen, and Gordon comment that “Braverman's distinction between the social division of labor and the detail division of labor in capitalist industry is not adequate" for an understanding of the whole of the damage wrought by the divisions of labor in society, and they cite specifically the sexual division of labor. They could not be more right. The distinction in question is adequate only to the purposes for which it was fashioned.

Readers who study Marx's chapter carefully will see how he uses one of his most characteristic tools of analysis: He dissociates the elements of the problem historically specific to capitalism from those generally characteristic of human societies, and treats these not just as continuities, one of the other, but in their polar opposition. From this opposition between abstract social categories and specific social forms in which they are cast in a given epoch of history, Marx works up an analysis of extraordinary penetration.

This does not, however, mean that the analysis is directed toward the clarification of the sexual division oflabor which originates in the long hunting period of human pre-history, and which requires considerably different tools of analysis. On the other hand, an approach so broadened as to include this problem would require a level of abstraction and generality—in relation to the division of labor in the factory and similar institutions—so extreme as to make it relatively useless for the latter. It is this, I believe, which dictated the approach taken by Marx and followed by me. What I am trying to emphasize here is that an attempt to combine these two analyses of the division of labor in modern society and of the most general forms of the sexual division of laborinto a single step would only defeat the object of both analyses and create a muddle all around.

II

Labor and Monopoly Capital has been criticized also for its omission of any discussion of the future of working-class consciousness, although in this case too the critics have, like John and Barbara Ehrenreich in their article in this collection (“Work and Consciousness"), understood and explained the self-imposed limits of my analysis and thus relieved me of the need to repeat any explanations. Nevertheless, a few further words may be usefully said.

Marxism is not merely an exercise in satisfying intellectual curiosity, nor an academic pursuit, but a theory of revolution and thus a tool of combat. From that point of view the value of any analysis of the composition and social trends within the working population can only lie in precisely how well it helps us to answer questions about class consciousness. Thus I do not quarrel with critics who are anxious to see further progress made in that most important side of the analysis. It was my interest in that very question of class consciousness, in fact, which led to my taking up the entire study in the first place.

When I did so, however, I already had the firm conviction that little purpose would be served by a direct attack on the subject, since it did not appear to me to be in any condition to yield to such an attack. Two major preconditions seemed to me to be lacking. The first has to do with the lack of a concrete picture of the working class, what it is made up of, the trends of income, skill, exploitation, “alienation," and so forth among workers, the place of the working population as a segment of the entire population, etc. I thought that my efforts would best be directed toward helping to fill this gap. I might add that since this is still far from accomplished, I believe that many more essays (along the lines of some of those in this collection) will be appearing in the near future.

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