Working USA 2/28/2000 V.3; N.5 p. 27
Looking backward on labor in the United States

Jacoby, Dan

DAN JACOBY, associate professor at the University of Washington-Bothell, is author of Laboring for Freedom: A New Look at the History of Labor in America (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998). He has written several articles on labor history, education, and apprenticeship.

The increase of rote tasks in manufacturing over the first half of the nineteenth century misled labor into believing that education and training were not central to its advance. With the rise of the service sector and the new information age, organized labor's success depends on understanding and promoting its educational interests.

THE century-long slumber of Julian West--protagonist of Edward Bellamy's 1887 novel Looking Backward--ends in Y2K, the year 2000. Although many of West's revelations about Y2K can now be confirmed incorrect--it is not pneumatic tubes that are now used to eliminate middlemen, but Internet sales--Looking Backward shows us how thorough our retreat from broader visions has been. Our information-based economy is as divided by class as was the economy of 100 years ago, and, contrary to Bellamy's sleepy visionary, it is education that is most responsible for labor-market inequality.

The demarcation of class by education has a long history, but reforms over the past century have accentuated it. In the burgeoning late-eighteenth-century battles between labor and capital, it was the American Federation of Labor's craft workers who best controlled their trades by organizing apprenticeships and hiring halls. Their successes often set craft unionists at odds with less-skilled workers. Often, craft unionists had a stake in maintaining inequality where industrial unionists sought greater solidarity. In the pressure cooker of immediate struggles, unionists failed to agree on how education and training should be used to support labor. Meanwhile, industrialists wooed workers by supporting their own versions of vocational and general education.

Given the tumultuous contest brought on by the nation's transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society, it is understandable why labor's relations with education are often overlooked. Conflict was rife as workers who formerly understood success in terms of independent farming--in 1900 still the largest single occupation, employing 35 percent of workers--faced off against modern industry's encroachments. One catches a glimpse of the palpable hold that agriculture had on the popular imagination in the letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart printed in the Atlantic Monthly in 1913. "To me," Stewart wrote, "homesteading is the solution of all poverty's problems... any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end."

It bears noting that 1909--the year Stewart left Denver for the ranch life of Burnt Springs, Wyoming--was sandwiched between two bloody Colorado union battles, Cripple Creek (1903-4) and the Ludlow Massacre (1913). The contrast between the open spaces of farms and life within factories was further accented by the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 young women died, many jumping to their death from the window ledge of a burning New York tenement shop, its locked doors preventing their escape.

Between 1900 and 1950 manufacturing employment grew from 19 percent to 26 percent of workers. However, even at mid-century, industrialization did not capture the reality of most working-class folks. Aided by a labor movement that organized 35 percent of workers in the fifties, many of the worst features of industrialization were tamed. Yet, if unionization depended upon an industrialized workforce, organized labor would not expand. More important, as the century progressed, manufacturing's share of employment declined, constituting only 15 percent of workers today. At mid-century labor achieved some of the equality Edward Bellamy sought, and economists now call the decade of the forties the period of the "great compression," because the gap between rich and poor closed dramatically. However, the dwindling wage differences between relatively unskilled and skilled workers would not hold.

When the protective bubble created by the ravages of World War II burst, manufacturers in Europe and Asia began to undermine high-priced U.S. goods. Domestic employers sought new technologies to reduce the number of highly paid semiskilled jobs. One dramatic example involved the docks, where jobs were eliminated by cranes and containerization, and the few remaining workers can now sometimes earn six-figure salaries. Increasing productivity enabled other industries to expand. In 1950, wholesale and retail establishments, financial services, insurance and real estate, other services, and government provided only 39 percent of employment, but by 1998 the comparable figure was 76 percent. Meanwhile, manufacturing shrank from 26 to 15 percent. Alternatively, occupational data show that skilled trades and operatives shrank from 41 percent of the labor force in 1950 to 26 percent in 1997. These employment trends rocked our conception of the world by signaling a new postindustrial economy.

In raising the wages of less-skilled workers, New Deal industrial unions inadvertently sowed the seeds of their own demise. Without structural changes to inhibit wage and product competition, it became difficult to maintain high wages for easily replaceable workers. Worse, the success of industrial unionism in the 1930s encouraged organized labor in the United States to disregard the education and skill-based strategies employed by older craft unions.

A few historians and analysts have brought the importance of skill and education to the public's attention. Harry Braverman's analysis--perhaps the most widely recognized--misled labor market observers in important ways. Braverman showed that semiskilled work was often the deliberate creation of scientific managers whose purpose was to control the labor process through job degradation. Under Frederick Winslow Taylor's guidance, managers deliberately eliminated the creative elements of work. This was done not merely to combat skilled unions, but more specifically to give managers exclusive control over the production process. Only this control could eliminate the "soldiering" that Taylor contended allowed workers to substitute their norms for the managers' drive for maximum efficiency. Management used technology and the reorganization of job tasks to reduce work to simple measurable dimensions, as with the use of bar-code scanners to automatically monitor cashiers' movements. Braverman's analysis of the degradation of work undermined the serious thinking about education that labor must undertake.

If only because highly specific and measurable jobs are the easiest ones to eliminate altogether, the degraded work Braverman describes is not likely to constitute labor's future. Thus employment, if it is to exist at all, will continue to involve jobs that have not been fully degraded. Most often this involves the services, the arts, and knowledge-based jobs involving hard-to-redesign human dimensions. Although Braverman's suggestion that many of these jobs--including the professions--are themselves subject to the logic of scientific management, we do not seem to be running out of employment opportunities so far. What is debatable is whether the majority of work that remains must involve personal services like those in fast food, or whether it can be more creative.

Much has been made of the fact that people process information differently than computers do, particularly through our ability to assess information within difficult-to-categorize contexts. Unlike computational devices that rely on external programmers, human creativity allows people to determine what a problem is as well as how it may be acceptably resolved. While this preserves some human employment, much service-industry employment relies on our preference for human interaction. It is not clear how much of this preference stems from the pleasure of association and how much from satisfactions derived from subordinating others to our comforts. And it is upon this distinction that we may shortly understand our current service economy as an ascent or descent.

Service work varies greatly in pay, work demands, and skills. Perhaps we should take heart that professional and managerial occupations have increased in importance, from 10 percent of the economy in 1900 to roughly 27 percent today. Yet many of these occupations face a technological siege to systematize their expertise. Telephone nurses are diagnosing patients with the aid of computer-driven scripts. Doctors are monitored and measured by insurance companies using medical data to prescribe the most cost-effective treatments. Architects, engineers, bankers, accountants, and countless other professionals are seeing their work transformed. We do not yet know how customers will adjust to these changes. Are our frustrations with automated receptionists better understood as anachronistic sentimentality remediable by small system modifications, or do they represent a rejection of the algorithms that predetermine a menu of options?

In discussing the necessity of education, Adam Smith brought to the public's attention the pernicious effects of excessive division of labor. One of the most memorable passages in the Wealth of Nations involves Smith's description of the dramatic increase in productivity derived from dividing the work of pin makers into specialized jobs. This much-quoted passage usually receives insufficient attention with respect to the concerns Smith himself raised. The man engaged in unchallenging and repetitive labor, said Smith, "naturally loses ... the habit of such [mental] exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."

This tradeoff between productivity and intelligence is of central importance to the labor movement. In late nineteenth century, unions such as the railroad brotherhoods concerned themselves not only with the skills of their members but also with their character. To be sure, there was a racist element to this concern, but there was also an attempt to revitalize the republican ideas in which citizens earned the right to civic participation by proving themselves capable. When organized labor capitulated to the de-skilling tendencies inherent in industrialization, it also abandoned its responsibility to maintain the intelligence of workers. That responsibility shifted to classrooms remote from the worlds that workers inhabit.

While mass education has dramatically changed the labor market, it has become too easy to invoke education as the solution for all of society's ills. One wishes to say that it has expanded opportunity so that the rich and the poor may equally expect their children to attain economic success. That, however, is clearly not true. The massive percentage increase in high school graduates--from 6 percent in 1900 to nearly 90 percent in 1999--has not guaranteed high earnings. While educational attainment does predict earnings, college has outflanked high school as the minimum degree necessary to ensure economic security. Over the same period, the percentage of young people earning college degrees has risen from about 2 percent to roughly 24 percent. Just as it was in 1900, a student's educational attainment today is well predicted by her parents' income and education. Thus, while many poor and low-income people use education to rise above the economic class from which they came, they remain unusual.

Where students go to school also matters a great deal. As Derek Bok and William Bowen reported in The Shape of the River, graduates of elite colleges earn huge premiums--their white male graduates, for example, earn over 50 percent more than graduates from nonelite colleges. Yet, the test scores that enable admission to elite schools are well predicted by income, ensuring that few low-income students get to attend elite colleges. Only 2 percent of all African American students in top schools are from poor families.

All this points toward the crucial fact that, if class exists in the United States, its life has been nursed by education. The close correspondence between the number of professional and managerial workers and the number of B.A. holders is not an accident. In 1997, the average salary among all college graduates was $38,000--more than 60 percent above that of the average high school graduate, and dropouts were worse off yet with average earnings of $15,000. Students with master's and professional degrees earned $50,000 and $75,000, respectively. None of this is said to praise education, but to point out how education has changed the landscape that is our labor market.

The wage effect of organized labor, in contrast with that of education, is relatively small. Although some unions make it possible for workers without a degree to earn incomes in excess of $50,000, most do not. The union premium is usually between 10 and 25 percent--nothing to sneer at, but nowhere near the premium yielded by a B.A., to say nothing of a higher degree. Workers without skills are and will increasingly be in competition with very low-wage workers throughout the rest of the world. Shifts away from manufacturing and agriculture inevitably mean more workers are employed in services. But obviously there is a huge difference between the market value of a systems engineer, at one extreme, and a busboy, at the other.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, reformers imagined that industrial productivity could eliminate poverty and inequality. Edward Bellamy advocated short compulsory service in an industrial army to equitably distribute dead-end jobs. Having earned their right to an education, citizens could then indulge in both an education and a vocation unconstrained by economic necessity. John Dewey later developed this theme, arguing that education should not merely respond to industrial needs but should instead transform them. The mid-century pact between labor and business went some way toward achieving this transformation, reducing wide income disparities and making education an entitlement for veterans.

By the 1960s the new system was under strain. Educators now directed their attention to the minorities and women who had been left behind by the New Deal. Courts directed schools and union apprenticeship programs to redress past discrimination. Between 1940 and 1980 the male income difference between African Americans and whites narrowed from 40 percent to 80 percent. White blue-collar workers grew distant from universities. Although workers sent their children to colleges to become professionals, they often came home estranged by a counterculture that rejected the material and psychological values of their communities. The tacit alliance between labor and intellectuals in the first half of the century came painfully undone--not only because of cold war red-baiting, but also because of the relative independence achieved within the university. Educators there withdrew into their own professionalism, sundering effective communication with workers. Blue-collar workers withdrew much of their commitment to education in a tax revolt that limited possibilities for coalition, much less for serious thinking about how education might transform society's work.

Paradoxically, by narrowing differences between white and black and between men and women, education now highlights the class differences that remain entrenched in our system. This situation may make it possible to reconstruct a labor-driven social agenda. At present the three prevailing educational strategies are not satisfactory. Neither privatization nor higher standards nor increased educational access alone are likely to offset the educational advantages of the wealthy.

I will not presume to speak for labor, but until it reflects seriously on its historical relationship to education and training, it cannot hope to regain momentum. Labor's interest in education requires that workers are aware of their past, that they appreciate how their interests and rights may differ from those of their employers, and that worker investments in training are not whittled away by overcrowding. Furthermore, workers need to ponder whether education can prevent the inequitable privatization of the productivity gains from our knowledge-based economy. Education has the capacity to transform these gains into a social dividend that promotes a capacity for leisure involving lifelong growth.

This is a propitious moment to regalvanize the labor-education alliance. As the so-called knowledge economy proceeds, educators increasingly debate their own position in the labor process. Not only is there mutiny among graduate students who resent their overproduction for the benefit of researchers, entry positions in academia increasingly look like those of contingent workers elsewhere. New instructor positions tend to be either nontenure track, funded temporarily through grants, short-term or part-time. At the same, a technological speedup exists in which professors are expected to respond to e-mail, utilize new technologies in the classroom, and develop courseware for distance education. Nonfaculty university staff face even more demeaning conditions. All in all, service workers in this hub of the knowledge economy represent the forward edge of the twentieth century, raising the possibility of a sustained questioning of our fundamental purposes.