From Steam Whistles to Coffee Breaks
Gordon, David M.
Most students of the American worker begin their portraits with the same basic conceptual division: blue-collar manual workers on one side of the divide, whitecollar nonmanual workers on the...
...Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition...
...The very nature of secondary work—the random affiliations of its employees, the relatively disorganized production processes, the variability of the work force—tends to undercut the potential for class awareness...
...by personal secretaries with a wide variety of skills...
...In the same way, many secondary workers seek more stable, standardized, less capricious working situations...
...and Michel Crozier, The World of the Office Worker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971...
...The implications of this speculation are obvious...
...b Totals do not equal 100.0 due to rounding...
...More and more, the unstable and capricious in the work force are being separated from their comrades, isolated in the plant and the office, barred from promotion...
...The literature on the new working class automatically situates its rebellious workers in the office—in whitecollar jobs within bureaucratized organizations...
...agents not elsewhere classified" had an earnings index of 200, for instance, while "messengers and office boys" had an earnings index of 56, and "library assistants and attendants" had an index of only 36...
...they have little opportunity for contact with others like themselves...
...it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labor, but the instruments of labor that employ the workman...
...The discussion concerns both the objective and the subjective, both the essential reality of relations in work and the phenomenology of worker response to those "objective" conditions...
...As office work has become more "balkanized," and as many office workers have begun to share experiences with blue-collar workers, many seem to have abandoned hope for occupational advancement and have joined manual workers in diverting their ambitions toward higher consumption standards...
...This is based on the assumption that distribution of wages within occupations is not very diffuse and that workers within a given job category tend to earn roughly the same amount...
...A recent study of workers' use of machines indicates that differences in the use of machinery are often more substantial within occupations than between them...
...200 DAVID M. GORDON ting forces of market competition and educational socialization, occupational ladders remained relatively unobstructed and occupational experiences were thought to merge into a single uniform pattern...
...Too many personal and social variables intervene...
...cit., pp...
...Their unpredictable behavior on the job constitutes a constraint and a serious threat to the longevity of any unions that might emerge...
...clerical workers...
...to unions.48 Throughout the 1960s, for instance, the percentage of white-collar workers covered by unions appears to have remained constant at roughly 10 percent.49 Among the reasons for the weakness of unions in the white-collar sector, two seem predominant: sex, and the organization of white-collar work...
...A "new working class" may not finally develop, but some important changes in the organization of work undoubtedly have occurred...
...One should not exaggerate, however, the extent to which these fairly open-ended work opportunities have evolved from em a+ For one of the most successful of these statements, see Herbert Gintis, "New Working Classand Revolutionary Youth," Socialist Revolution, May—June 1970...
...Women, even if they work, tend to accept their secondary status...
...Most students of the American worker begin their portraits with the same basic conceptual division: blue-collar manual workers on one side of the divide, whitecollar nonmanual workers on the other...
...Yet many in routinized primary jobs are employed in the very industries under attack, industries that depend upon polluting and constantly deteriorating products...
...Department of Labor, BLS Bulletin, no...
...66 These observations about the structure of work in America should induce some obvious pessimism about the possibilities for workers' coalitions...
...If they look for such opportunities but find that their skills are reduced to monotonous operations, their complaints will have little leverage, for employers cannot afford to make many changes in their organizational arrangements over a short period of time...
...Yet, blessed (or burdened) with the option of leaving the labor force, they may be less and less willing to labor patiently at menial work...
...For a variety of reasons—some rooted in reality, some in fantasy—they no longer believe their places at the bottom of the ladder will be filled in time by succeeding immigrant groups...
...In the automation of work, however, we have now entered a stage at which the machine seems equally to impinge on the work of every occupation...
...83 It may once have been true that bluecollar factory workers comprised the only members of this class...
...Government Printing Office, 1966), especially Appendix Table C-6, pp...
...More and more white-collar workers come from working-class origins and retain a sense of identification with the blue-collar workers...
...Many of these primary workers belong to unions, and many do not...
...Service workers constitute a third, separate, and very mixed group...
...Within each of the three modes, moreover, important differences among workers persist...
...And, probably more important, several features of white-collar work seem to heighten the difficulties of unionization...
...Women now work at every stage of their adult lives—before marriage, while their children are young, and after their children attend school...
...According to one recent review of this literature, the earlier studies had unequivocally "demonstrated the American preference for white-collar over blue-collar jobs...
...The blue-collar working class and the lower-level white-collar worker "seem to form a middle mass," Harold Wilensky has concluded, "a population that increasingly shares common values, beliefs, and tastes...
...9 In their definitive study of American occupational mobility, for instance, Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan find that mobility opportunities for lower-level whitecollar workers now seem fairly comparable to those for many blue-collar workers.'° • During the transition to industrial capitalism, factory workers spent much more time working with and for machines...
...A brief review of some of those trends helps emphasize the critical importance of this emergent market duality and helps amplify the evolution of a "new" mode of work in the United States...
...The conventional wisdom has traditionally attributed the most attractive opportunities for upward mobility to the white-collar occupations, which has been another source 7 Some simple statistical explanations for this trend are possible...
...220, p. 4. 50 For the best discussion of these factors, see Lockwood, op...
...Following the lead of such French Marxists as Serge Mallet and Andre Gorz, theoreticians of the new working class have projected the emergence of a new militant class of workers...
...51 This sexist heritage not only tends to preclude the unification of this group of workers—permitting tactics of "divide and conquer" among employers— but it also guarantees certain fundamental differences (by sex) in the re 49 See Edward R. Curtin, White-Collar Unionization, (New York: National Industrial Conference Board, 1970), Personnel Policy Study, no...
...Despite these similarities between white-collar and blue-collar workers in routinized primary jobs, one cannot easily assume that they constitute a unified "working class" or that, in view of the overriding commonalities in their objective working conditions, the emergence of a united "working class" is imminent...
...To say `white collar' or `working class,' " as Harold Wilensky has written, "is to obscure most of what is central to the experiences of the person and the structure of society...
...Secondary workers today are not confined to the factory but are scattered across the full industrial spectrum...
...At the turn of the century, women tended to work during a short span, principally from the time they left school to the time they were married...
...Male and female workers, however identical their objective working conditions, are separated physically and psychically...
...FROM STEAM WHISTLES TO COFFEE BREAKS Pending further events and more deliberation, only a few conclusions can be drawn...
...25 The "promised land effect" seems likely to generate an independent inclination among younger disadvantaged workers to work capriciously...
...secondary market has jobs which, relative to those in the primary sector, are decidedly less attractive...
...248-51, in which data for 116 separate occupational categories are tabulated...
...85 White- and blue-collar workers seem, in this respect, equally submerged in the production process, equally dominated by the dictates of its organization...
...4a See Wilensky, "Mass Society and Mass Culture . . .," op...
...Occupational sociologists used to argue that workers in more "prestigious" occupations were more "satisfied" with their jobs, and that apparent distinctions between white- and blue-collar work rested on a differential in job "satisfaction" between office and factory workers...
...The differences in the experiences of workers in these three modes are vast...
...income within occupations seems to be growing fairly rapidly...
...al, Labor Mobility and Economic Opportunity (Cambridge: Technology Press of MIT, 1954...
...is Michael Piore, "The Dual Labor Market: Theory and Implications," in David M. Gordon, ed., Problems in Political Economy: An Urban Perspective (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1971), p. 91...
...The reactions of various secondary workers to their work experiences obviously differ, however, and one cannot yet speak very certainly about the emergence of class consciousness among members of the "underclass...
...Political Implications I have argued that three distinct modes of work are beginning to dominate the American labor market—secondary jobs, routinized primary jobs, and creative primary jobs...
...It is a distinction that is losing its usefulness...
...Three kinds of differences continue to divide these workers, and they are largely correspondent to the distinction between office and factory...
...Roughly half of all male blue-collar workers were unionized in 1969, while only 10 percent of the white-collar workers belonged 4e Hamilton, "The Marginal Middle Class: A Reconsideration," op...
...Throughout the 20th century, however, office work seems to have become as thoroughly "balkanized" as work in the factory...
...Bureau of Labor Statistics, "The U.S...
...Faced with the prospect of expensive screening costs to detect those employees with the greatest potential work stability, employers are likely to rely on more approximate, much less costly indicators...
...Economists and sociologists had traditionally viewed the Iabor market as a single continuum of objective conditions and subjective experiences, glued together by opportunities for both inter- and infra-gen erational occupational mobility...
...Their conditions of work lead them to rely on the stability of manipulated product markets...
...From a subjective point of view, it implies similar psychological consequences— arising out of the separation of work from the individual abilities and needs of those who perform it—and a similar rational, inhuman division of labour...
...If certain demographically identifiable groups of workers have traditionally exhibited chronic instability in the market, employers are more and more likely to try to channel those workers away from jobs requiring stability into secondary jobs...
...The full distributions of clerical and sales jobs and bluecollar manual jobs were almost exactly comparable, as the following table indicates...
...And one of the qualities about Conscious ness III that seems most admirable, in many ways, is its profound sense of the debilitating personal consequences of beating one's head against stone walls...
...8 Data are based on the statistical appendices of the Manpower Report of the President, 1966 and 1971...
...They feel doomed forever to DAVID M. GORDON permanent last place...
...64 The corporate economy demands more and more skilled technical workers, the analysis suggests, requiring more highly educated labor...
...See U.S...
...In advanced and highly interdependent organizations, it appears, the relations of production are not very malleable...
...Some of their demands center around pollution and the wastefulness of commodity obsolescence...
...A wide variety of white-collar jobs have been permeated with what Lockwood calls the "social marginality of clerical work" 28—jobs in the typing pool, many office-machine operator jobs, most messenger work...
...It may still be generally true that middle-class whitecollar workers are more likely to live in the suburbs and blue-collar manual workers in central-city neigborhoods...
...The 19thcentury clerk had not yet endured the progressive specialization of clerical tasks that the office-machine revolution has subsequently entailed...
...Yet the objective characteristics of primary workers scarcely differ between factory and office, and it seems critically important to emphasize that this mode of "routinized primary work," as I shall call it, is endured in nearly equal numbers by bluecollar and white-collar workers alike...
...Given some vested interests in the present definition of tasks, the aspirations of secondary workers cannot easily be met...
...47 a fairly large number of these women probably work in routinized primary jobs...
...2 Most discussions of occupations concern the gross Census occupational categories, to which this essay will often refer...
...31 2. Primary Workers and the American Working Class The second mode of work in the American economy is more familiar...
...Watson and Barth, op...
...If we confine our attention exclusively to blue- or white-collar workers, we begin to miss more and more of what unites and divides different classes of workers...
...There have always been unskilled, unstable workers in the market, and employers who took advantage of, even depended upon their instability...
...For a discussion of the "promised land effect," see Gordon, ed., Problems in Political Economy: An Urban Perspective, op...
...The blue-collarfactory jobs include: craftsmen, operatives, andlaborers...
...80 For one of the clearest attempts to separate out class and race, see John Leggett, Class, Race, and Labor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968...
...Now, as much as one can conclude from scattered pieces of evidence, large numbers of white-collar workers encounter precisely the same kinds of routinized working conditions...
...3. Creative Primary Jobs and the "New Working Class" A third mode of work has dominated many discussions about the American worker in 52 Alex Inkeles, "Industrial Man: The Relation of Status to Experience, Perception and Value," American Journal of Sociology, July 1960...
...The enormity of variations within the two groups of workers has begun to outweigh the significance of differences between them...
...In 1960, for instance, according to official Census data, nearly one-third of all female white-collar workers were married to blue-collar workers...
...the higher the Gini Coefficient, the more unequal the income of the population...
...48 Many primary white-collar workers view work as instrumental, as a means toward obtaining consumer goods.44 Many share a similar kind of exposure to and familiarity with the "high culture...
...60 White collars work in smaller groups, generally, with fewer workers per supervisor...
...office as they do to productivity in the factory...
...cit., p. 19...
...Looked at objectively, bureaucracy implies a similar reduction of all social functions to their basic elements, and a similar rational and formal regulation of these precisely dif a' For two attempts to define two classes of firms, see Robert T. Averitt, The Dual Economy (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1968), and Barry Bluestone, "The Tripartite Economy: Low Wages and the Working Poor," Poverty and Human Resources, July—August, 1970...
...In one study, for instance, 90 percent of those white-collar workers who call themselves "working class" came from families in which the principal wage earner was a blue-collar worker 48 Perhaps most significantly, many white-collar workers are the wives of blue-collar workers and are obviously influenced by the life-styles of their husbands...
...Blue-collar workers now live in the suburbs in large numbers, of course, sometimes with whitecollar workers and sometimes in "workingclass suburbs...
...20 Several trends illustrate the forces prompting employers to encourage the separation of primary and secondary jobs: • In many kinds of work, skills acquired on the job have become an increasingly dominant component of worker productivity...
...In contrast, many of the most recent disadvantaged workers in the American economy have not shared this hopeful journey...
...The...
...4o n Given the increasing routinization of white-collar work, it should not be surprising that many office workers have become as alienated from their work as large numbers of the blue-collar work force...
...Industry has developed rapidly increasing demands for skilled, technical, and educated labor on the one hand, and rapidly increasing numbers of students are choosing to continue their education—only partially in response to the shifts in demand...
...cit., p. 116...
...the majority actually has become a minority after decades of dominance.66 And blue-collar workers will constitute, by 1980, less than one-third of the employed in the United States...
...For to the extent that production processes are not malleable, their demands for more creative work will not readily be met...
...Many workers—perhaps in increasing numbers—will find some exciting, creative work opportunities, and they will undoubtedly enter those jobs with discriminating demands about their work...
...15 For one summary of some interesting data, seeHarold L. Wilensky, "Varieties of Work Experience," in Henry Borow, ed., Man in a World of Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964...
...198 DAVID M. GORDON ical, sales, operative, laborer, and service occupations— comprising roughly 60 percent of male wage and salary earners in 1960—fully 83 percent were employed in occupations for which the Gini Coefficient had increased over the preceding decade—job categories, that is, in which income inequality had grown during those ten years...
...They may be able to organize themselves into white-collar unions—to acquire the class consciousness of the "new working class"— but it also seems likely that they will drop out...
...84 This process of rationalization has obviously swept into the 20th-century office as well, with many white-collar workers turned into "living appendages" of rationalized production processes...
...Prime-age white males those we project as the "majority" group in the American labor force—now comprise less than half of the working population...
...The concentration of these workers in secondary jobs induces a vicious circle, for workers quickly appreciate the extent to which their success at work does not depend on their stability...
...But exceptions 9 For the original analysis of "balkanization," see Clark Kerr, "The Balkanization of Labor Markets," in E. Wight Bakke, et...
...As the duality of the labor market increases, the commonalities in objective working conditions among these secondary jobs seem more clearly to outweigh some of the marginal differences between white- and blue-collar work...
...But waves of immigrants made the transition to industrial work, and a succession of employers adjusted to the power relationships of the corporate economy...
...Most of the changes have been determined by technological and organizational imperatives...
...45 Perhaps most important, many white-collar workers share social origins, communities, 40 For a discussion of the lack of relation between educational attainment and productive skills, see Ivar Berg, Education and Jobs: The Great Train ing Robbery (New York: Praeger, 1969...
...While the objective working conditions shared by these 20th-century workers seem reminiscent of those endured by the 19thcentury lumpen proletariat, one important difference shatters the analogy...
...cit., p. 18...
...As an outgrowth of their studies of ghetto labor markets, several economists have been proposing an alternative view of the labor market.17 They suggest that we can best understand the behavior of workers if we think of two separate labor markets: a "primary" and a "secondary" sector...
...Doeringer and Piore conclude in their study of internal labor markets that "by far the largest proportion of blue-collar job skills is acquired on the job...
...And their unstable work behavior is tolerated by their bosses...
...But they do suggest that we incorporate our awareness of these important changes in work directly into our political analyses, though they do not tell us how...
...Minority workers, women, and teenagers have been those groups with relatively capricious work habits, and employers now often rely on race, sex, and age as inexpensive screening criteria for work stability...
...19 The dual market analysis builds from a fundamental hypothesis of market discontinuity, postulating that once you work in a secondary job, it becomes unlikely that you will ever work in the primary market, and 17 For a summary of the literature, see David M. Gordon, Theories of Poverty and Underemployment (Lexington, Mass.: Heath Lexington, 1972...
...The typing pool was organized so that work would rarely be disrupted if women came and went at will2 6 Channeled into secondary jobs in which instability is expected, some women may have begun to develop unstable work habits...
...This pool of relatively satisfied workers—proud of their skills and relatively happy with their crafts—may not respond very favorably to workers' movements demanding better working conditions...
...Any strategies to unite the working classes will have to overcome all of these divisions, an obviously problematic proposition...
...This section essays some interpretations of the lives of American workers, suggesting 12 See Bennett Berger, Working Class Suburb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), and Herbert Gans, Levittowners (New York: Pantheon, 1967...
...Their stability on the job has grown suspect...
...A dichotomized labor market exists, these economists have proposed, as a result of several convergent historical trends affecting both the calculations employers make about the organization of work and the aspirations workers carry with them into the market...
...n Similar changes have affected the jobs available to teen-agers in the labor market...
...The rise of unions and the evolution of class consciousness among certain groups of workers has also encouraged the dichotomization of the labor market...
...42 Roughly half of all white-collar workers call themselves members of the "working class," according to some studies, and seem to share many of the aspirations and cultural norms of the organized blue-collar working class...
...FROM STEAM WHISTLES TO COFFEE BREAKS 205 ferentiated parts...
...Many are young blacks or other minority workers, raised in Northern ghettos...
...Since then, and especially since World War II, the pattern of women's participation in the labor force has changed substantially...
...As one divides a population more finely, the more equally one expects its income to be distributed—and the lower the calculated coefficients—within individual subsamples...
...Many white-collar workers now, too, are surrounded by machinery and relate to machines with the same kinds of responsibilities as most blue-collar workers...
...Of all male workers in the cler 5 This would be especially true because of the standardization of salary scales as organizations grow and unions gain power...
...Indeed, most political discussions at this stage must necessarily be qualified, each alternative speculation crinkling with the impossibility of confident prediction...
...assumptions about the occupational homogeneity of central-city ethnic communities, according to several pieces of recent evidence, have been greatly exaggerated.'$ • The patterns of job satisfaction among workers in different occupations also have changed...
...Pools of secondary labor develop, in which unstable working behavior is both tolerated and (occasionally) encouraged.28 • Employers know how to measure certain fairly tangible kinds of productivity...
...Most of their skills are acquired on the job...
...FROM STEAM WHISTLES TO COFFEE BREAKS now begin to rival the rules...
...n The relationship of women to the labor market also has changed radically over the past 50 years...
...In place of that dichotomy, some new divisions have arisen among American workers, straddling the whitecollar/ blue-collar boundary...
...The second, critical division within this mode of work is also obvious...
...2. 25 Brown, op, cit., pp...
...3 Some interesting historical data on relative wagescan be found in Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...Growing numbers of well-educated young Americans are working at "blue-collar" crafts and at service jobs as a result of their desire for more creative, more unalienated labor...
...Although this assumption continues to have some validity, it seems to be less and less accurate—particularly in some middle-range white- and blue-collar occupations...
...202 unionization, at least theoretically, has been to foster segregation between certain pools of jobs in which unionization was permitted —primary jobs, in this context, in which unions actually fostered some of the work stability that employers sought—and other pools of jobs in which employees were permitted to come and go capriciously...
...managers, proprietors, and other officials...
...See also Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: Phoenix, 1964...
...The fact that the locus and organizational context of their work seems so different does not obviate the conclusion that white- and blue-collar constituents of the "creative" working class have much in common and share many similar ambitions...
...To the extent that they have been able to satisfy their desires, they share this third mode of work with some of the technicians about whom we hear so much...
...I, p. 423...
...Occupations by Earnings," Monthly Labor Review, March 1965...
...They can test for physical strength, manual dexterity, reading ability, and typing skills...
...They usually work in large plants for large corporations...
...Their assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, all who share this mode of work are not white-collar workers...
...Deferred fringe benefits, nonvested pension rights, graduated variations in working conditions—all of these inducements are costly, and employers will naturally try, as I have written elsewhere, "to confine those extra expenses to the narrowest range of jobs they can...
...14 Steven E. Deutsch, "The Sociology of theAmerican Worker," International Journal of Comparative Sociology, March—June 1969, p. 66...
...Such workers are not concentrated in the factory, but are scattered throughout the economy...
...Clerical work, once a sort of "handicraft," now frequently involves a semiskilled machine operation comparable to factory work...
...And more than two-thirds of those men were employees in lower- and middle-level office and factory jobs—in the clerical, sales, service, and laborer categories—although less than one-third of all male workers were employed at those levels...
...21 Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: New World Press, 1965), p. 359...
...The classic American worker, the prime-age blue-collar male, no longer dominates the labor force, and his image can no longer be projected upon the rest of the employed...
...Bureau ofLabor Statistics, Department of Labor, "Salary Structure Characteristics in Large Firms, 1963," BLS Bulletin, no...
...47 Walter B. Watson and Ernest A. J. Barth, "Questionable Assumptions in the Theory of Social Stratification," Pacific Sociological Review, Spring 1964...
...they pay even less attention to stable work habits, and so employers' impressions of group work behavior are reinforced...
...They were encouraged to emulate the example of successful transition among previously assimilated workers and were driven by what Max Weber called the "whip of hunger...
...They were just as poor as their parents, Brown has written, and "to add to their misery they had little hope of deliverance...
...Many white-collar workers are women, and, so far, unions have not been very sympathetic to or very successful at organizing large numbers of women...
...cit., for a useful discussion...
...22 They will inevitably try to isolate "secondary" jobs that do not demand work stability—jobs in which 20 Most of the following paragraph is based on a more extended discussion in Gordon, Theories of Poverty and Underemployment, op...
...vice versa...
...And teen-agers in the secondary market, finally, probably have very little potential for "underclass" consciousness at all, since they tend to view such secondary work as a mere interlude before their serious careers...
...If workers are fortunate enough to find opportunities for creative work, they will undoubtedly enjoy some of their work...
...Michael Piore has described the differences: the primary market offers jobs which pos• sess several of the following traits: high wages, good working conditions, employment stability and job security, equity and due process in the administration of work rules, and chances for advancement...
...Many primary workers appear to be highly skilled, although some of their skills involve essentially routine operations that can be quickly taught...
...Their jobs are finely and rigidly structured, with specified job ladders and promotion procedures.32 Wages are generally high, and fixed salary structures inform the allocation of income within the firm...
...Conversely, unions are relatively unlikely to organize such unstable workers...
...In a ranking of 321 occupations by earnings in 1959, for instance, the earnings of both office and manual jobs were scattered throughout the list.4 In the "clerical" and "sales" categories, the separate occupations were spread quite evenly throughout the listings, although none reached into the most affluent 50...
...Incentives to retain workers on the job become expensive...
...6 The following calculations are based on Herman Miller, Income Distribution in the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...Casual laboring jobs, foundry work, stitching and pressing jobs in apparel plants, packing lines in light manufacturing plants provide a few illustrations of blue-collar secondary work.27 Many secondary jobs also predominate in the office...
...28 Lockwood, op...
...The percentage of the long-term unemployed—those without a job for 15 weeks or more—who were working in white-collar occupations also grew by about 50 percent over the decade, from 19.5 to 28.2 percent...
...Since most discussions about strategies for workers' coalitions have conventionally begun with the distinction between bluecollar and white-collar work, these new shifts in worker stratification will have some profound implications for the calculus of coalition...
...63 This difference, if manifest originally, is probably eroding among workers in routinized primary jobs...
...Occupations by Earnings," Monthly Labor Review, March 1965...
...their salaries are usually paid by what have been characterized as "primary" or "core" corporations...
...Perhaps even more critically, certain features of secondary work tend to constrain 29 For one discussion of such workers, see Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander, Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970...
...ss Several independent pieces of evidence suggest the same conclusions about white-collar work.ss More and more, the kinds of "formal" skills, which we all learn in our extensive schooling, seem to bear as little relationship to performance in the 86 Quoted in Lockwood, op...
...Most analyses of mobility aspirations, from which these conclusions have emerged, focused on all the white-collar occupations and failed to distinguish among different strata within the office...
...Particularly among New Leftists, bored with strategic homilies about the "grand coalition," the "new working class" has become a subject for analysis...
...62 Michel Crozier has built a theory of "anticipatory socialization" from these ideas...
...48 See Derek Bok and John Dunlop, Labor and the American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970...
...Although some of the increases in the ratio were small, the magnitude of the trend seems impressive.' Some other kinds of evidence also illuminate the growing diversity of office and factory work: n Unemployment and work instability seem to be spreading throughout the occupational hierarchy, challenging our timehonored assumptions about the singular vulnerability of blue-collar workers to economic insecurity...
...204 DAVID M. GORDON the emergence of a united underclass...
...Through the equilibra 16 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House Vintage, 1966), p. 11...
...As median educational attainments have soared in this century, more and more teen-agers are working solely to support themselves (and their families) while they finish school...
...Their very acts of migration—whether from Europe or from rural America and the South— were motivated by the powerful promise of a better life...
...But psychological expertise does not yet permit a very accurate test for potential work stability...
...Employers have admittedly grown more willing to accommodate demands for temporary and informal work among technical personnel who prefer to free-lance, but employers, it seems, have not yet made notable changes in their organization of production in order to capture those who seek creative work...
...opportunity to complete a product themselves...
...12 Equally important, many white-collar workers live alongside blue-collar workers in central-city communities...
...41 Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom (Chi cago: University of Chicago Press, 1964...
...These simple concluding remarks do not take us very far...
...As women have increased their share of the labor force to nearly 40 percent, employers have been forced to make arrangements to accommodate the relative unpredictability of work attachments among some women...
...The first difference is a major one...
...Economists have traditionally assumed that the distribution of income among workers can be explained most accurately—as a first approximation— by the distribution of workers among occupations...
...To the extent that employers must rely on teen-age workers to fill certain kinds of positions, it becomes increasingly important to segregate "teen jobs" in order to minimize productivity losses from their (potentially) unstable working behavior...
...As E. P. Thompson has written, If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences...
...Another group of workers, with equally high aspirations, will be plugged into routinized primary jobs, however technical in nature, and will quickly grow disillusioned...
...Source: Max A. Rutzick, "A Ranking of U.S...
...But the magnitude of the trend seems sufficiently large to ensure that some of it reflects a real increase in the diversity of work experiences captured by the occupational categories with which analysts have traditionally tried to work...
...1417, August 1964...
...Several historical trends help illustrate the split of the work force into primary and secondary workers: • Historically, the lower rungs of the occupational ladder have been filled by groups of disadvantaged immigrant workers...
...10 Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan, The American Occupational Structure (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967...
...None of these admittedly critical differences should soften the central conclusion...
...42 Wilensky, "Class, Class Consciousness, and American Workers," in William Haber, ed., Labor in a Changing America (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 13...
...69 Crozier, The World of Office Workers, op...
...some modes of work that transcend the distinction between office and factory, illustrating some important changes in the structure of the working classes...
...Comparing 1959 and 1970, two years in which the aggregate unemployment rates were nearly comparable, one finds that the percentage of the unemployed in white-collar occupations increased by 50 percent— from 21.8 percent to 32.0 percent— while the white-collar share of total employment grew by only 10 percent...
...White-collar workers are supposedly more aware and desirous of opportunities for occupational mobility than blue-collar workers...
...The analysis begins with some obvious constructs and seeks to relate them to the range of experience in factory and office jobs...
...Working in highly interdependent production processes, the workers rarely have the s1 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (NewYork: International Publishers, 1963), p. 173...
...1e 1. Secondary Workers and the American Underclass Several economists have been writing recently about the emergence over the past 50 years of a "dual labor market" in the United States...
...For where does one run to when he's already in the promised land...
...Teen-agers traditionally began work immediately upon leaving school and could be expected to settle down quickly to the steady, disciplined patterns of adult workers...
...Two are obvious and persistent, while the third seems less obvious and is probably eroding...
...Political strategies to unite the working classes must begin to reflect some of the constraints and contradictions inherent in these new patterns of stratification...
...8e Speaking about his own operation, a bank manager recently emphasized the sweeping effects of automation on the organization of work: "There is no place [in the bank] where there is no connection whatsoever to the automated equipment...
...Jobs, people, and classes may change, but the distinction between office and factory seems eternally superimposed on our views of work...
...They tend to involve low wages, poor working conditions, considerable variability in employment, harsh and often arbitrary discipline, and little opportunity to advance.] 18 The most important dimensions of difference between jobs in the two sectors, Piore continues, are "the behavioral requirements which they impose on the work force, particularly that of employment stability...
...Many of those skills are "enterprisespecific," in the language of economists, and cannot be transferred to work at other sites...
...their job tenure, consequently, was fairly calculable for employers...
...Many secondary jobs still center in manufacturing, constituting significant numbers of lower-level, manual jobs...
...21 It becomes increasingly important for employers to retain workers in these sensitive jobs as long as possible in order to develop in them a sense of "natural productive rhythm...
...Ss Doeringer and Piore, op...
...Robert Blauner and Eli Chinoy have presented impressive evidence on the boredom with which factory workers approach their jobs 41 Many white-collar workers are joining their factory comrades in these attitudes...
...14 More recent studies seem to suggest that this satisfaction barrier is beginning to erode, that many white-collar workers are now less satisfied with their work, and that some blue-collar workers, for a variety of reasons, find more satisfaction than many lower-level office employees...
...Many white, male secondary workers probably continue to share a kind of "false consciousness" about their opportunities, convinced that their personal diligence and dedication will somehow lift them out of secondary work into the primary sector2 9 Minority workers—and particularly young blacks—have begun to develop some class consciousness about their conditions, but it remains difficult to determine whether they are beginning to develop a militant identification with other members of their race or with other members of their stratum in work 30 Women are beginning to develop some consciousness about their exploitation in the labor market, but it is not yet clear whether secondary female workers will build on their relationships with male secondary workers...
...FROM STEAM WHISTLES TO COFFEE BREAKS productivity does not depend on relative job tenure—and institute arrangements by which the process of production not only accommodates worker instability in secondary jobs but fosters such instability...
...The importance of the argument for the purposes of this es 26 For a discussion of these developments in England, see the masterful book by David Lockwood, The Black-Coated Worker: A Study in Class Consciousness (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958), p. 92...
...208 DAVID M. GORDON ployers' positive response to the growing demands among educated workers for creative work...
...1673, p. 57...
...recent years, and it requires little discussion here...
...Wages vary considerably by age, for instance, and the age distributions of employees within occupations may have tended over time to grow more diffuse...
...One example draws on a convenient measure of income inequality called the Gini Coefficient, an index that expresses the deviation of income distribution within any sample population from conditions of perfect income equality...
...Those working in unstable secondary jobs are unlikely to have much contact with the unions and are relatively unlikely to develop a sense of group identity with others at the work site...
...If the process of assimilation and socioeconomic mobility took time, the earlier immigrants suffered with consummate patience...
...The white-collar, office categories include: professional and technical workAt the beginning of the century, whitecollar workers tended to earn much more than manual workers, and the range of incomes within both factory and office was fairly narrow.8 By the 1960s, incomes in office and factory jobs criss-crossed up and down the wage and salary scale...
...Men learn to manipulate their advantages...
...Although some of this analysis seems to me misplaced, it does emphasize the emergence of a third mode of work in the advanced sectors of American capitalism...
...If, in ar The best discussion of these jobs is in Peter B. Doeringer and Michael J. Piore, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1971...
...Even in those marriages where the wife works at a more lucrative or prestigious job than the husband, assumptions of male superiority often persist...
...Sociologists often cite a third difference between office and factory employees in this mode of work...
...37 Quoted in Mueller, Technological Advance in an Expanding Economy, op...
...206 DAVID M. GORDON and even families with blue-collar workers...
...84 Karl Marx, Capital (New York: New World Publishers, 1969), vol...
...look at a few examples...
...Discussions of the "working class" that focus only on blue-collar workers ignore this central conclusion at the peril of irrelevance...
...Such an integration would inevitably threaten the secure arrangements by which both routinized and creative primary workers derive a livelihood and satisfaction from their work, for it seems clear that secondary work cannot be stabilized without a substantial redefinition of the tasks of both secondary and primary jobs...
...At the subjective level, moreover, they seem to respond to their working conditions in fairly similar ways...
...These demands produce a contradictory response, for the very nature of expanding higher education gives rise to interest in unalienated work activities...
...A second example clarifies the importance of this trend...
...FROM STEAM WHISTLES TO COFFEE BREAKS say is obvious...
...210 DAVID M. GORDON...
...As educated labor enters the market, it finds limited opportunities for unalienated work and begins to demand greater control over the production process in order either to channel its creativity through participation in planning or to change the character of the relations of production...
...The conflicts between the work-conditioned aspirations of these two groups cannot easily be resolved...
...In 1949, for example, roughly 14.1 percent of male wage and salary employees worked in occupations in which the Gini Coefficients were greater than the economy-wide coefficients...
...They acquired the disciplined work habits required by the factory system under prompting from the carrot and the stick...
...The evolution of production has already created for "this mass a common situation," as Marx would have put it, but the underclass is "not yet [a class] for itself...
...those beginning their careers as lowerlevel white-collar workers, no matter how determined and able, seem to have fewer and fewer chances of rising above their initial ports-of-entry...
...While the total dispersion of income in the economy has remained relatively constant over the past 25 years, the range of Table INCOME RANKINGS OF OFFICE AND FACTORY JOBS, 1960 Distribution of Jobs in a List of 321 Occupations Ranked by Median Annual Earnings Ranking on Percentage of Jobs in Category List of 321 Clerical & Blue Collar Occupations Sales Workers Workers` 1-100 13.7% 10.2% 29.6 30.5 101-150 15.9 20.3 151-200 25.0 20.3 } 43.2 44.9 201-250 18.2 24 6 251-300 18.2 17.8 } 27.3 24.6 301-321 9.1 6.8 100.0" 100.0" 100.0 100.0 Includes craftsmen, operatives, and laborers...
...As the work of a secretary grew more and more dependent on her stability, however—on her intricate knowledge of her boss's habits and the idiosyncracies of work arrangements in the firm—it became increasingly important for employers to be able to retain the most stable women in secretarial positions and to channel more unpredictable women into separate job pools...
...sales personnel...
...5 In fact, official Census data reveal that income in some occupations is distributed more unequally than in the economy as a whole, and that the number of workers employed in such occupations is growing...
...Many of the principal dynamics of these shifts in work are only beginning to unfold, and it seems a bit early to anticipate their political consequences with either assurance or accuracy...
...Many blue-collar and white-collar workers share a common mode of work in the United States today—a deadening, stable, modestly affluent life in routinized primary jobs...
...See also Herbert Gintis, "Education, Technology and the Characteristics of Worker Productivity," American Economic Review, May 1971...
...Economy in 1980," U.S...
...Marxist terms, a group of workers becomes a potentially emergent "class" through the evolution of a set of shared experiences in the organization of production, it seems fairly clear that secondary workers in the American economy are beginning to share some common productive relations in precisely this sense...
...Realization of their desires requires an integration of secondary jobs into the rest of the production process...
...The prevailing rags-to-riches mythology usually starred a freckled-face lad rising from the bottom of the white-collar ladder, beginning as a messenger in the mail room...
...In many cases the contacts between employee and supervisor are probably more personal (and paternalistic) than those in factory work...
...1l • Even the traditional verities about residential location seem to be dissolving...
...i1 Of all families in which both husband and wife are employed, the wife is in a "higher" occupation— by the Census rankings, in 42 percent of those families...
...Any attempts to intuit the emergence of a class or classes of workers must pay equal attention to both elements of the class experience...
...But if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions...
...22 Gordon, Theories of Poverty and Underemployment, op...
...1 Most of the important differences between work in the office and factory have begun to disappear...
...For that, we must await much more seasoned and sophisticated reflection about the full variety of working experiences in this country...
...s7 • The nature of many skills employed in routinized primary work also seems comparable in the factory and the office...
...In a remarkably prescient passage, the late Georg Lukacs predicted this development when he published History and Class Consciousness in 1923: Bureaucracy implies conditions similar to those found in the mechanized factory...
...by 1959, 21.5 percent were employed in these income-diffuse occupations, an increase of more than half...
...82 See Doeringer and Piore, op...
...See the labor-force data in relevant issues of the Monthly Labor Review...
...Two separate trends have conjoined...
...One presumes, as a result, that the Gini Coefficient calculated for the entire economy will exceed the ratios for finely disaggregated occupations by large amounts...
...One example of this kind of accommodation is suggested by the evolution of the typing pool...
...Let us 6a Prime-age white males fell below 50 percent of the labor force sometime in 1968 or 1969...
...One of the many consequences of these changes in female labor-force participation is that employers can be much less certain about the potential tenure of female employees...
...In nearly every important respect, they experience the same working conditions as the organized factory work force...
...In the factory," Marx wrote about 19thcentury industrial organization, "we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage...
...cit., p. 8. 8e William Faunce, "Automation and the Division of Labor," Social Problems, Fall 1965, p. 157...
...82ff...
...I have called this qualitative change in expectations "the promised land effect," after the book by Claude Brown.24 Second-generation Northern ghetto blacks have been much less likely than their elders to endure the frustrations of menial work...
...All of these trends help clarify the argument that the American labor market has become increasingly dichotomized...
...And many service jobs feature classically secondary working conditions: dishwashing, domestic work, menial work in the hospitals...
...38 See Lockwood, op...
...In each category 30 percent of the jobs were in the top 150 on the list, 43 and 45 percent respectively were in the next 100 jobs on the list, and 27 and 25 percent respectively fell in the bottom 71 rungs...
...Many in the "new working class" have acquired an interest in improving the "quality" of life...
...of distinction between office and factory work...
...19 Loc...
...44 For one example, see Elinor Langer, "The Women of the Telephone Company," The New York Review of Books, March 26, 1970...
...Figures on the dispersion of income within occupational categories also help document the diversity of opportunities in the whiteand blue-collar sectors...
...An American "underclass" has developed...
...43 Richard Hamilton, "The Marginal Middle Class: A Reconsideration," American Journal of Soci ology, April 1966...
...Vast numbers of workers labor in the highly structured, often unionized primary sector of the labor market...
...Most typing used to be done 24 Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Macmillan, 1965...
...One final note about this third mode of creative primary work...
...11 See Eva Mueller, Technological Advance in an Expanding Economy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, 1969...
...2 'Harold L. Wilensky, "Mass Society and Mass Culture: Interdependence or Independence," American Sociological Review, April 1964, p. 195...
...Disadvantaged" workers, through better education and training, could incrementally advance their careers or those of their children...
...4 Max A. Rutzick, "A Ranking of U.S...
...First, these emerging modes of work cannot be dismissed on the grounds that they do not describe the working conditions of most workers...
...Bureau of theCensus, 1962...
...Their horizons also seem more dominated by vertical hierarchies, limiting the amount of contact they have with others at their own occupational levels...
...cit., chap...
...Each individual member of an interdependent production process must learn to relate to his fellow employees, as Maurice Dobb has put it, "with a discipline that is something akin to that which co-ordinates the separate instruments of an orchestra...
...68 U.S...
...Many opportunities for relatively creative work have evolved as a result of these two trends, work in which one can have some autonomy and in which to identify with a final product...
...In his classic article on "Industrial Man," Alex Inkeles infers a "special propensity to risk-taking" among many white-collar workers, contrasting them with those in "the manual classes" who "remain unmoved and stick to security...
...Their economic mobility would follow the paths blazed by earlier movements of unskilled immigrant workers...
...Several indices illustrate this trend...
...It has often been noted that a wide variety of manual factory skills can be learned better (if not exclusively) on the job...
...18 For some interesting data, see Richard Hamilton, "Class and Politics," a forthcoming work...
...Union membership largely depends on the locus of work, with factory workers unionized in large numbers and office workers persistently outside the unions...
...FROM STEAM WHISTLES TO COFFEE BREAKS sponses of routinized primary workers to similar working conditions...
...See also Eli Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the Amer ican Dream (Boston: Beacon, 1965...
...One way for employers to try to forestall the spread of 23 Employers are likely to "encourage" instability, as well as merely tolerate it, because short-term employees are less likely to become dissatisfied with dead-end jobs...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
