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on the chef level. Those who supervise labor in institutions correspond to the foremen who supervise factory labor, or to lower-level managers having the same function in every labor process. Chefs and cooks of superior grades, the highest skill of the service category, offer an instructive instance of the manner in which an ancient and valuable craft is being destroyed even in its last stronghold, luxury and gourmet cooking. The technological means employed in this case is that of food freezing, including its more recent forms, flash freezing and drying at sub-zero temperatures, and cryogenic freezing at temperatures at least 300 degrees below zero. In such processes, cell walls are destroyed and texture and flavor damaged. Moreover, pre-cooked frozen foods tend in the long run to be more expensive than fresh foods because of the expensive equipment required for freezing, transporting these foods in a frozen state, and thawing them in microwave or convection pressure ovens. That moneyed clienteles now pay "luxury prices for slot machine food"so that a rack of lamb ordered rare in a famous Connecticut inn is brought to the table cold and the client told that rare lamb must be cold²—is not what concerns us here. More to the point is the manner in which a precious craft is destroyed and how this destructive tendency feeds on itself. As in so many other fields of work, the simplification and rationalization of skills in the end destroy these skills, and, with the skills becoming ever more scarce, the new processes become ever more inevitable-because ofthe shortage of skilled labor! The food editor of the New York Times wrote, in describing this process:

Many restaurant owners say the shortage and high price of skilled help are major reasons they turn to frozen foods. But kitchen wages are among the lowest in all industries, and the shortage of help may be a result, rather than a cause, of conditions in the trade.

A reader says his wife applied for a job with the Stouffer's chain and was told that they didn't need any cooks, only“thawer-outers."An executive acknowledged that the chain was “not a chef system but a food management system. "13

So far as retail trade is concerned, it is worth noting that although the “skills" of store operations have long since been disassembled and in all decisive respects vested in management,\* a revolution is now being prepared which will make of retail workers, by and large, something closer to factory operatives than anyone had ever imagined possible. In retail food trading, for example, the demand for the all-around grocery clerk, fruiterer and vegetable dealer, dairyman, butcher, and so forth has long ago been replaced by a labor configuration in the supermarkets which calls for truck unloaders, shelf stockers, checkout clerks, meat wrappers, and meatcutters; of these, only the last retain any semblance of skill, and none require any general knowledge of retail trade. The use of mechanical equipment for the shelving, display, and sale of commodities has thus far remained in a primitive state, in part because of the ready availability of low-cost labor and in part because of the nature of the process itself. With the perfecting of a number of computerized semi-automatic checkout systems, however, an increasing number of national chains in retail trade—in other fields as well as in food marketing—have committed themselves to replacing their present cash-register systems with new systems that, they estimate, will almost double the number of customers handled by each checkout clerk in a given time. The system will require affixing to each item a tag or label which carries the proper stock number (a universal ten-digit code has been adopted by the food industry) and perhaps a price, printed in characters which may be recognized by an optical scanner. Thus the clerk will simply pass the item over the scanner (or hold a scanner lens to the tag), and the register will transmit the operation to a computer which can either supply the price or check it against the current price list. The effects of this system on inventory control, quick and general price changes, and sales reporting to a central point require no comment. But the checkout counter then adopts as its own the assembly line or factory pace in its most complete form. The “production" of each register can be controlled from a single central station and laggards noted for future action; and, since no knowledge of prices is required, the production speed of a checkout clerk can be pegged at the highest level within a few hours after that clerk has begun the job, instead of the few weeks of learing time that are now allowed. Of course, the slowest operation will then become that of bagging, and various mechanical systems which will eliminate the separate “bagger" and enable the checkout clerk to sweep the item over the optical scanner and into the bag with a single motion are being devised and tested.™s

The trend to automatic filling stations, where the customer, in return for a small saving, fills his or her own tank while the transaction is monitored on a screen in the station is also worth mentioning, if only for the manner in which it combines a displacement of labor with a shift from male to female labor; the new gasoline station attendants are generally “girls," who, as everyone knows, offer a further saving to the thrifty employer.

As a quick glance at the list of service occupations will make apparent the bulk of the work is concentrated in two areas: cleaning and building care, and kitchen work and food service. Female workers outnumber male, as in retail sales work. Training prerequisites for most of these occupations are minimal, a job ladder leading upward is virtually nonexistent, and unemployment rates are higher than average. In this occupational category are found the housekeeping jobs of a society of concentrated life and labor that masses workers and residents in multiple-dwelling units, giant office blocks, and immense factory units, and which thus develops extraordinary requirements for cleaning, caretaking, and catering. We see here the obverse face of the heralded “service economy," which is supposed to free workers from the tyranny of industry, call into existence a “higher order” of educated labor, and transform the condition of the average man. When this picture is drawn by enthusiastic publicists and press agents of capitalism (with or without advanced degrees in sociology and economics), it is given a semblance of reality by reference to professional occupations. When numbers are required to lend mass to the conception, the categories of clerical, sales, and service workers are called upon. But these workers are not asked to show their diplomas, their pay stubs, or their labor processes.\*

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\* In 1892, F. W. Woolworth wrote in a letter to his store managers: "We must have cheap help or we cannot sell cheap goods."14 Chain stores in the notion and novelty, as well as in the food trades, and nationwide mail order houses, pioneered the fractionalization of retail labor.

Notes

Part V

The Working Class

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\* We may note here that according to sociological surveys—take them for what they are worthjob dissatisfaction, "negative attitudes toward work and life," while high among workers in manufacturing and in machine trades, are much higher among workers in service, clerical, and sales jobs."16

Chapter 17

The Structure of the Working Class and its Reserve Armies

Labor and capital are the opposite poles of capitalist society. This polarity begins in each enterprise and is realized on a national and even international scale as a giant duality of classes which dominates the social structure. And yet this polarity is incorporated in a necessary identity between the two. Whatever its form, whether as money or commodities or means of production, capital is labor: it is labor that has been performed in the past, the objectified product of preceding phases of the cycle of production which becomes capital only through appropriation by the capitalist and its use in the accumulation of more capital. At the same time, as living labor which is purchased by the capitalist to set the production process into motion, labor is capital. That portion of money capital which is set aside for the payment oflabor, the portion which in each cycle is converted into living labor power, is the portion of capital which stands for and corresponds to the working population, and upon which the latter subsists.

Before it is anything else, therefore, the working class is the animate part of capital, the part which will set in motion the process that yields to the total capital its increment of surplus value. As such, the working class is first of all raw material for exploitation.

This working class lives a social and political existence of its own, outside the direct grip of capital. It protests and submits, rebels or is integrated into bourgeois society, sees itself as a class or loses sight of its own existence, in accordance with the forces that act upon it and the moods, conjunctures, and conflicts of social and political life. But since, in its permanent existence, it is the living part of capital, its occupational structure, modes of work, and distribution through the industries of society are determined by the ongoing processes of the accumulation of capital. It is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord with its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital.

From this is derived the formal definition ofthe working class as that class which, possessing nothing but its power to labor, sells that power to capital in return for its subsistence. As we shall see, this, like all definitions, is limited by its static quality. But in itself it is perfectly correct and forms the only adequate starting point for any attempt to visualize the working class in modern society.

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We may gain a rough first approximation of the working class in this century by considering at the outset the mass occupational categories which embrace, with a few anomalies and exceptions, the unmistakably workingclass population. These, as classified by the U.S. bureaus of the census and labor statistics, are the craftsmen, clerical workers, operatives, sales workers, service workers, and nonfarm laborers. We exclude from these groups foremen, who are usually classified in the craftsman's category; from among the sales workers, we exclude the salesmen, agents, and brokers of advertising, insurance, real estate, and stocks and bonds, as well as manufacturers' representatives and salesmen in wholesale trade, the latter being generally higher-paid and privileged sales workers, thus leaving in this category chiefly salespersons in retail trade.\* In these six categories, so modified, we find the overwhelming bulk of the nonagricultural working class, whose growth and changes of composition can be seen in the following table:

Using major occupational categories in this way, even if modified as described, leaves much to be desired in statistical precision. For example, it has already been pointed out that even the lowest of the occupational categories included in this table—that of service workers——includes among its hundreds of thousands of cooks some of whom, as chefs, manage the labor processes of large kitchens, are paid on a managerial scale, and are thus strictly speaking far from being “working class" in the same sense as the rest of the category. The same is undoubtedly true of some who are classified as bookkeepers, or even secretaries, within the clerical category. One might also raise objections to the classification of police as workers. The numbers involved, however, are small in relation to the size of the categories as a whole. On the other hand, some parts of other major occupational groups not included in this tabulation are just as much a part of the unmistakable and self-evident working class as those major groups we have included above. In that group called “managers, officials, and proprietors," for instance, there are considerable numbers of railroad conductors, union officials, and especially “managers," so called, of retail stores, eating and drinking places, gasoline service stations, repair and personal services, and the like. In a large number of cases the classification of such workers as managers owes more to convention than to reality. The inclusion of draftsmen, medical, dental, engineering and other such technicians among the professional and technical grouping also, in a large and increasing number of cases, conceals a genuinely working-class situation for those involved.

Moreover, a very rapidly growing category reported in the census is that which falls outside of any occupational group and is given the rubric “occupation not reported." This category of the occupational census included 1,369,621 people in 1950, and 3,453,279 in 1960. Furthermore, the growing number of those who are not counted as part of the “labor force" because they have stopped the active search for employment, as well as the enormous undercounting of the population in the working-class portions of the cities now admitted by census officials, also affect the trends. All in all, we must suppose these forms of undercounting result, particularly in recent censuses, in an underestimate of the size of the working-class population. These considerations, rough though they may be, tend toward the conclusion that the nonagricultural working-class portion of the “experienced civilian labor force" has grown since the start of the century from half to well over two-thirds, perhaps as high as three-quarters, of the total at the present time.

The conversion of an ever larger proportion of the population into labor power on the working-class level devoted to the increase of capital, has taken place primarily at the expense of the farming population, which at the turn of the century embraced nearly 40 percent of the “economically active," while by 1970 it had fallen below 4 percent. The most substantial proportional increases have taken place in three categories: operatives, clerical workers, and the combined service and retail-sales sectors. As the employment effects of the technological revolution began to be felt, however, the steady proportional increase of operatives ceased, and after 1950 this group fell backward as a proportion of the total (although numerically it continued to increase). But the continued, and even accelerated, increase of the other two groups, clerical and sales-service, has taken up the workers released from factory employment (or never hired).

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\* Since for our tabulation we use the census figures for the “economically active civilian population"—the term used in the early part of this century—or, in later censuses, the “experienced civilian labor force," this tabulation includes all workers whose occupations can be defined, employed or unemployed, but not those who have "dropped out of the labor force."

It takes but a moment's reflection to see that the new mass working-class occupations tend to grow, not in contradiction to the speedy mechanization and “automation" of industry, but in harmony with it. As a result of this mechanization, the numbers of workers required by the manufacturing, mining, transportation, communications, public utilities, and even to some extent construction industries are held down and do not increase as rapidly as their material products, so that the labor requirements of these industries, measured as a proportion of the total employed population, are held in check. Thus the scientific-technological revolution possesses, in the long run, this trait: that with its spread, the proportion of the population connected with scientifically and technologically advanced industry, even if only in the form of helots, eventually shrinks. The fastest growing industrial and occupational sectors in the “automated” age tend, therefore, in the long run to be those labor-intensive areas which have not yet been or cannot be subjected to high technology.

The masses of labor sloughed off by the rapid mechanization of industry (and this includes not just those who lose their jobs, but, much more important numerically, those who keep coming into the employment market at a time when traditional opportunities for industrial employment are shrinking) furnish the labor supply for the clerical, service, and sales fields. The mechanization of industry produces a relative surplus of population available for employment at the lower pay rates that characterize these new mass occupations. In other words, as capital moves into new fields in search of profitable investment, the laws of capital accumulation in the older fields operate to bring into existence the “labor force" required by capital in its new incarnations. This process was given its classic formulation by Marx in the chapter of the first volume of Capital called “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," in the section in which he describes the continuous formation in capitalist production, after it emerges from its “childhood," of a “relative surplus-population." We have already extracted a portion of this passage in Chapter 11, but since Marx's description of the movement of capital and labor in the nineteenth century is extraordinarily helpful for understanding our present theme, and since the matter can hardly be given a more forceful and precise formulation, it bears quotation here at greater length:

But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus-population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost, Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation. With accumulation, and the development of the productiveness of labour that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows also; it grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already functioning increases, not merely because the absolute wealth of society expands, of which capital only forms an elastic part, not merely because credit, under every special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of this wealth at the disposal of production in the form of additional capital; it grows, also, because the technical conditions of the process of production themselves—machinery, means of transport, &c.—now admit of the rapidest transformation of masses of surplus-product into additional means of production. The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c., the need for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. Overpopulation supplies these masses. . . . This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly “sets free" a part of the labourers; by methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the increased production. The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends, therefore, upon the constant transformation of a part of the labouring population into unemployed or half-employed hands.

Those industries and labor processes subjected to mechanization release masses of labor for exploitation in other, generally less mechanized, areas of capital accumulation. With the repeated manifestations of this cycle, labor tends to pile up in the industries and occupations which are less susceptible to engineered improvements in labor productivity. Wage rates in these “new" industries and occupations are held down by the continuous availability of the relative surplus population created by the steadily increasing productivity of labor in the machine occupations. This in turn encourages the investment of capital in forms of the labor process which require masses of low-wage hand labor. As a result, we see in capitalist industry a secular trend to accumulate labor in those portions of industry and trade which are least affected by the scientific-technical revolution: service work, sales and other forms of marketing, clerical work insofar as it has not yet been mechanized, etc. The paradox that the most rapidly growing mass occupations in an era of scientifictechnical revolution are those which have least to do with science and technology need not surprise us. The purpose of machinery is not to increase but to decrease the number of workers attached to it. Thus it is by no means illogical that with the development of science and technology, the numbers of those cheaply available for dancing attendance upon capital in all of its least mechanized functional forms continues to increase at a rapid pace.

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In periods of rapid capital accumulation, such as that which has taken place throughout the capitalist world since World War II, the relative surplus population which is the “natural" product of the capital accumulation process is supplemented with other sources oflabor. In northern Europe and the United States, the capitalist economies have increasingly made use of the masses of former agricultural labor in the colonies and neocolonies. These masses are thrown off by the process of imperialist penetration itself, which has disrupted the traditional forms oflabor and subsistence. They become available to capital as its own agricultural surplus labor (that part of the relative surplus population which Marx called the “latent" portion) is used up. As a result of this, the movement of labor has to some extent become internationalized, although still regulated in each country by government action in an attempt to make it conform to the national needs of capital. Thus Western Europe and the United States now draw upon a labor reservoir which extends in a broad band from India and Pakistan in the east across northern Africa and southernmost Europe all the way to the Caribbean and other portions of Latin America in the west. Indian, Pakistani, Turkish, Greek, Italian, African, Spanish, West Indian, and other workers supplement the indigenous underclass in northern Europe and make up its lowest layers. In the United States, the same role is occupied by Puerto Rican, Mexican, and other Latin American workers, who have been added to the pool of lowest-paid labor which is made up chiefly of black workers.

At the same time, in a process which cuts across racial and national lines, the female portion of the population has become the prime supplementary reservoir of labor. In all the most rapidly growing sectors of the working class, women make up the majority, and in some instances the overwhelming majority, of the workers. Women form the ideal reservoir of labor for the new mass occupations. The barrier which confines women to much lower pay scales is reinforced by the vast numbers in which they are available to capital. These vast numbers are in turn guaranteed, for a considerable period of time, by the lower rate of participation in the working population with which women entered into the era of monopoly capital. While the male population, even in its prime working ages, is suffering a slowly declining labor force participation rate (which is only a concealed form of the rise in unemployment), women have been participating in employment at a very rapidly rising rate throughout this century. For capital, this is an expression of the movement to the poorly paid, menial, and “supplementary" occupations. For the working class, it is in part an expression of the increasing difficulty of keeping up with customary and unavoidable needs of subsistence in the society created by capital, without having two or more family members at work at the same time. In this manner, an ever increasing portion of human work is incorporated into capital.

The Reserve Army of Labor

Thus the mass of employment cannot be separated from its associated mass of unemployment. Under conditions of capitalism, unemployment is not an aberration but a necessary part of the working mechanism of the capitalist mode of production. It is continuously produced and absorbed by the energy of the accumulation process itself. And unemployment is only the officially counted part of the relative surplus of working population which is necessary for the accumulation of capital and which is itself produced by it. This relative surplus population, the industrial reserve army, takes a variety of forms in modern society, including the unemployed; the sporadically employed; the part-time employed; the mass of women who, as houseworkers, form a reserve for the “female occupations"; the armies of migrant labor, both agricultural and industrial; the black population with its extraordinarily high rates of unemployment; and the foreign reserves of labor.

Marx distinguished three forms of the reserve army of labor, or relative surplus population: the floating, the latent, and the stagnant. The floating form is found in the centers of industry and employment, in the form of workers who move from job to job, attracted and repelled (that is to say, hired and discarded) by the movements of technology and capital, and suffering a certain amount of unemployment in the course of this motion. With the simplification of job operations and the spread of the number and variety of jobs for which the “qualifications" have become reduced to the minimums of simple labor this stratum has grown to encompass large parts of the working population The extraordinary mobility provided by automobile transport in the United States has widened the geographical range of such jobs for each worker, has greatly enlarged the “labor pool" available to each factory, office, warehouse, retail establishment, etc., and has broken down ties to localities and communities. An ordinary working life for many workers now consists of movement among a considerable number of jobs, so that such workers are in turn part of the employed and the reserve labor populations. This has been reflected in the system of unemployment insurance, which provides for periods of unemployment at a reduced wage with monies collected during periods of employment; it is in part a safeguard against the economic, social, and political effects of widespread and prolonged unemployment, and in part a recognition of the roles workers play, now as part of the employed and now as part of the reserve armies of labor.

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The latent relative surplus population is, in Marx's definition, that which is found in the agricultural areas. In these areas, unlike in the centers of capitalist industry, there exists no counter-movement of attraction to offset the repulsion of those “set free" by the revolution in agricultural technology, and hence the movement of labor is out of the agricultural regions and into the cities or metropolitan areas. In the most developed capitalist countries in northern Europe and North America, this pool of latent relative surplus population has been largely absorbed, although in the United States the black population of the rural areas still remains, in dwindling numbers, as part of this pool. The latent form of surplus population now exists chiefly in the neocolonies, and, as has been noted, the capitalist countries attempt a regulated absorption and repulsion of such labor, in accord with the needs of accumulation. This regulated internationalization of the labor market is supplemented by the export of various industrial processes to cheap labor areas in the countries which are kept in subjugation as “undeveloped regions."

Finally, Marx speaks of the stagnant relative surplus population, whose employment is irregular, casual, marginal, and which merges with the “sediment," as Marx called it, of relative surplus population which dwells in the world of pauperism: “Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army . . . ; along with the surpluspopulation, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class."

The stagnant relative surplus population, irregularly and casually employed, "furnishes to capital," in Marx's words, “an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working-class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation."4 The importance of this branch of surplus population for the types of employment that have been increasing rapidly is clear. We will consider it at greater length below.

The activity of capital in breeding masses of labor for its various needs is summarized by Marx in the following familiar paragraph:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labourpower at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.⁵

This law, Marx maintained, “always equilibrates the relative surpluspopulation, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation. . . . It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital."6 During the 1940s and early 1950s, when the tendencies of the immense upward surge in the accumulation of capital that began (for the United States) in the Second World War were not yet developed or clearly manifest, this “absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" was widely taken to be the weakest aspect of the Marxian analysis. From our present vantage point, when the consequences of this cycle of accumulation have worked themselves out more fully and have been given greater visibility by the unrest of the 1960s, the matter takes on a somewhat different appearance.

The scope and energy of the accumulation process that began at the start of the 1940s has completed the annihilation of the agricultural population in the United States and largely transformed it, black and white alike, into an urban “labor force," and this has been supplemented by the import of workers on a considerable scale from Latin America. This immense increase in “the absolute mass of the proletariat" has been accompanied by an equally immense increase in the industrial reserve army. Statistics show a doubling of the number of officially counted unemployed, so that in the early 1970s this part of the working class had mounted into the 4 to 5 million range, but this is the least significant indicator of the growth of the industrial reserve army. Far more significant is the statistical series known as the “labor force participation rate."

This series attempts to establish, by the technique of household sampling interviews, the proportion of the population which is part of the labor market It starts from the assumption that some significant part of the population over the age of sixteen cannot be counted as part of the “labor force" because it is made up of people who are in school, running a household full time, sick or disabled, or retired for reasons of age. All these categories of presumed nonseekers after employment are obviously elastic: when one considers that the total embraced in this “not-in-the-labor-force" group exceeded 55 million persons in 1971, there is clearly plenty of room in it for concealed unemploymentall the more so as it also includes those who are not seeking work because they believe they cannot find it. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that some 4 to 5 million persons in the group, in the last years of the 1960s and the early 1970s, regularly expressed themselves as “wanting a job now, although they are counted as not having been part of the labor force for the preceding period. This alone either doubles or more than doubles the official 7水 unemployment rate in most of those years. 117

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The movement of the labor force participation rate in the years since World War II, taken as a whole, is a relatively unenlightening trend. The percent of the noninstitutionalized population found in the total labor force (including the armed forces) has moved since 1947 in a narrow range between 59 and 61 percent. But this static condition conceals changes of a most striking kind, which become visible as soon as one breaks down the overall figures by sex. The nonmovement of the index as a whole is produced by violently contrary movements of the male and female populations.

For the male population during the period 1947 to 1971, a strong and consistent decline since the 1940s and early 1950s has reduced the participation rate from some 87 percent to only 80 percent. This decline is only partly attributable to the increase in school attendance during the student years and to retirement; it is to be found in every age category, and is most particularly marked in male workers between the ages of 55 and 64, for whom the participation rate declined from 89.6 in 1947 to 82.2 in 1971. Unless we are to make untenable assumptions (such as, as Sweezy and Magdoff point out, the assumption of a growing leisure class among workers), this clearly indicates that a portion of the male working population (and the figures point to white workers almost as much as to black) has been and is being moved into the reserve army of labor without this showing up in the unemployment statistics.

For the female population, the trend is precisely the opposite. Here the figures, across the board for all age groups, indicate a very great movement into the labor force, from a participation rate of 31.8 percent in 1947 to 43.4 percent in 1971. And just as among males the largest decrease takes place in the 55- to 64-year-old age bracket, so among females the largest increase takes place in the age groups from 45 to 54 and from 55 to 64; for the former, from 32.7 percent in 1947 to 54.3 percent in 1971, and for the latter, from 24.3 percent to 42.9 percent.

These two opposing statistical movements of male and female workers are contradictory in form only. In essence, they represent two sides of the same phenomenon, the increase in the relative mass of the industrial reserve army. Among male workers this takes the form of a sloughing off into the ranks of the so-called nonparticipants in the labor force, or in other words an increase of the “stagnant" portion. Among female workers it takes the form of a growing body of female labor which is drawn from the mass of women who previously did not work, and hence represents an enlargement of the “floating" and “stagnant" reserve army oflabor by additional hundreds of thousands and even millions each year. As the available pool of unemployed labor is expanded among men by their relative repulsion from industry and trade, it is expanded even more among women by their increasing attraction into industry and trade. The opposing forms taken by this basically unitary movement simply reflect the different starting points of male and female labor at the beginning of the period we have been considering, as well as the strong demand for female labor in the expanding mass occupations in contrast to the relative stagnation of the male mass occupations.

The logical culmination of these trends is an equalization of the labor force participation rates between men and women, and the stabilization of a uniform rate for the population as a whole—in other words, the transformation of as much as one-third or more of the male population into a reserve army of labor, along with a similar part of the female population. But for purposes of this analysis there is no need to enter into risky extrapolations from existing statistical trends. It is enough to notice what has in fact been happening, without trying to assess the extent to which it can proceed, an extent which is limited by future trends in the accumulation process of capital as well as by social trends having to do with the structure of the family, etc. And what has been happening is that, along with an increasing mass of the proletariat, there is also the consolidation of an increasing mass of relative surplus population which takes place by way of a market repulsion of male labor and an attraction of female labor, both on a very great scale.

The well-established fact that women are generally paid on a substantially lower scale than men, either by way of their concentration in lower-paid occupations or within the same occupation, immediately draws our attention to a significant long-term consequence of the statistical movement we have been discussing. The concentration of better-paid employment among craftsmen (as well as professional and managerial males) on the one side, and the further tendency of the mass of working-class jobs to shift in the direction of lower-paid female occupations, clearly brings about a polarization of income among job holders. This is reflected in the fact that the industrial sectors in the United States in which employment is relatively stagnant are the sectors with wage rates above the average, while the sectors in which employment is growing most rapidly are those with lower-than-average wage rates (see table, next page). 10

An important corroboration of this trend toward a polarization of income among job holders emerges from the work of Victor R. Fuchs for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Fuchs is a celebrant of the growing importance of the service industries, and the information we shall cite here arose as a by-product of his effort to establish the shift to service industries and the consequent characteristics of the emerging economic structure. He divided the economy into two sectors, The first, which he called "Industry," included mining, construction, manufacturing, transport, communications and public utilities, and government enterprises. The second, which he called “Service," included wholesale trade, retail trade, finance and insurance, real estate, and household and institutional employment, professional, personal, business, and repair services, and general government including the armed forces.

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\* This conclusion is also arrived at, by other and much fuller methods of computation, by Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff in their analysis of the labor force participation rate in Monthly Review.8

The rationale of such a separation, and the significance of the results obtained by making these particular groupings, does not here concern us; this I have already discussed in the chapters on the universal market and on the service and retail-trade occupations. What is interesting at this point is that these groupings correspond precisely to the stagnating and the growing portions of the American economy. Each of the industrial classifications listed by Fuchs as belonging to Industry has been either stagnating or declining in terms of the percentage of national employment it represents, and this is true for every classification in the group since the 1950s and for almost every classification since the 1920s. On the other side, every classification (except household employment) included by Fuchs in the Service sector has been a rapidly growing area of employment throughout the last hundred years, again in terms of its percentage of total employment." The Service sector, as defined by Fuchs, grew from approximately 40 percent of total employment in 1929 to over 55 percent in 1967. Between 1947 and 1965 alone, there was an increase of 13 million jobs in this sector, compared with an increase of only 4 million in the Industry sector.\*12

The most striking finding reported by Fuchs is the growing gap between the pay levels in the Industry sector and those in the Service sector. With remarkable consistency, the average rates of pay in the Service sector each year slipped further behind the average rates of pay in the Industry sector, so that by 1959 Industry rates were on the average 17 percent higher, and thereafter the gap continued to widen.'4 Since the Service sector employs a disproportionately large share of nonwhite, female, and very young workers, Fuchs next investigates whether this widening wage gap is perhaps simply the effect of the contrasting compositions of the two sectors, by color, age, sex, and education—in other words, whether it is not just another way of looking at the well-known fact that blacks, women, young workers, etc., receive less pay. This proves to be only part of the explanation: the differing compositions of the two sectors of employment “explain" only about one-half the great and growing spread in pay. This means that while the Service sector contains a disproportionate share of those who, throughout the whole economy, get lower pay, and this pulls down the average for the sector, at the same time all kinds of workers in the Service sector, no matter what their age, color, or sex, receive on the average lower rates of pay.\*i5

The levels of pay in the low-wage industries and occupations are below the subsistence level; that is to say, unlike the scales of the highest paid occupational groups, they do not approach the income required to support a family at the levels of spending necessary in modern society. But, because these industries and occupations are also the most rapidly growing ones, an ever larger mass of workers has become dependent upon them as the sole source of support for their families. It is this continual enlargement of the mass of lower-paid occupations that is at the root of the tendencies, which began to be publicized only during the 1960s but which existed before, toward “poverty in the midst of plenty" in the United States; it is this that accounts for the rapid expansion of the welfare rolls to take in ever larger masses of employed workers.

This tendency, which is but one of the factors leading to what Marx called an “accumulation of misery, corresponding to the accumulation of capital," is so marked that even when one abstracts from the effects of the rapid influx of female labor into ill-paid employment and considers only male employment, it is still visible and measurable. A study of the distribution of earned income made by Peter Henle of the U.S. Department of Labor follows the widespread custom of disregarding female employment, which is considered to be somehow temporary, incidental, and fortuitous, when it should actually be placed at the very center of all occupational studies today. Henle considers only the distribution of earned income among males, and his conclusion for the years 1958 to 1970 is as follows: “Over the 12-year span covered by this study, there has been a slow but persistent trend toward inequality in the distribution of earnings and in the distribution of wages and salaries. The trend is evident not only for the work force as a whole, but also for many individual occupational and industrial groups. If the effect of fringe benefits could have been included in the calculations, the trend would undoubtedly have been even more pronounced." “All in all," he notes, "the net effect of the shifting occupational composition of the economy seems clearly in the direction of a more elongated earnings distribution, helping to produce the trend toward inequality."7 But the “shifting occupational and industrial composition of the economy" is far less significant for the male population alone; it is female employment, as has been noted, that accounts for the bulk of the occupational and industrial shift, and thus it is female employment that constitutes the bulk of the new workingclass occupations. We cannot doubt, therefore, that if Henle's analysis were repeated for the total of the wage and salary earning population, it would show a rapid and intense, rather than a slow, trend toward polarization of income.

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The Structure of the Working Class

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\* This increase, we may note in passing, was not, according to Fuchs, accompanied by any increase in the share of output produced in the Service sector. Measured as a share in Gross National Product, the output of the Service sector did not increase at all between 1929 and 1965, despite the great increase in its share of employment.‘3 This estimate is interesting, as far as it goes, in highlighting the increasingly wasteful allocation of labor, but since Fuchs is bound by the fictitious concepts of“output" used in calculating the Gross National Product, it does not go nearly as far as it should. The “output" of great portions of the Service sector exists only in the balance sheets of the corporations operating within it, and in the national product accounts of statisticians and economists, while adding little or nothing to the social product calculated in noncapitalist terms.

\* Another investigation of the same subject matter, by Barry Bluestone, reaches this conclusion: "In tracing wage histories since the Second World War, one finds that the wage differential between high-wage’ and 'low-wage’ industries has increased secularly. In 1947 the set of industries with lowest wages paid straight-time hourly rates which averaged 75 percent of the average wages prevailing in the highest wage industries in the nation. Apart from slight cyclical variation in wage increases during the ensuing period, the wage ratio between these two sets of industries fell to 60 percent by 1966. The low-wage industries granted smaller wage increases (in percentage as well as absolute terms) in all but four years during the two-decade period."16