Labor in the Post-Industrial Society
Bell, Daniel
In the Communist Manifesto, which was completed in February 1848, Marx and Engels envisaged a society in which there would be only two classes—capitalist and worker, the few who owned the...
...The criterion of techne is efficiency, and the mode of life is modeled on economics: how does one extract the greatest amount of energy from a given unit of embedded nature (coal, oil, gas, water power) with the best machine at what comparative price...
...DANIEL BELL original problems, and the love of workmanship are incompatible with the criteria of capitalist profitability...
...These soften the unrelenting quality of industrial life...
...As a share of total employment, the per centage of semiskilled will slide downward from 18.4 percent in 1968 to 16.2 percent in 1980...
...Printing Office, 1970), and from preliminary estimates for 1968-70 in the B.L.S...
...In 1900 only 15 percent of American men wore white collars (and most of these were independent small businessmen) . By 1940 the figure had gone up to 25 percent (and these were largely in administrative jobs...
...Finally, the claims for more services and the inadequacy of the market in meeting people's needs for a decent environment as well as for better health and education lead to the growth of government, particularly at the state and local level, where such needs have to be met...
...s Gintis's major statement is to be found in theessay "The New Working Class and Revolutionary Youth," a supplement to Continuum, Spring– Summer 1970...
...Altogether, the goods-producing industries employed 29 million workers in 1968, and the number is expected to increase to 31.6 million by 1980...
...so does the entire area of science and engineering technicians and engineers...
...the clash between the professional and the populace, in the organization and in the community, is the hallmark of conflict in the post-industrial society...
...Automation is a real fact, and the bogey of an accelerated pace has not materialized.' But even a steady advance of T See "Technology and the American Economy," Report of the President's Committee on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...productivity and growth, and the costs of services, private and governmental, increase sharply...
...Because it is a game against nature, productivity is low, and the economy is subject to the vicissitudes of tangible nature and to capricious fluctuations of raw-material prices in the world economy...
...This integument is burst asunder...
...Similarly, within the law, the greater role of government in welfare, services for the poor, education, consumer standards, and health provides a whole new area of public-interest law for the lawyer alongside the older areas of business, real estate, labor law, wills and trusts...
...the main question is which sector of society is the motive force behind the process [of revolution], which class is in charge of the administration of the process...
...As Sir John Clapham comments: "German industry in general could in no sense be called capitalistic...
...4. The Nonprofit Sector...
...As Mallet writes: The "new working class" is, in effect, tied to the most highly developed industrial capitalists, and the standard of living which they have is due entirely to the high degree of productivity of these enterprises...
...This may save jobs in some sectors (textiles, electronics, steel, automobiles), but at a higher price to the consumer...
...By 1980, only one in 16 adult workers (25 years and over)—about 5 million—will have had less than eight years of schooling, while seven in every ten adult workers, about 52 million, will at least have completed four years of high school...
...By 1980, with the rising predominance of services, close to seven in every ten workers will be in service industries...
...Karl Marx and his large family lived in two rooms in Soho in the 1850s and were sometimes evicted for failing to pay rent, but they had a faithful servant, Lenchen...
...The quotation in the text is from p. 167...
...A bourgeois was a bourgeois by day and a bourgeois by night...
...In effect, trade unionism in the United States has made no real advance in nearly a quarter of a century...
...1921), pp...
...all that was looked upon as holy is profaned...
...It is the white-collar field, of course, that is crucial for the future of organized labor, and here trade unionism has done poorly...
...Second, in the mass consumption of goods and the growth of populations there is an increase in distribution (wholesale and retail), and finance, real estate, and insurance, the traditional centers of white-collar employment...
...LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY student lives in a world apart, free largely, especially today, from the sanctions and re prisals of adult authority for almost any escapades...
...17 In 1929, 4.465 million persons were employed by government and nonprofit institutions, or about 9.7 percent of the labor force...
...TABLE 7 PROPORTION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES ORGANIZED Year Government Federal Government State and Local Total Percent Total Percent Total Percent Employment Organized Employment Organized Employment Organized 1956 1960 1964 1966 1968 7,277 8,353 9,596 10,792 11,846 12.6 12.8 15.1 15.9 18.2 2,209 2,270 2,348 2,564 2,737 -38.2 41.8 49.4 5,069 6,083 7,248 8,227 9,109 — — 7.7 7.8 8.8 Source: Monthly Labor Review, July 1970...
...For Fuchs's data see his chap...
...But with the continuing spread of major technological developments such as numerical-control machine tools, electronic computers, instrumentation and automatic controls, the proportion of direct production workers is expected to go down steadily...
...In 1970 almost 42 percent of the male labor force-some 20 million men-held white-collar jobs (as against 23 million who wore blue collars), and of these, almost 15 million were managerial, professional, or technical-the heart of the uppermiddle class in the United States.8 $ For current figures, see U.S...
...See Table 8.) Since 1956, union membership in manufacturing and nonmanufacturing has continued to shrink as a proportion of total membership (union membership in manufacturing declined 44,000 between 1968 and 1970), and only membership in the public sector has moved upward...
...New York: Atheneum — Russell & Russell, (reprint ed., 1963...
...Marx had assumed, in the logic of commodity production, that in the end both bourgeoisie and worker would be reduced to the abstract economic relation in which all other social attributes would be eliminated so that the two would face each other nakedly—as would all society—in their class roles.35 sg Marx's view is laid out most starkly in The Communist Manifesto...
...New forms of small professional firms, research institutes, diverse kinds of government agencies, plus schools and hospitals—all subject to professional and community control— become the locus of life for more and more persons in the society...
...But, as we shall see, far from having negative consequences on the behavior of the rest of the working class, the existence of this "avant garde" has, on the contrary, positive effects.21 In principle, the idea is not new...
...General services were the second fastest growth area for employment between 1947 and 1968, and about 10 percent of employment in general services is in private educational institutions...
...This is the new dual revolution taking place in the structure of occupations and, to the extent that occupation determines other modes of behavior (but this, too, is diminishing), it is a revolution in the class structure of society as well...
...I am indebted to Mrs...
...38 (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...119-20...
...Are highly paid professors and engineers workers...
...and this is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society...
...In 1968, employment on the farms TABLE 4 PERCENT DISTRIBUTION BY MAJOR OCCUPATION GROUP 1900-60 Major Occupation Group 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 White-Collar Workers 17.6 21.3 24.9 29.4 31.1 36.6 42.0 Professional & Technical 4.3 4.7 5.4 6.8 7.5 8.6 10.8 Managers, Officials & Proprietors 5.8 6.6 6.6 7.4 7.3 8.7 10.2 Clerical & Kindred 3.0 5.3 8.0 8.9 9.6 12.3 14.5 Sales Workers 4.5 4.7 4.9 6.3 6.7 7.0 6.5 Manual Workers 35.8 38.2 40.2 39.6 39.8 41.1 37.5 Craftsmen & Foremen 10.5 11.6 13.0 12.8 12.0 14.1 12.9 Operatives 12.8 14.6 15.6 15.8 18.4 20.4 18.6 Laborers, Exc...
...cit., Table 66, p. 185...
...The American labor movement, particularly the blue-collar class, has always had a large component of foreign-born or first-generation workers, many of whom accepted a lower status as a matter of course...
...Note: The totals do not always add up because of small numbers not allocated, and rounding of figures...
...Life is a game against fabricated nature...
...Second, the labor problem has become "encapsulated...
...Is the proletariat, or the working class, all those who work for wages and salaries...
...The multiplication of junior and community colleges and the breakup of the standard curricula in most universities provide an arena for experiment and change...
...Either there is a politics of consensus or a politics of stymie...
...While it is clear that the upsurge of unionism in the 1930s was indigenous, its institutionalization was possible only under the umbrella of the National Labor Relations Board...
...But even at that time his argument was not entirely convincing (especially to those who tried to get service in some of these stores), and it is even less so today...
...LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY TABLE 1 SECTOR DISTRIBUTION OF EMPLOYMENT BY GOODS AND SERVICES 1870-1940 (in thousands) Year 1870 1900 1920 1940 Total 12,900 29,000 41,600 49,860 Goods-Producing Total 10,630 19,620 23,600 25,610 Agriculture, Forestry, & Fisheries 7,450 10,900 11,400 9,100 Manufacturing 2,250 6,300 10,800 11,900 Mining 180 760 1,230 1,100 Construction 750 1,660 2,170 3,510 Service-Producing Total 2,990 9,020 15,490 24,250 Trade, Finance & Real Estate 830 2,760 4,800 8,700 Transportation & Utilities 640 2,100 4,190 4,150 Professional Service 230 1,150 2,250 4,000 Domestic & Personal Service 1,190 2,710 3,330 5,710 Government (not elsewhere classified) 100 300 920 1,690 Source: Adapted from Historical Statistics of the United States: 1820-1940, Series D57-71, p. 74...
...In an essay of almost a decade ago, in which I first formulated the theme of the post-industrial society, I wrote: Insofar as education is today—and tomorrow— the chief means of social mobility, by charting the school dropout rates and matching them against future skill requirements by education one can sketch a rough picture 18 These figures are computed from the 1950 Census, Subject Report 3A, Characteristics of the White Population 14 years old and over, and 1960 Census, Subject Report 1A, Social and Economic Characteristics of the Population 14 years and over...
...As a game between persons, social life becomes more difficult because political claims and social rights multiply, the rapidity of social change and shifting cultural fashion bewilders the old, and the orientation to the future erodes the traditional guides and moralities of the past...
...The Rand mathematician Richard Bellmann has often been quoted as predicting that by the year 2,000 only 2 percent of the labor force will be required to turn out all necessary goods...
...today, and the independent federation, the Council of Engineersand Scientists Organizations, claims to represent 100,000 members in the U.S...
...Until now, he argues, the trade union movement has taken the necessary stand of fighting for "quantitative gains," but this continuing strategy has become increasingly dysfunctional because it has tied the workers into the productivity of the economic system and the consumption society...
...conversely, in the services sectors only 54 percent of all workers were men and 46 percent women...
...In England, where engineering has never been considered a true profession, and technical schools until recently never had the status of universities, the Association of Scientific, Technical and Man agerial Staffs has grown from 9,000 members in 1947 to 220,000 today...
...In 1968, six out of every ten semiskilled workers were employed as factory operatives...
...At various points he writes: The bourgeoisie cannot exist without incessantly revolutionizing the instruments of production...
...Similar orders were issued in Philadelphia and other cities with evident results...
...But not all services are whitecollar, since they includetransportation workers and auto-repair men...
...But in the last two decades we have seen the rise of scientists, educators, the intelligentsia, blacks, youth, and poor—all playing a role in the game of influence and resource allocation...
...And within the blue-collar force there has been a steady and distinct shift from direct production to nonproduction jobs as more and more work becomes automated, and blue-collar workers turn to machinetending, repair, and maintenance, rather than staying "on the line...
...The engineers and technicians are a "new" working class, in part replacing the old, with a potential for revolutionary leadership and the ability to play a role far beyond their numbers...
...2 Marx's vision of the inexorable rise of industrial society was thus a bold one...
...ALLENDE: The proletariat...
...As Victor Fuchs points out, "For as long as we have records on the industrial distribution of the labor force, we find a secular tendency for the percentage accounted for by the service sector to rise...
...Moreover, most women are bunched into a few unions...
...To that extent, there is a basic liberal or Left drift among the successive college educated generations in the society...
...But 27 For a comprehensive scrutiny of technical problems of measurement, see Victor R. Fuchs, ed., Production and Productivity in the Service Industries, Studies in Income & Wealth Series, no...
...those providing professional and business services, such as data-processing...
...The post-industrial society, thus, is also a DANIEL BELL "communal" society in which the social unit is the community rather than the individual, and one has to achieve a "social decision" as against, simply, the sum total of individual decisions which, when aggregated, end up as nightmares, on the model of the individual automobile and collective traffic congestion...
...and those that deal with communal services, particularly health, education, and government...
...It then becomes immediately evident that the struggle for a meaningful life is the struggle against the power of capital, and that this struggle must proceed without a break in continuity from the company level to the whole social sphere, from the union level to the political realm, from technology to culture...
...But beyond that, in the utopian visions of Marx and the socialist movement, the working class, made conscious of its fate by the conditions of struggle, was seen as the agency not only of industrial but of human emancipation...
...By 1960, this figure had fallen to 26 percent.13 It is likely to fall further...
...From 1947 to 1968 there was a growth of about 60 percent in employment in services, while employment in the goods-producing industries increased less than 10 percent...
...at that time, the number employed by government was 8.3 million...
...DANIEL BELL 174 have been organized...
...Industrial employment still increased numerically, but its share of total employment tended to decline, as employment in services grew at a faster rate, and from 1968 to 1980, if we take manufacturing as the key to the industrial sector, the growth will be less than half of the whole labor force...
...and labor conflict, as the form of polarized class conflict, which threatened to tear society apart...
...Semiskilled work is the occupational counterpart of mass production, and it rose with the increased output of goods...
...Thus one finds today the paradox that "educated labor" is caught between the extremes of bureaucratization and populism...
...In the first half of this century, beginning symbolically with the formation of the first billion-dollar corporation—the U.S...
...But cooperation between men is more difficult to achieve than the management of things...
...All of this poses a serious problem for American labor...
...5. The "New" Working Class...
...For Gintis, the student rebellion against the university foreshadows the pos sible revolt of all "educated labor" against capitalism...
...54, 70-71, 82, 84...
...Information becomes a central resource, and within organizations a source of power...
...DANIEL BELL small as the proportion of farmers today...
...There have been almost no studies in this field...
...In Gorz's words: . . . technicians, engineers, students, researchers discover that they are wage earners like the others, paid for a piece of work which is "good" only to the degree that it is profitable in the short run...
...12 The main push has been in the federal government, where about half the employees 1l See Everett M. Kassalow, "Trade Unionism Goes Public," in Public Interest, Winter 1969...
...The breakup of the SDS left the tendency without a home...
...indeed as late as 1895 more people in Germany were engaged in agriculture than in industry...
...In health, despite multiphasic screens and similar, mechanized diagnostic devices—a gain in numbers examined, but a loss in personal care—there is only so much of a physician's time to be distributed among patients...
...It is a world of coordination in which men, materials, and markets are dovetailed for the production and distribution of goods—a world of scheduling and programming, in which the components of goods are brought together at the right time and in the right proportions so as to speed the flow of goods...
...Since the proportion of women in the labor force is bound to rise—the efforts of women's lib apart—simply because of the expansion of the service industries, the problem for the organized trade union movement in recruiting more union members will be an increasingly difficult one...
...By 1975 the white-collar component will reach 33 percent...
...In the world economy the United States is now a 28 For a theoretical model of this problem seeWilliam J. Baumol, "Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crisis," American Economic Review, June 1967...
...It is central, of course, to the writing of Thorstein Veblen (little known to the French), who, in The Theory of Business Enterprise (1903), made a fundamental distinction between industry and business—between the engineer, devoted largely to improving the practices of production, and the finance capitalist or manager, who restricts production in order to maintain process and profit...
...Its growth has outdistanced that of all other major occupational groups in recent decades...
...One has to distinguish between the underlying system of the society, which is still capitalist, and the actual "ecology of games" wherein, on different issues, there are different coalitions, and even sizeable disagreements within the business community on specific political issues...
...Dept...
...the imprint of the machine and its rhythms on the character of work...
...For Marx, the proletariat was not identical with the masses of poor working people, and certainly not the lumpenproletariat, who he thought had lost the ability to function in human terms in society...
...These studies, plus a long essay, "Trade Unionism and Industrial Society," were published in France in 1963 under the title La Nouvelle Classe Ouvriere ("The New Working Class...
...Yet, since the heart of the nonprofit sector is health, education, and research, which by 1975 will comprise about 6 million persons,18 one can assume here a core of middle-class and upper-middle-class persons who not only form a large market for culture, but whose political and social attitudes, in the main, will be more liberal than those of the society as a whole...
...The standard entities of interest-group politics used to be corporate, labor, and farm, with the ethnic groups playing a role largely in state and city politics...
...In the Grundrisse, the outline sketch for the master work which preceded Capital, and which was never published by Marx, he envisaged a time when almost all work would be replaced by the machine and when science, not labor power, would be considered the main productive force...
...They discover that they are ruled by the law of capital not only in their work but in all spheres of their life, because those who hold power over big industry also hold power over the State, the society, the region, the city, the university—over each individual's future...
...their health declined, and the acuteness of their need was but the empty functioning of their organs in a hostile surrounding world...
...for the last 30 years) was undreamed of...
...Govt...
...31 The old so For an elaboration of this argument, and a documentation of these assertions, see Daniel Bell and Virginia Held, "The Community Revolution," Public Interest, Summer 1969...
...grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers...
...But if an industrial society is defined as a goods-producing society— if manufacture is central in shaping the character of its labor force—then, clearly, the United States is no longer an industrial society...
...General Motors, the largest corporation in the United States, in 1970 had 695,790 employees...
...Within general services, the largest category is medical services, where employment rose from 1.4 million in 1958 to 2.6 million a decade later...
...The labor costs in goods manufacturing are about 30 percent of the total costs...
...It was evident that this new occupational stratum was gaining importance, and replacing the skilled workers as the crucial group in the industrial process...
...In France in 1851, only 10.5 percent of the population lived in towns and "the number of concerns employing more than a hundred people in 1848," writes Clapham, "was so small that they could not much affect the average for the whole country...
...The rise of externalities—the effects of private actions on the commonweal—turns clean air, clean water, and mass transit into public issues and increases the need for social regulations and controls...
...by Columbia University, 1968), p. 22...
...And here the story is a familiar one...
...It remains to be seen, then, to what extent the entry of a new, young, educated work force creates a very different psychology and new kinds of demands about the character of work...
...The first Marxist to seek a theoretical formulation fitting this new development was the independent French radical Serge Mallet...
...81 Does business always have the disproportionate influence...
...and a parallel 10 percent increase in wages adds 7 percent to the cost of production, while productivity in the services sector averages between 1.2 and 1.9 percent...
...Whether the blacks maintain an alliance with the labor movement, particularly in the political field, depends more on the behavior and response of labor than on that of the blacks...
...The first has been the persistent strength of what Max Weber called "status groups"— race, ethnic, linguistic, religious—whose loyalties, ties, and emotional identifications have been more powerful and compelling than class at most times, and whose own divisions have overridden class lines...
...Productivity in services, because it is a relation between persons, rather than between man and machine, will inevitably be lower than it is in industry...
...In 1960 it was estimated that the white-collar component within manufacturing—professional, managerial, clerical, and sales—came to about 28.8 percent of the work force, while 68.5 were blue-collar workers...
...Many will have gone further...
...Yet they do not in the least identify themselves with the "working class...
...Thus there is a high service component, of the personal or household sort...
...176 DANIEL BELL of class society in the United States thirty years from now...
...What counts for the engineer is the maintenance of a "professional status...
...see also my discussion "The Bogey of Automa 2-3 percent a year, though it may be manageable economically and socially (people are usually not fired, but jobs are saved through attrition), inevitably takes its toll...
...2. The Blacks...
...Now the problem of sociological definition became crucial...
...Through the 1970s, service occupations will increase by two-fifths-a rate one-and-one-half times the expansion for all occupations combined...
...In 1956, for the first time, this group surpassed the employment of blue-collar workers...
...With 15.5 million workers in 1980, this will comprise 16.3 percent of total employment as against 13.6 percent in 1968...
...that is to say, a complex and coordinated network of regional and local autonomous bodies...
...Not only has the political tension become encapsulated...
...The growth of unionism among teachers has been largely in the public universities, too...
...Those who have hitherto belonged to the lowermiddle-class—small manufacturers, small traders, minor recipients of unearned income, handicraftsmen, and peasants—slip down, one and all, into the proletariat...
...Life is primarily a game against nature...
...Skills are broken down into simpler components, and the artisan of the past is replaced by two new figures: the engineer, who is responsible for the layout and flow of work, and the semiskilled worker, the human cog between machines— until the technical ingenuity of the engineer creates a new machine that replaces him as well...
...And yet, ironically, at a time when many needed reforms seem to be imminent in the area of work and in the professions—in part out of the upheavals of the 1960s, in greater part because of the deeper forces of structural changes of a post-industrial society— there will be stronger objective constraints on such changes (apart from the vested and established interests which are always present) than in the previous several decades of American economic and social development...
...at long last, people are compelled to gaze open-eyed at their position in life and their social relations...
...in 1968 it was 2:1 (exports of $18.4 billion against imports of $9.4 billion...
...1956-68 data in Bulletin 1665, Bureau of Labor Statistics...
...And, at the extreme, there is the example of live musical performances, where, as William J. Baumol is fond of pointing out, the performance of a half-hour quintet calls for the expenditure of two and a half man hours—and there can be no increase in productivity when the musician's wage goes up.27 This problem comes to a head in the cities, whose budgets have doubled and tripled in the last decades (apart from welfare) because the bulk of municipal expenditures— education, hospitals, police, social services— falls into the nonprogressive sector of the economy, and there are few real economies or gains that can halt these rises...
...After graduation students enter a different, highly differentiated society and begin to take on responsibilities for them selves and their new families...
...These goals are now finally being met, and it is expected that employment in construction will rise by 35 percent in this decade...
...The industry of the second half of the twentieth century increasingly tends to take men from the universities and colleges, men who have been able to acquire the ability to do creative or independent work...
...In 1900, the blue-collar workers formed about 35 percent of the total labor force, a figure which reached 40 percent in 1920 and again, after World War II, in 1950...
...Yet Marx could never escape the power of his own rhetoric, and in the penultimate chapter of Capital, when he is describing, nay sounding, the death-knell of capitalism, he writes: "Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital...
...Ibid., p. 423) "mature" nation and in a position to be pushed off the top of the hill by more aggressive countries, as has happened to England at the end of the first quarter of this century...
...48, 50...
...But the introduction of sophisticated new technologies has slowed the growth of this group drastically...
...It declared that "the efficient administration of the government and the wellbeing of employees require that orderly and constructive relationships be maintained between employee organizations and management...
...26 26 One sees here, in particular, the sociological differences between English and American life...
...Today about 85 percent of all pupils complete high school as against 33 percent in 1947...
...Yet it is productivity that allows the social pie to expand...
...the only major area for union growth was government employment, and this depended on favorable government support...
...The political independence of the blacks—at least of the top leadership—is one of the realities of the politics of the '70s...
...A post-industrial society is based on services...
...Since individuals often seek only enough to feed themselves, domestic service is cheap and plentiful...
...Should there be more big teaching hospitals with greater sophisticated facilities or more simple community medical services...
...But from then on the growth rates 5 Victor R. Fuchs, The Service Economy (NewYork: National Bureau of Economic Research, distrib...
...The Constraints on Change There is little question, I believe, that in the next few decades we shall see some striking changes in the structure of occupations and professional work...
...186 DANIEL BELL coalitions are no longer decisive...
...1970 data in release, B.L.S., September 13, 1971...
...The blue-collar occupations, which numbered about 12 million men in 1900, rose to 27.5 million in 1968 and will rise at a slower rate to 31.1 million in 1980...
...The weakness of this abstract analysis lies, first, in seeing the students as the model for the revolution of the future...
...The sources of these critiques are the moral impulses of socialist humanism, but though one can sympathize with their values, it is folly to confuse normative with analytical categories and convert social tendencies into rhetorical wish fulfillment, as Gorz and Gintis do...
...In 1970, the total American membership rose to 19.381 million, its all-time high...
...190-92...
...Government to most people signifies the federal government...
...n The fourth constraint is the multiplicity of competing demands in the polity itself...
...2) The reduction in costs of transport, and the differential in wages, has made it increasingly possible for American multinational corporations to manufacture significant proportions of components abroad and bring them back here for assembly...
...The figuresof 34 and 26 percent are not an averaging: as itturns out, the distribution of native and foreignborn are equal across the skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled classifications...
...In many ways this was a remarkable prediction, if only because at that time, in Europe and the United States, the vast majority of persons were neither capitalist nor worker but farmer and peasant, and the tenor of life in these countries was overwhelmingly agrarian and artisan...
...The gap between these rates is a rough measure of the cost-push factor of inflation that is being built into the system...
...For a long time, Marxist sociologists simply ignored the issue, arguing that the "inevitable" economic crises of capitalism would force a revolutionary conflict in which "the working class" would win...
...In 1968, by contrast, one in ten (about 7 million) had completed less than eight years of schooling and six in ten (about 37 million) had completed four years of high school or more...
...Note 1. The figures for 1980 assume a 3 percent unemployment...
...but by 1968 it was down to about 36.3 percent of the total labor force, and by 1980 it will reach a historic low of 32.7 percent...
...But here a new consciousness begins to intervene...
...In a series of articles in Les Temps Moderns and the magazine La Net in 1959, Mallet wrote an analysis of the new industrial processes in France's petit counterpart to IBM, la Compagnie des machines Bull, and in the heavily automated oil refinery, Caltex...
...inexorably and cumulatively, whether or not there is inflation, budgets will almost certainly continue to mountin the future...
...and tens of thousands of hand looms were still at work in rural cottages.' At mid-century, continental Europe was about a generation behind Britain in industrial development...
...The word government conjures up a picture of a huge bureaucracy, but employment at the local level of government exceeds that of state and federal, and half of this local employment is in governmental units with fewer than 500 employees 3s Even where unit size is larger, in hospitals and in schools, what is different about these enterprises is the larger degree of autonomy of smaller units (the departments in the hospitals and colleges) and the greater degree of professional control...
...Only 22 percent of black males are professional, technical, and clerical, as against 43 percent of white males...
...Bureau of the Census, U.S...
...In pre-industrial societies—still the condition of most of the world today—the labor force is engaged mainly in the extractive industries: mining, fishing, forestry, agriculture...
...In subsequent years, the membership became stabilized...
...Are supervisors and administrators workers...
...14, 74...
...yet the distinctive ethos of each time lies in these archetypes...
...The elimination of disease and the increasing numbers of people who can live out a full life, plus the efforts to expand the span of life, make health services a crucial feature of modern society...
...But the distinctive character of the services sector is the small size of unit enterprise...
...They were 5 percent of the clerical group in 1960, and 8 percent in 1970...
...This is true in almost all services...
...Bureau of the Census, U.S...
...taking place in organizations which are modifying the classic hierarchical structures of bureaucracy by encouraging committees and participation...
...LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY The Mallet thesis is quite simple...
...At a 4 percent unemployment, there would be a drop in the labor force of 1 million (i.e., from 99,600 to 98,600), and this loss is distributed between goods-producing (31,600 to 31,000) and service-producing (67,980 to 67,300) em ployment...
...Printing Office, 1970...
...In 1950, about 34 percent of the blue-collar labor force (skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled) were either foreign-born or of foreign or mixed parentage...
...LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY while still preeminent, is not pervasive...
...In an essay I published 15 years ago, Work and Its Discontents, I wrote: "The image of tens of thousands of workers streaming from the sprawling factories marks indelibly the picture of industrial America, as much as the fringed buckskin and rifle marked the 19thcentury frontier, or the peruke and lace that of Colonial Virginia...
...This is true not only locally but nationally, where, in the last 20 years, new constituencies have multiplied...
...Between 1900 and 1980, in the exact reversal of the proportions between the sectors, there occurred two structural changes in the American economy...
...Energy and machines transform the nature of work...
...And this is now happening to American manufacture...
...But who would have made similar predictions with equal confidence, following Cyrus McCormick's invention of the reaper in 1832 and its exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851...
...the average mill in England employed less than 200...
...Looked at along a different axis, 27 percent of all employed females worked in the goods-producing sector, while 73 percent of all women worked in the services sector...
...of a labor force of 7.7 million, 4.9 were engaged in agriculture, 1.2 in manufacturing and construction combined (it was only in 1870 that the two figures were separated), and almost 1 million in domestic service...
...Sixty-two unions reported a total of 982,000 professional and technical members, but a large proportion of this group consisted of unions exclusively representing such professional employees as actors and artists, musicians, airline pilots, and, of those in government, mainly teachers...
...Office work—particularly in large insurance companies, banks, utilities, and industrial corporations—has the same mechanical and dronelike quality, for routing procedures serve the same pacing functions as assembly lines...
...The essay was reprinted in 1971 by the League for Industrial Democracy, with an introduction by Lewis Coser...
...But it is unlikely that these will become ideological or "class" issues...
...From less than a million in 1890, the number of these workers has grown to 10.3 million in 1968...
...These historic shifts pose a serious problem for the trade union movement, which in the United States has historically been a bluecollar phenomenon...
...portion has remained stable or has even begun to show signs of decline...
...There would be an expansion in the distributive trades (teamsters, retail clerks) since these were expanding areas of the labor force, but such gains would be offset by declines in railroad and mining...
...12 Harry P. Cohany and Lucretia M. Dewey, "Union Membership among Government Em ployees," Monthly Labor Review, July 1970...
...of the last two years were only half those of the major periods of increase from 1964-66...
...6 From 1870 to 1920, the shift to services could be explained almost entirely by the movement from agricultural to industrial pursuits...
...At that time it will be third in size ranking, outpaced by clerical, which will be the largest, and by professional and technical workers...
...It depends on the issue...
...After 1920, however, the rates of growth in the nonagricultural sector began to diverge...
...The major change-and the impetus to new jobs in that sector-will come in construction...
...Productivity for all services (including education) has shuffled upward at 1.9 percent a year...
...From 1920 on, the category of semiskilled worker (called operatives in the census classifications) was the single largest occupational category in the economy, comprising more workers than any other group...
...104-106...
...So we have here the growth of a new intelligentsia, particularly of teachers...
...Pre-industrial societies are agrarian societies, structured in traditional ways of routine and authority...
...Private Household 3.6 4.6 4.5 5.7 7.1 7.9 9.3 Farm Workers 37.5 30.9 27.0 21.2 17.4 11.8 7.9 Farmers & Farm Managers 19.9 16.5 15.3 12.4 10.4 7.4 4.0 Farm Laborers & Foremen 17.7 14.4 11.7 8.8 7.0 4.4 3.9 Source: Computed from Historical Statistics of the U.S...
...Fuchs has used a unit size of 500 employees as the cut-offpoint in his own calculations...
...The watchwords are maximization and optimization, in a cosmology derived from utility and the felicific calculus of Jeremy Bentham...
...But, as we all know from generational experiences, the gains of the past count little in the present...
...Energy has replaced raw muscle and provides the power that is the basis of productivity—the art of making more with less—and is responsible for the mass output of goods, which characterizes industrial society...
...Moreover, in 1980 about 9.2 million adults, one in eight, will have had some college training, though less than four years...
...Govt...
...outside min 1 David Landes, The Unbounded Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, England: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1969), pp...
...Among the nonfactory operatives, drivers of trucks, buses, and taxicabs make up the largest group...
...Hence, it is a game between persons...
...According to reports from 167 unions and estimates for 22, total white-collar membership in 1968 stood at 3.2 million...
...LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY the argument that unionism had come to the saturation point in manufacturing and construction simply because it had organized nearly all major companies, and found it too costly to tackle small units of under 100 workers, which so remained unorganized...
...cit., are forced to use data a decade old...
...They are a "new" working class, even though well paid, because their skills are inevitably broken down, compartmentalized, and routinized, and they are unable to realize the professional skills for which they were educated...
...28 As a result of this system, the unions have been able to force wages up at an average rate of 7 percent annually for the past four years (while in some industries, such as printing and the construction trades, the rate has been 12 percent a year...
...The classical proletariat consisted of factory workers whose class-consciousness was created by the conditions of their work...
...In textiles, and in such technological products as transistor radios, typewriters, and electronic calculators, which have now become standardized, the U.S...
...employment in industry rose as rapidly as service, and the major increases in services were in the auxiliary areas of transportation, utilities, and distribution...
...In the United States in 1850, of a population of 23 million persons, 19.6 million lived in rural territory (in places with under 2,500 persons...
...Printing Office, 1970...
...One of the facts of a communal society is the increased participation of individuals and groups in communal life...
...Without consensus there is only conflict, and persistent conflict simply tears a society apart, leaving the way open to repression by one sizable force or another...
...the work of little more than 3 million persons (as against more than twice that number two decades ago) feeds 207 million persons, and if all crop restraints were released, they could probably feed 50 million more...
...since 1958, 600,000 more women in the United States have joined unions...
...A post-industrial society, as I pointed out earlier, is increasingly a communal society wherein public mechanisms rather than the market become the allocators of goods—and public choice, rather than individual demand, becomes the arbiter of services...
...Within the whole structure of power, they are dependent variables...
...The last great brakes on production and abundance would be removed when the working class took over control of the means of production and ushered in the socialist millennium...
...But one then faces a painful contradiction, for if the service sectors, especially government, rise without compensating gains in productivity, they become additional claimants on social resources, competing for money with hospitals, schools, libraries, housing, roads, clean water, clean air, etc...
...In a recent dialogue, the romantic French Marxist, Regis Debray, tested Chile's President Salvador Allende on his revolutionary purity: DEBRAY...
...Govt...
...3. Women...
...In the Communist Manifesto, which was completed in February 1848, Marx and Engels envisaged a society in which there would be only two classes—capitalist and worker, the few who owned the means of production and the many who lived by selling their labor power—as the last two great antagonistic classes of social history, locked in final conflict...
...In 1956, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics first started collecting data on union membership by industry, 915,000 persons, or 5.1 percent of a total union membership of 18.1 million, were in government...
...cit., p. 187...
...In 1960 the Eisenhower Commission of National Goals formulated a set of minimum standards for the quality of life—standards that already seem primitive a decade later—and when the National Planning Association projected these goals to 1975 and sought to cost them out (assuming a 4 percent growth rate, which we have not maintained), it found that we would be $150 billion short in trying to achieve all those goals...
...In advanced industrial countries, such as Belgium and Canada, no less than in tribal societies such as Africa or communal societies such as India, the "status groups" have generated conflicts that have torn the society apart more sharply often than class issues...
...Waste runs high...
...of Labor, The U.S...
...The rhythms are no longer that pervasive...
...It is estimated that about 60 percent of manufacturing employment is organized, compared to onequarter in nonmanufacturing and a little less than 20 percent in government employment...
...16 "The Post-Industrial Society," June 14, 1962 (unpublished) . 15 All data are from U.S...
...What we have been witnessing in the last decade is the rise of an independent component, committed to neither of the two parties, whose swing vote becomes increasingly important...
...16 The fact that the service industries are so largely unorganized creates a special problem for the labor movement in its relation to women...
...This goal will not be reached merely through nationalization (which risks turning into no more than bureaucratic governmentalization) of the centers of accumulation of capital and credit: it also requires the multiplication of centers of democratic decision making and their autonomy...
...in fact, there is probably more participation today, at the city level, than at any other time in American history.30 But the very increase in participation leads to a paradox: the greater the number of groups, each seeking diverse or competing ends, the more likelihood that these groups will veto one another's interests, with the consequent sense of frustration and powerlessness as such stalemates incur...
...indeed, the entire area of blue-collar work may by then have diminished so greatly that the term will lose its sociological meaning as new categories, more appropriate to the divisions of the new labor force, are established...
...Mills's prototype was the salesman and the setting was "the big store...
...168 DANIEL BELL began to diverge in new, accelerated fashion...
...In Belgium/Luxembourg, more than 65 percent of employees are organized, in Italy more than 55 percent, in Great Britain more than 45 percent, in Holland more than 40 percent, in Germany almost 40 percent, and in France about 20 percent...
...By that criterion, thirty years hence, class society in the United States will be predominantly a color society...
...In France the number of persons in industry was outnumbered by those in agriculture until World War II...
...Economy in 1980 (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...In 1971 the unfavorable balance of trade as a whole was running at a deficit rate of $12 billion when President Nixon moved to force the revaluation of competing currencies and quotas of foreign goods to be sold in the United States...
...During these ten years, unions added over 2 million new numbers to their ranks, and women made up 30 percent of that increase...
...As Fortune found in a recent study of engineers, in June 1971, "Many have moved up into engineering from blue-collar union families and don't want to slip back...
...They discover that long-range research, creative work on 22 See Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (Harcourt Brace — Harbinger ed., 1963), pp...
...On the record, the trade union movement (AFL—CIO plus the major independents) is stronger than it has ever been since the beginning of mass organizing in 1935...
...The simple and obvious fact is that productivity and output grow much faster in goods than in services...
...During those same ten years, however, the number of women in the labor force grew from 32.7 percent to 37.1 percent...
...TABLE 2 SECTOR DISTRIBUTION OF EMPLOYMENT BY GOODS AND SERVICES 1947-68 PROJECTED TO 1980 (in thousands) Percentage Change Year 1947 1968 1980 1947-68 1968-80 Total 51,770 80,780 99,600 56% 23% Goods-Producing 26,370 28,975 31,600 9.8% 9% Agriculture, Forestry, & Fisheries Mining Construction 7,890 955 1,980 4,150 640 4,050 3,180 590 5,480 (-48) (-33) 10 (-23) (-9) 35 Manufacturing Durable 15,540 8,385 20,125 11,850 22,358 13,275 29 41 11 12 Nondurable 7,160 8,270 9,100 15.5 10 Service-Producing 25,400 51,800 67,980 104% 31% Transportation & Utilities Trade (Wholesale & Retail) Finance, Insurance, Real Estate 4,160 8,950 1,750 4,500 16,600 3,725 5,000 20,500 4,640 8 85.5 113 10 23 24 Services (Personal, Professional, Business) Government 5,050 5,470 11,850 11,850 21,000 16,800 135 117 40 42 Federal 1,890 2,735 3,000 45 10 State & Local 3,580 9,110 13,800 150 52 Source: The U.S...
...29 One can extend the urban problem to the society as a whole...
...Jordy Bell Jacobyfor the breakdowns and computations...
...From the view of theoretical economics, in the inevitable "product cycle" of goods production a more advanced industrial society finds itself at a price disadvantage when a product becomes standardized, inputs are predictable, price elasticity of demand is higher, and labor costs make a difference, so that less advanced but competing nations can now make the product more cheaply...
...New stereotypes abound...
...But in the large area of state and local government, less than 10 per cent of the employees are unionized...
...Though one finds giant corporations in the services fields as large as any industrial corporation— in utilities (AT&T), banking (Chase Manhattan), insurance (Metropolitian Life), retail trade (Sears Roebuck)—most retail-trade firms, personal and professional services, finance and real estate firms, and hospitals employ less than 1,000 persons...
...Total employment will rise from 14 million in 1968 to 15.4 million in 1980, but the rate of increase is half of that projected for all employment...
...But then, not all manufacturing is blue-collar...
...If the economy were only a manufacturing economy, this would be manageable...
...Germany took another 25 years just to reach that 50 percent mark...
...Is it the "factory worker," the "industrial 18 Detailed projections by occupations are available only to 1975 Tomorrow's Manpower Needs, B.L.S...
...The modem business corporation was a social invention, fashioned at the turn of the century, to implement the "economizing mode" that had become the engine of social change in the society...
...tional housing goals for the 1968-78 decade call for the building of 20 million new housing units in the private market and 6 million new and rehabilitated units through public subsidy...
...Educational services, the area of fastest growth in the country, comprised 50 percent of state and local LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY governmental activities in 1968 (as measured by employment...
...They complain that the word engineer is now used to describe everyone from a salesman (a systems engineer at IBM) to a garbage collector (a sanitary engineer, in the Chicago euphemism...
...From 1950 to 1960, the nonprofit sector accounted for a large percentage of new jobs, and in the period 1960-70, government alone contributed one-third of the new jobs in the service areas...
...See Table 6.) After the Wagner Act was passed in 1935, and until the end of World War II, union membership made a fourfold gain...
...Thus the problem of how to achieve consensus on political questions will become more difficult...
...6 (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...Finally, for more than 100 years, the "labor issue" dominated Western society...
...Does a new archetype exist today...
...Govt...
...In 1953-54, I wrote a series of studies for Fortune and other journals predicting that the labor movement would stop growing, and describing the kind of plateau it would reach.14 My reasoning was based on 10 See "The Next American Labor Movement," Fortune, April 1953, and my discussion, "Union Growth," in the Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association, December 1954...
...o C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York, )xford University Press, 1951), p. 352...
...If the struggle between capitalist and worker, in the locus of the factory, was the hallmark of industrial society...
...Thus they are "reduced" to the role of a highly trained working class...
...Members Number Percent Union Members 1947 1952 1956 1960 13,782 15,805 17,490 17,049 60,168 62,966 69,409 72,142 22.9 23.7 25.2 23.6 43,438 48,306 52,408 54,234 31.7 30.9 33.4 31.4 1964 16,841 75,830 22.2 58,332 28.9 1968 18,916 82,272 23.0 67,860 27.9 1970 19,381 85,903 22.6 70,644 27.4 Sources: 1947 and 1952 figures by Leo Troy, Bureau of National Research...
...The growth, in effect, has been taking place in the nonprofit sector of society...
...The beat has been broken...
...More important, the nonprofit sector is the major area of net new jobs, i.e., actual expansion as against replacement...
...In effect, because of the constraints in two major areas—in the changing ratios between goods- and service-producing industries, and in the newly threatened position of American manufactures in the world economy— there may be less margin for social experiment...
...So the problem is one of priorities and choice...
...By 1950, these proportions were more evenly balanced...
...By 1980 the ratio will be about 5:3 in favor of the white-collar workers...
...What counts is not raw muscle power, or energy, but information...
...In personal services, LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY from barbering to travel arrangements, the nature of the personal relations is fixed by time components...
...The inflation that has wracked the American economy since 1968 has been due, in great measure, to the deceptions of President Johnson, who masked the costs of the Vietnam war from the country and was afraid to raise the necessary taxes to finance the war...
...But Gintis sees educated labor as pressed into a mold by the requirements of the capitalist system...
...In 1900 farming was still the single largest occupation in the United States, comprising 12.5 million workers and about 37.5 percent of the labor force...
...Organizations deal with the requirements of roles, not persons...
...The major alarums and noises of collective bargaining in such major industries as steel and auto, electric products and rubber, have been, in reality, mimetic combats in that an unstated but nonetheless real accommodation had been worked out between the contending parties...
...those deriving from leisure demands, such as travel, entertainment, sports, recreation, including the media...
...Within medicine, for example, one of the central occupations of a post-industrial society, the inevitable end of the "fee-for-service" relationship, replaced by some kind of insurance-cum-government payment scheme, means the end of the doctor as an individual entrepreneur and the in engineering unions in the U.S...
...Without them and their constant attention, the industrial equipment, the mechanical appliances of industry, will foot up to just so much junk.22 Veblen wrote in the first flush of excitement after the Russian Revolution, and he felt that a syndicalist overturn of society was possible—in fact, he thought it could be the only one, since political revolutions in advanced industrial society were passe...
...3) Increasingly the United States is becoming a rentier society, in which a substantial and increasing proportion of the balance of trade consists of the return on investments LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 185 abroad by American corporations, rather than exports...
...28): Medical and Health 2,240 Teachers 3,063 Natural Scientists 465 Social Scientists 79 Clergymen 240 Editors and Reporters 128 DANIEL BELL worker," or, even more widely, the "bluecollar worker...
...Data from European Economic Community, reported in the Economist, June 19, 1971, P. 46...
...180 tial of the production engineer as the indispensable "General Staff of the industrial system...
...Thus the ratio of women union members to employed women has declined over the decade from 13.8 to 12.5 percent...
...because once a certain level of culture has been reached, the need for autonomy, the need to develop one's abilities freely and to give a purpose to one's life is experienced with the same intensity as an unsatisfied physiological necessity...
...in J. H. Clapham, The Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-1914 (Cam bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1945...
...But to make this observation, as many sociologists do, is to miss the fact that there now exists a multiplicity of diverse types of organization, and that the received model, the large business corporation, 88 The data on unit size of enterprise is woefullyinadequate, and even such recent accounts asVictor R. Fuchs's The Service Economy, op...
...Yet in the U.S...
...This change in the character of production and of occupations is one aspect of the emergence of the "post-industrial" society...
...Union growth in the United States has always been dependent on favorable government support...
...Today, 12 million persons work for the government-about 16 percent of the labor force...
...The word "services" disguises different things, and in the transformation of indus 166 trial to post-industrial society there are several different stages...
...This is a trend for which no man and no group should be blamed, forthere is nothing that can be done to stop it...
...and, therefore, the totality of social relations...
...The Sectors of Work and Occupations Shortly after the turn of the century, only three in every ten workers in the country were employed in service industries, and seven out of ten were engaged in the production of goods...
...Dept...
...The number of farmers has been dwindling steadily, but the politics of agriculture still plays a major role in the calculations of the political parties, and the influence of the agricultural bloc casts a far longer shadow than its size...
...Yet the essential, technical features remain...
...For this group, the problem of better jobs lies with the trade union movement which, while formally accepting the principle of help, has been quite slow, particularly in the construction and skilled trades (14 percent of blacks are skilled as against 21 percent of whites) in upgrading black workers...
...Few of them are allowed to decide how their skills and knowledge will be used...
...The most striking change, of course, has been in the farm population...
...The politics of the next decade is more likely to concern itself, on the national level, with such public-interest issues as health, education, and the environment, and, on the local level, crime, municipal services, and costs...
...Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument...
...but these are outside the scope of this paper...
...Participation becomes a condition of community, but when many different groups want too many different things and are not prepared for bargaining or trade-off, then increased conflict or deadlocks result...
...There is, first, the constraint of productivity...
...In response, American labor, which has traditionally been committed to free trade, is now heavily protectionist...
...Nearly one in six persons, 25 years and over (about 13 million) will have completed at least four years of college, as against one in seven, or about 8.5 million, in 1968...
...of Commerce, Directory of National and International Labor Unions in the United States, 1969, Bulletin 1665 (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...But long-run, in this context, means 30 years or so, before these tendencies work themselves out in detail, and numbers or proportions are not always a reliable index of influence...
...of Commerce, The Social and Economic Status of Negroes in the United States, 1970, Series P-23, no...
...Bureau of the Census, U.S...
...All three of these elements are markedly changed in the post-industrial society...
...But, in Western society, the most important social change of the last 100 years has been not simply the diffusion of industrial work but the concomitant disappearance of the farmer —and in a Ricardian world of diminishing returns in land, the idea that agricultural productivity would be two or three times that of industry (which has been in the U.S...
...The latter has been the largest-growing area since the end of World War II...
...But this is more an effort to catch the reflected authority of science than the mimesis of a new civilization...
...36 percent of black females are professional, technical, and clerical, as against 64 percent of white females...
...In beholding the application of steam power to a textile mill, one could venture predictions about the spread of mechanization and the extension of factory work...
...Despite a steadily rising total output of goods through the 1970s, this tendency will persist...
...The issues I shall deal with, some of them theoretical in nature, derive largely from the analysis of the changes in composition of the work force, and the nature of the post-industrial society that I have sketched earlier...
...Industrial society in the West was marked by three distinctive features: the growth of the large corporation as the prototype of all business enterprise...
...The need for amenities, the cry for a better quality of life, brings government into the arena of environment, recreation, and culture...
...The engineers, for example, fit many of the attributes of the alienated "educated worker...
...Economy in 1980, Bulletin 1673, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1970...
...1. Education and Status...
...Even in the cotton manufacture, with over three-fifths of its working force of over half a million (of a total of almost 16 million) in mills, almost two-thirds This article will be part of Daniel Bell's forthcoming book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, copyright © 1972 by Daniel Bell, to bepublished by Basic Books, Inc...
...See Tables 4-5...
...who have curiosity, the ability to synthesize, to analyze, to invent, and to assimilate, an ability which spins in a vacuum and runs the risk of perishing for lack of an opportunity to be usefully put to work.23 The most serious effort to apply Gorz's ideas to the American scene have been made by a group of radical young economists at Harvard, notably Herbert Gintis...
...14 The situation today is not as bleak as it was a dozen years ago...
...For the first time, therefore, historically speaking, the American blue-collar labor force is approaching the "classical" Marxist image of a relatively well-educated, culturally homogeneous force...
...It is not so surprising, therefore, that whatever the initial benchmark of radicalism, the college genera tion, as it grows older, becomes more con servative.24 A second weakness is the monolithic rhetoric about the requirements of "the system...
...But all this is a far cry from the vision of The Communist Manifesto of 1848 and the student revolutionaries of 1968...
...34 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, distrib...
...and the growth of technical requirements and professional skills makes education, and access to higher education, the condition of entry into the postindustrial society...
...The major reason has been the expansion of schooling, both in numbers of children an3 amount of schooling, and thus of the number of teachers employed...
...It is a world of orLABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY ganization—of hierarchy and bureaucracy— in which men are treated as "things" because one can more easily coordinate things than men...
...Arvin Industries, the 500th largest, had 7,850...
...The world has become technical and rationalized...
...Bulletin 1606, vol...
...Instead of the industrial worker, we see the dominance of the professional and technical class in the labor force—so much so that by 1980 it will be the second largest occupational group in the society, and by the end of the century the largest...
...It appears here withthe kind permission of the publisher...
...It is also true, as Lipset and Ladd point out, that eachsucceeding college generation starts out from apoint further Left than the preceding one...
...Industrial societies—principally those around the North Atlantic littoral, plus the Soviet Union and Japan—are goods-producing societies...
...And yet there is, also inevitably, a greater demand for government activities and government goods to meet the social needs of the populace...
...Printing Office), See Appendix I. 170 DANIEL BELL matic, yet somewhat deceptive...
...However, their share in total employment will drop to less than 32 percent in 1980, from about 36 percent in 1968.6 Within the goods-producing sector, employment in agriculture and mining will continue to decline in absolute terms...
...In 1958, women unionists totaled 3.1 million, or 18.2 percent of total union membership...
...It is a mechanically organized structure of the technical processes designed, installed and conducted by the production engineers...
...See Table 7.) The relatively large advance in government unionism has changed the sector distribu tion of unionism in the United States...
...The spread of services, particularly in trade, finance, education, health, and government, conjures up the picture of a white-collar society...
...The change has come not only in place, but also in character of work...
...As Professor Baumol writes: Since there is no reason to anticipate a cessation of capital accumulation or innovation inthe progressive sectors of the economy, theupward trend in real costs of municipal services cannot be expected to halt...
...The data for 1968 and 1980 is from Table A-16, p. 49...
...The major rises were in such occupations as garage workers, and hotel and restaurant workers...
...The central person is the professional, for he is equipped, by his education and training, to provide the kinds of skills increasingly in demand in the postindustrial society...
...A service economy is largely a female-centered economy—if one considers clerical, sales, teaching, health technicians, and similar occupations...
...Traditional elements remain...
...The services industries, as I indicated earlier, can be divided into many different kinds: those which are directly auxiliary to industry, such as transportation and utilities...
...Farm & Mine 12.5 12.0 11.6 11.0 9.4 6.6 6.0 Service Workers 9.0 9.6 7.8 9.8 11.7 10.5 12.6 Private Household Workers 5.4 5.0 3.3 4.1 4.7 2.6 3.3 Service, Exc...
...By 1980 that figure will rise to 17 million, or 17 percent of the labor force...
...Where Mallet, like Veblen, restricted his analysis largely to the technicians, the French social critic Andre Gorz, an editor of Les Temps Modernes, has extended his thesis to the "alienated situation" of the entire professional class...
...creasing centrality of the hospital and group practice...
...The Ford Motor Company could only bring out its low-priced Pinto by having most of the components manufactured abroad, and Chrysler has announced that an increasing proportion of the parts for all of its cars will be manufactured abroad rather than in Detroit...
...in which most of the labour force was engaged in industries of the old type: building trades, tailoring, shoemaking, unskilled work of all sorts...
...Yet if one takes the industrial worker as the instrument of the future, or, more specifically, the factory worker as the symbol of the proletariat, this vision is warped...
...Assuming an increase in unit sizes in the decade, I have arbitrarily used 1,000 employees as a cut-off point to emphasize the difference in the distribution of employment between the goods-producing and the services sectors...
...A considerable number of women workers are bluecollar and belong to such unions as the International Ladies' Garment Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing, Service Employees (formerly Building Service), the Teamsters, and the Auto Workers...
...For half a century that idea has seemed strange indeed, but its revival by the French writers has been possible because the idea of a professional new class has meshed with the idea of alienation...
...In the schools, in the hospitals, in the community, the New Left political impulse is to deplore professionalism and hieratic standing as means of excluding the people from decisions...
...But the problems for an advanced industrial society are: What is the working class...
...release, "Labor Union and Employee Association Membership, 1970," of September 13, 1971...
...Today the professional and technical occupational category is the central one in the society...
...To what extent does this change create the basis for a new consciousness or a new militancy...
...All that has been regarded as solid, crumbles into fragments...
...A full-scale analysis of the problems of labor in a post-industrial society would have to include the structure of trade unionism, the problem of bureaucracy and democracy in unions, and the like...
...The changeover to a post-industrial society is signified not only by the change in sector distribution—the places where people work —but in the pattern of occupations, the kind of work they do...
...The crucial fact is that the "labor issue" qua labor is no longer central, nor does it have the sociological and cultural weight to polarize all other issues along that axis...
...man's behavior as well...
...In the economy, a labor issue remains...
...Similarly, a movement with about 20 million members, even in a labor force of 100 million persons, TABLE 9 WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM Number of White- Percent of All Year Collar Members Union Members 1956 2,463 13.6 1968 3,176 15.7 TABLE 8 UNION MEMBERSHIP BY SECTOR, 1956 ern 1968 Year Total Manufacturing Number Percent 1956 18,104 8,839 48.8 1968 20,210 9,218 45.6 Nonmanufacturing Number Percent 8,350 46.1 8,837 43.7 LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY Government Number Percent 915 5.1 2,155 10.7 175 is one that will exercise considerable influence for a long time...
...Stated in these terms, the change is dra tion," New York Review of Books, April 26, 1965...
...This, then, is the sociological canvas of the scheme of social development leading to the post-industrial society.* To identify its structural lineaments and trend lines more directly, let me turn now to the distribution of jobs by economic sector and to the changing profile of occupations in the American economy...
...II...
...While there are no immediate figures for the rise of the remaining nonprofit sector, is Ginzberg, Hiest, and Reubens, The Pluralistic Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 86...
...IV...
...Without their immediate and unremitting guidance and correction the industrial system will not work...
...In retailing, despite self-service, supermarkets, and prepackaging, the rising proportion of the labor force engaged in marketing reaches a ceiling of productivity...
...Not only is there a much greater degree of educational attainment, but there is also a greater degree of cultural homogeneity...
...When the pattern of steadily rising wages becomes so fixed, one finds an exacerbation in the communal services sector, for the 28 For a detailed discussion of the origin of thissystem and how the play was worked out, see myessay "The Subversion of Collective Bargaining," Commentary, March 1960...
...In Belgium, the most industrialized nation on the continent, about half the labor force was engaged in agriculture (in Britain it was only one-fourth...
...Since 1920, the white-collar group has been the fastest-growing occupational group in the society, and this will continue...
...Paradoxically (and perhaps tongue-incheek) Gintis drew his analysis not from Marcuse but from the functionalist school of sociology, particularly Talcott Parsons, which Marxists have attacked as too simple a view of the "integration" of society...
...The proportion of factory workers among the semiskilled will probably drop, too...
...Thus, a third sector, that of personal services, begins to grow—restaurants, hotels, auto services, travel, entertainment, sports—as people's horizons expand and new wants and tastes develop...
...But how to achieve this...
...The great divide began in 1947, after World War II, when employment was evenly balanced...
...178 principally health, one can assume a substantial rise there, too...
...Within the professions there will be more socialmindedness as a newer generation comes to the fore and the structure of professional relationships changes...
...32 This device differed markedly from the Army and the Church (the two historic forms of large-scale organization) in its ability to coordinate men, materials, and markets for the mass production of goods...
...By 1960, 13.583 million or 20 percent of everyone employed were in the nonprofit sector...
...ranks among the lowest of Western industrial nations...
...Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times at one time symbolized industrial civilization, but today it is a period piece...
...This demand, far from being abstract, has or can have all the urgency of imperious necessity...
...But in the services sectors, the wage proportion may run 70 percent or more of the total costs of the services...
...from 4.6 percent of the work force in 1968 it will fall to 2.7 percent in 1980...
...Dept...
...The figures for 1947 are adapted from chart data in Bulletin 1673, by Lawrence B. Krause...
...Within the factories there will be new demands for control over the decisions of work as the new, younger, and more educated labor force faces the prospect of long years in a mechanical harness and finds the monetary rewards (which their forebears struggled to achieve) less important...
...This is an intractable problem of all post-industrial society...
...that is, the working class...
...And yet, the distinctive archetype has gone...
...Fewer women have thought of their jobs as "permanent," and have been less interested in unions...
...As David Landes writes: The British census of 1851—for all its inaccuracies— shows a country in which agriculture and domestic service were far and away the most important occupations...
...Printing Office, 1960), pp...
...1 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1906), p. 837...
...there is even the question whether the occupational psychology that Veblen and Dewey made so central to their sociology carries over into other aspects of a their attendant train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, and the newly formed becomes obsolete before it can petrify...
...The majority of Americans may not work in factories, as the majority of Americans never were on the frontier, or never lived in Georgian houses...
...Meanwhile productivity has been growing at only 3 percent a year...
...Welfare consists of taking in the extra mouths when necessary—which is almost always...
...In education—despite programmed learning and television instruction and large lecture classes (which students resent)— the costs have increased at 5-7 percent a year...
...Manufacturing is still the single largest source of jobs in the economy...
...Printing Office), Table 347, `Employed Persons by Major Occupation Group and Sex," p. 222...
...1 I have omitted here the larger theoretical questions of the nature of class power and the stratification system...
...has become a whitecollar society...
...Those entering into plant and factory work today step into conditions far better than those their parents experienced...
...In historic fact, the shift of employment to services does not represent any sudden departure from previous long-run trends...
...To return to the larger picture, the most important growth area in employment since 1947 has been government...
...and Canada, but few collective bargaining contracts in the U.S...
...The book was first published in France in 1964, under the title of Strategic Ouvriere et Neocapitalisme...
...And third, Gintis sees bureaucratization as identical with capitalism ("The bureaucratization of work is a result of the capitalist control of the work process, as bureaucracy seems to be the sole organizational form compatible with capitalist hegemony"), rather than as a pervasive feature of the historic development of all technological and hierarchical societies, capitalist and communist.25 And what he misses, in his abstract conception of bureaucracy, are the large number of changes 24 For a comprehensive review of the evidencefor this argument, see S. M. Lipset and E. C. Ladd, Jr., "College Generations—From the 1930's to the 1960's," Public Interest, Fall 1971...
...In agricultural products, in minerals, fuels, and other nonmanufactured and nonagricultural products, and in nontechnologyintensive manufactured products, the balance is heavily the other way...
...In 1929, according to estimates of Eli Ginzberg and his associates, the nonprofit sector accounted for 12.5 percent of all goods and services purchased...
...whilethey end up more conservative than when theybegan, the final resting point may be more liberalor Left than even the starting point of generationsa long time ago...
...By 1963 it stood above 27 percent, and it is still rising...
...The major white-collar areas—in trade, finance, and insurance— remain largely unorganized...
...One works with raw muscle power, in inherited ways, and one's sense of the world is conditioned by dependence on the elements —the seasons, the nature of the soil, the amount of water...
...For the German sociologists, particularly Emil Lederer and Jacob Marschak, who first analyzed the phenomenon in detail, the "new middle class" could not be an autonomous independent class, but would eventually have to support either the working class or the business community.19 This was also Mills's argument: Insofar as political strength rests upon organized economic power, the white-collar workers can only derive their strength from "business" or from "labor...
...The highest ratio of white-collar union workers, more than 40 percent, was in government service, followed by 22 percent in nonmanufacturing and 4 percent in manufacturing...
...Govt...
...Surely this is an "organizational society" in that the organization rather than the small town is the Iocus of one's life...
...Follow ing the big drive of the CIO, more than half of American unionism was in manufacturing, but in recent years that proportion has slowly begun to change, and we can look for greater shifts in the years ahead...
...Industry in the last century took from the countryside men who were muscles, lungs, stomach: their muscles missed the open spaces, their lungs the fresh air, their stomachs fresh food...
...In any event, both the functionalist and the Marcusian views are too constricted in their understanding of the diversity and multiplicity of the society and the culture...
...These are all communal issues, and on these matters labor may find itself, on the national level, largely liberal, yet, on the local level, divided by the factious issues that split community life...
...One out of every six American workers today is employed by one of about 80,000 entities that make up the government of the United States today...
...Thus, in these key sectors, the pace of gain has been striking...
...Printing Office, 1966...
...As a larger portion of the labor force shifts into services, there is inevitably a greater drag on...
...those handling distribution and trade, as well as finance and insurance...
...And this is about 15 percent of all union members...
...A communal society by its very nature multiplies the definition of rights—the rights of children, of students, of the poor, of minorities—and translates them into claims of the community...
...In Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp and Captain Rawdon Crawley are penniless, but they have a servant...
...But, particularly in the 1950s, it became evident that there was a large-scale transformation in the character of skilled work, with the expansion of engineers and technicians in the advanced technological fields—such as aerospace, computers, oil refining, electronics, optics, and polymers...
...I argued, further, that while a large variety of occupations and jobs were far removed from the factory, "the factory is archetypal because its rhythms, in subtle fashion, affect the general character of work the way a dye suffuses a cloth...
...In Germany in the 1920s, where the phenomenon of the new technical and administrative class was first noticed, it was categorized as "the new middle class," and in this sense, too, C. Wright Mills used the idea in his 1951 book, White Collar...
...164 worker...
...On the proportion of white-collar to blue-collar workers in manufacturing for 1960 and projections to 1975, see Bureauof Labor Statistics, U.S...
...by 1968, their number had risen to 3.7 million, or 19.5 percent of all members...
...188 sons led C. Wright Mills 20 years ago to declare that the white-collar world had become a "personality market," in which each person "sold himself" in order to impress another and get ahead...
...Any increase will appear largely in the manufacture of building materials for housing construction...
...many female jobs is Victor R. Fuchs, The Service Economy, op...
...The rhythm of life is shaped by these contingencies...
...Note: Dashes indicate data not available...
...In place of the farmer came the industrial 2 Sources for the above are, Landes, op...
...the Vietnam war apart, inflation has become a structural problem for the economy...
...If it is to resist the "alienation" that threatens its achievement, it is more likely to assert the traditional professionalism (certainly on the ideological level) than go in either direction...
...Gintis sees a "new emergent social class in modern capitalism," a new working class which he broadly labels "educated labor...
...The unions receive substantial wage increases, and these increases become the occasion for even more subtantial price increases which the industries, with their ability to "administer" prices, are able (until recently) to pass on to the public without protest either from the unions or from government...
...Until about 1930, the absolute number of farmers and farm workers continued to rise, though their share of employment began to decline...
...This order gave clear and unequivocal support to public unionism, just as the Wagner Act of 1935 had supported unions and collective bargaining in private business...
...Work groups intervene to impose their own rhythms and "bogeys" (or output restrictions) when they can...
...In Capital, when he is working out the logic of the changing organic composition of capital, Marx describes a dual process resulting, on the one hand, in an increasing concentration of firms, and, on the other, in an increase in the "industrial reserve army," i.e., the unemployed...
...The area in which it is best organized—manufacture—faces a grave erosion of jobs...
...But individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine...
...The trade union movement, including the UAW, has never really challenged the organization of work itself, though it has modified the arbitrary authority over the workers...
...But the shift away from defense-spending-with its consequent unemployment in aircraft, missiles, and communicationsmeans a slower rate of growth for manufacturing in the future...
...The fact that in services relations are between per 34 Work and Its Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956...
...England was the evident model for industrialization, but despite Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and Sheffield, Great Britain at the mid-century mark was not at all industrial, a fact demonstrated in occupational statistics...
...The conflict between worker and boss (whether capitalist or corporate manager) overshadowed all other conflicts and was the axis around which the major social divisions of the society rotated...
...ing and metallurgy they hardly existed [and] true factory conditions were exceptional in the France of 1848...
...In 1980 the total manufacturing labor force will number about 22 million, or 22 percent of the whole labor force...
...In the next decade, the possible demands for the reorganization of work, the decline in productivity, and the persistent threat of inflation because of the disproportionate productivity in the goods and services sectors, the threats of foreign competition, and other issues such as the recalcitrance of some unions on race, or the bilateral monopolies of unions and builders in the construction trades —all these factors may make labor issues increasingly salient and even rancorous...
...Blacks were 4 percent of the professional and technical group in 1960, but the proportion had almost doubled to 7 percent in 1970...
...Though not translated, the book had a definite influence on some young American radicals, particularly in SDS (after all, they could eat their working-class cake and have it, too...
...6, op...
...See Table 9.) M. Some Labor Problems of the Post-Industrial Society The structural changes I have been delineating pose some crucial, long-run problems for the organized trade union movement in the U.S...
...In 1960, 81 percent of all workers in the goods-producing area were men, and 21 percent women...
...The effort to reassert their professional status—through membership in high-prestige associations, through stiffer requirements for professional certification, through changes in school curricula— is an effort at differentiation, not identification...
...Universities are a "hothouse" in which a 23 Andre Gorz, Strategy for Labor (Boston: Bea con, 1967), pp...
...market has been swept by foreign goods...
...In New York City, in 1961, earlier executive orders by Mayor Robert F. Wagner had resulted in the "breakthrough" of unionism among 44,000 teachers...
...the transition from a defense economy, combined with the drastic slash in research-and-development spending, have made many of them aware, for the first time, of the precariousness of a "career...
...of Labor, Tomorrow's Manpower Needs, B.L.S...
...the development of large-scale industry severs all family ties of proletarians, and .. . proletarian children are transformed into mere articles of commerce and instruments of labor...
...and, consequently, the relations of production...
...but the figure is fanciful and inherently unprovable...
...How does one balance research and patient care in the distribution of resources...
...of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...The demand for higher education and better health necessarily expands greatly the role of government as funder and setter of standards...
...the bill, inevitably, is paid for in the later years...
...and before 1840 large enterprises of the factory type were extraordinarily rare...
...But it is at this point-in the changing nature of the male labor force-that a status upheaval has taken place...
...An interest conflict and a labor issue—in the sense of disproportionate power between manager and worker over working conditions—remains, but the disproportions have shifted and the methods of negotiation have become institutionalized...
...The union gains could later be consolidated when the War Labor Board virtually enacted union-shop clauses in collectivebargaining contracts during World War II...
...Dept...
...and in American society, as in most others, family status is still evaluated on the basis of the man's job...
...The bulk of the others are in the communication workers', teachers', and government workers' unions...
...The na e All statistical data in this section are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S...
...of the units making returns employed less than 50 men...
...LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY...
...Even in technology-intensive products (computers, lasers, instruments) there has been a decline: in 1962 the favorable balance was 4:1 (exports of $10.2 billion and imports of $2.5 billion...
...This was the historic period of industrialization in American life...
...by Columbia University, 1969...
...The impossibility of living which appeared to the proletarians of the last century as the impossibility of reproducing their labor power becomes for the workers of scientific or cultural industries the impossibility of putting their creative abilities to work...
...Particularism and politics abound...
...There are a dozen or so 182 DANIEL BELL This effort to maintain professional status —one aspect of a society in which individual social mobility is still a positive value— comes into conflict, however, with the New Left populism, which derogates professionalism as "elitism...
...18 percent of black males are unskilled laborers as against 6 percent of whites, and 18 percent of black females are domestics as against 3 percent white.'5 The single largest group of black workers are semiskilled (28 percent of the black males, as against 19 percent of white males...
...If one looks at the position of the United States in today's world economy, three facts are evident: (1) Only in technology-intensive products does the United States have a favorable commercial balance in its trade with the rest of the world...
...Some unions may even turn from concern with income and consumption to problems of production and the character of work, and this is all to the good...
...The concept of a post-industrial society gains meaning by comparing its attributes with those of an industrial and a pre-industrial society...
...Despite the momentary slowdown in the demand for education, and the immediate unemployment in engineering TABLE 5 OCCUPATIONAL DISTRIBUTION BY NUMBERS AND PERCENT 1968 (ACTUAL) -1980 (PROJECTED) Occupational Group 1968 1980 Numbers Percent Numbers Percent Total 76,000 100 95,000 100 White-Collar Workers 35,600 46.7 48,300 50.8 Professional & Technical 10,300 13.6 15,500 16.3 Managers & Officials Clerical 7,800 12,800 10 16.9 9,500 17,300 10 18.2 Sales 4,600 6 6,000 6 Blue-Collar Workers 27,500 36.3 31,100 32.7 Craftsmen & Foremen 10,000 13.1 12,200 12.8 Operatives Laborers 14,000 3,500 18.4 4.7 15,400 3,500 16.2 3.7 Service Workers 9,400 12.4 13,100 13.8 Farm Workers 3,500 4.6 2,600 2.7 Source: Figures computed from Bulletin 1673, U.S...
...Bulletin 1606, vol...
...Dept...
...Estimates of their political tendencies, therefore, must rest upon larger 19 For an analysis of the history of the idea ofnew social classes in post-Marxian discussions, see my essay "The Post-Industrial Society: The Evolution of an Idea," Survey (London), Spring 1971...
...A revolutionary outlook emerges because of the alienated desire of educated persons for a full life as producers, as against the fragmentation and specialization that is their lot in the workaday world...
...Professionalism thus becomes a criterion of position, but also clashes with the populism that is generated by the claims for more rights and greater participation in the society...
...A 10 percent wage increase means, then, only a 3 percent increase in the cost of production, which can be offset by productivity...
...Are all managers workers...
...But not in the sociology and culture of the society, and less so in the polity...
...Thus education as a whole, both public and private, represented 8 percent of total employment in the United States...
...It is, however, a situation which could change according to the economic situation and it is a superficial analysis which permits one to assimilate these modern industrial technicians to a "working class aristocracy...
...8, particularly pp...
...34 The rhythms of mechanization are still pervasive in the United States...
...All stable and stereotyped relations, with DANIEL BELL Two things, however, have gone awry with this prediction...
...For a variety of sociological reasons, women have been more difficult to organize than men...
...it would be hard to say this about some of the managers who are executives by day and swingers at night...
...The U.S...
...cover engineers...
...See Tables 1-3...
...TABLE 6 UNION MEMBERSHIP AS A PROPORTION OF THE LABOR FORCE 1947-70 Year Total Union Total Labor Force Employees in Membership Number Percent Union Nonagricultural Establ...
...Govt...
...Yet this is a superficial way of looking at the problem, for the extraordinary fact is that, as a percentage of the total labor force, the number of members today is exactly the same as in 1947...
...If there are no primary images of work, what is central to the new relationship is talk or communication, and the response of ego to alter, and back—from the irritation of a customer at an airline-ticket office to the sympathetic or harassed response of teacher to student...
...Within this category, teachers were the largest group (more than 2 million...
...In England, up to the mid-Victorian period, the single largest occupational class in the society was the domestic servant...
...Government employment has risen rapidly (at a rate of 4.5 percent a year), reaching 11.8 million in 1968, and an estimated 16.8 million in 1980...
...The most striking aspect of the new labor force is the level of formal educational attainment...
...In 1900 there were about 3 million persons in services, and more than half of them domestics...
...It is in this area that the greatest pressure for social change will come, and here the wave of radicalism of the '60s will break in the '70s...
...Because of low productivity and large population, there is a high percentage of underemploy ment, which is usually distributed throughout the agricultural and domestic-service sectors...
...First, in the very development of industry there is a necessary expansion of transportation and of public utilities as auxiliary services in the movement of goods and the increasing use of energy, and an increase in the nonmanufacturing but still blue-collar force...
...Drawing upon the standard work of Edward Denison, and of his Harvard colleague Samuel Bowles, Gintis emphasizes the importance of "educated labor," because, if one compares the relative contribution of physical capital (machines and technology) with "human capital" in the economic growth of the United States between 1929 and 1957, labor is between five and eight times more important than physical capital...
...The university, even with required courses, is not the prototype of the corporate world, and it is unlikely that even "raised student consciousness" was a consciousness of "oppression...
...From a total of about 5.5 million persons in 1900 (making up about 17.6 percent of the labor force), the white collar group by 1968 came to 35.6 million (46.7 percent) and will rise to 48.3 million in 1980, when it will account for half (50.8 percent) of all employed workers...
...The modern business corporation is marked by large size: of assets, sales, and the number of employees...
...The new strategy for labor, as well as for all professionals, should be to fight for "qualitative" changes, and in particular for control of production...
...National distinctions and contrasts are already tending to disappear more and more as the bourgeoisie develops...
...Note: In percentage of employees organized, the U.S...
...In actual fact, life is never as "one-dimensional" as those who convert every tendency into an ontological absolute make it out to be...
...Are there significant differences in the ethos of those engaged in the profit and nonprofit sectors...
...the second largest were professional health workers (about 2 million), scientists and engineers (about 1.4 million), and engineering and science technicians (about 900,000...
...In the 1960s it gained 2.3 million members, though the major increase came in the mid-years of the decade, and the gains • All statistical data in this section, except when otherwise noted, are from Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S...
...Thus a necessary distinction is introduced between the role and the person, and this is formalized on the organization chart of the enterprise...
...By 1968, the proportions had shifted so that six out of every ten were in services...
...equally important, since there may not be enough money to satisfy all or even most of the claims, how do we decide what to do first...
...The unions had shown themselves incapable of organizing white-collar and technical workers...
...TABLE 3 SECTOR DISTRIBUTION OF EMPLOYMENT BY GOODS AND SERVICES PROJECTED TO 1980 Distribution by Percentages Year 1947 1968 1980 Total 100% 100% 100% Goods Producing 51 35.9 31.7 Agriculture, Forestry, & Fisheries 15.0 5.1 3.2 Mining 2.1 0.8 0.6 Construction 3.9 5.0 5.5 Manufacturing 30.0 24.9 22.4 Durable 16.0 14.7 13.3 Nondurable 14.0 10.2 9.1 Service Producing 49 64.1 68.4 Transportation & Utilities 8.0 5.6 5.0 Trade (Wholesale & Retail) 17.0 20.6 20.6 Finance, Insurance, Real Estate 3.0 4.6 4.7 Services (Personal, Professional, Busi ness) 10.0 18.7 21.2 Government 11.0 14.7 16.9 Federal 3.5 3.4 3.0 State & Local 7.5 11.7 13.9 Source: Ibid., conversion of figures into percentages...
...Dept...
...Govt...
...Steel Company in 1901, by J. P. Morgan— the role of the corporation grew steadily, and the economy came to be dominated by such familiar giants as General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, and the other monoliths that make up the banner listing of Fortune's 500 industrials...
...But the total numbers of blacks are still small...
...It grew at 0.9 percent a year during the 1960s, largely because of increased employment in defense industries-aircraft, missiles, ordnance, communications equipment and the like-which have higher labor components because the work is more "custom-crafted" than in mass production industries...
...In January 1962, President Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988, which encouraged unionism in the federal service...
...LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY are part-time or "second jobs" for the family, and the turnover of the number of women at work has been much higher than that of men...
...It is true that there exists between them and the masses of workers an appreciable difference in the level of living...
...By the end of 1962, the number had grown to 1.2 million, or to 7 percent of the total membership, and by 1968 union membership had climbed to 2.2 million, or 10.7 percent of the total membership...
...The fact that they are better paid does not make them a new "aristocracy of labor," but in fact provides a model for the other workers...
...The claims to the good life which the society has promised become centered on the two areas fundamental to that life—health and education...
...A third constraint, more peculiar to the United States, is the evident fact that (from a businessman's point of view) American manufactured goods are pricing themselves out of the world market...
...While such changes, it is true, do not alter the fundamental character of authority, the modifications often serve to provide the individual with a greater degree of participation than before...
...Third, as national incomes rise one finds, as in the theorem of Christian Engels, a German statistician of the latter half of the 19th century, that the proportion of money devoted to food at home begins to drop, and the marginal increments are used first for durables (clothing, housing, automobiles) and then for luxury items, such as recreation...
...From then on everything is involved: jobs, wages, careers, the city, the regions, science, culture, and the possibility of developing individual creative abilities in the service of humanity...
...But state and local agencies actually account for eight out of every ten workers employed by the government...
...A whole new range of issues opens up: who is to run the hospitals—the old philanthropic trustees, the municipal political nominees, the doctors, the "constituencies," or the "community...
...Note 2. Figures are not always exact because of rounding...
...The machine predominates, and the rhythms of life are mechanically paced: time is chronological, methodical, evenly spaced...
...The sense of time is one of duree, of long and short moments, and the pace of work varies with the seasons and the storms...
...and as a percentage of workers in nonagricultural establishments, the sector where most members are found and most organizing efforts are made, the percentage of union members is less today than in 1947...
...There are no figures available for industry asa whole on the proportion of direct production tononproduction workers...
...The point is that whatever the improvement in wage rates, pension conditions, supervision and the like, the conditions of work—the control of pacing, the assignments, the design and layout of work—are still outside the worker's control...
...Capital, vol...
...orig...
...The nature of materials-handling has been revolutionized by the introduction of mechanized devices...
...The service occupations continue to expand steadily...
...In 1940, because of the extraordinary agricultural revolution, which shot productivity to spectacular heights, the number of farm laborers began its rapid decline...
...And for the last hundred years or so the vicissitudes of the industrial worker —his claims to dignity and status, his demand for a rising share of industrial returns, his desire for a voice in the conditions affecting his work and conditions of employment —have marked the social struggles of the century...
...To this extent, the phrase "new working class" is simply a radical conceit, and little more...
...In The Engineers and the Price System (1920), Veblen wrote "A Memorandum on a Practicable Soviet of Technicians," which laid out the argument of the revolutionary poten 21 Serge Mallet, La Nouvelle Classe Ouvriere (Paris: Le Seuil, 1963), p. 69 (my translation...
...Department of Labor...
...In 1929, 3 million persons worked for the government, or about 6.4 percent of the labor force...
...To return to Marx's day, in the Prussia of 1852, which in this respect was representative of all of Germany, 72 percent of the population was classified as rural...
...DANIEL BELL 184 higher "prices" become, necessarily, higher "taxes"—and more political grumbling...
...This is crucial in the shift in the relative shares of employment: men can be displaced by machines more readily in goods production than in services...
...172 DANIEL BELL because of the shift away from defense work in 1970-71, requirements in this category continue to lead all others, increasing half again in size (about twice the employment increase among all occupations combined) between 1968 and 1980...
...For, paradoxically, as one goes along the trajectory of industrialization—the increasing replacement of men by machines—one logically comes to the erosion of the industrial worker himself . 5 By the end of the century the proportion of factory workers in the labor force may be as 3 In Marx's writings, there are many contradictory views of this situation...
...To that extent, the changes that are summed up in the post-industrial society represent a historic metamorphosis in Western society...
...The transformation of agrarian life (whose habits had marked civilization for 4,000 years) has been the signal fact of the time...
...LABOR IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 171 numbered 3.5 million, and this will decline to 2.6 million in 1980...
...Yet by 1956 the corporation seemed to have reached a plateau in the economy, when incorporated businesses accounted for over 57 percent of the total national income, and since then the pro 82 For an elaboration of the "economizing mode," see my essay on "The Corporation and the Society in the 1970's," the Public Interest, Spring 1970...
...In 1968, almost 9.5 million persons were in services, and only a fourth were domestics...
...If an industrial society is defined by the quantity of goods that mark a standard of living, the post-industrial society is defined by the quality of life as measured by the services and amenities—health, education, recreation, and the arts—which are now deemed desirable and possible for everyone...
...But that so expands the concept as to distort it beyond recognition...
...These are dealt with in my essay "ThePost-Industrial Society: Technocracy and Politics," Survey (London), Winter 1971...
...An important one—to judge from some of the television commercials—is the researcher or the laboratory technician in a white coat, carrying out an experiment (usually to prove that the sponsor's product is better than the rival's...
...Thus, at a time when workers may be asking for more control over the conditions of work—which will inevitably increase costs —the squeeze may be greatest because of the changed condition of the economy...
...The unit of social life is the extended household...
...All this involves two problems: we don't really know, given our lack of social-science knowledge, how to do many of these things effectively...
...Large numbers of them now work as inspectors, maintenance men, and as operators of such material-moving equipment as powered forklift trucks...
...predictions of the manner and outcomes of the struggles of business and labor.2e The German sociologists, and Mills, had been writing principally about managerial, administrative, and clerical personnel...
...of Labor, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1971 (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...today, only 4 percent of the labor force is engaged in agriculture...
...For a while "the new working-class tendency," as it was called, seemed to be making its way among independent Marxists until it was swamped, on the one hand, by the revolutionary adventurism of the Weathermen, and, on the other, by the heavy-handed dogmatism of the young Progressive Labor party groups...
...cit., "The National Industry—Occupational Matrix," makes the following estimates (p...
...For until recently the overwhelming number of whitecollar workers have been women, in minor clerical or sales jobs...
...The only real growth in American trade unionism in the last decade has been among government workers, and here the same forces have been at work...
...The second constraint is an inflation that has been built into the structure of the economy itself by the bilateral actions of strong unions and oligopolistic industries...
...The unit is the individual, and the free society is the sum total of individual decisions as aggregated by the demands registered, eventually, in a market...
...But even at its most comprehensive definition, the blue-collar group is in an increasing minority in advanced or post-industrial society...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
