The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  TABLE 2-9

  White-Collar Unionism

  (In Thousands)

  YEAR NUMBER OF WHITE

  COLLAR MEMBERS PERCENTAGE OF ALL

  UNION MEMBERS

  1956 2,463 13.6

  1968 3,176 15.7

  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 United States. But long-run, in this context, means thirty years or so before these tendencies work themselves out in detail, and numbers or proportions are not always a reliable index of influence. 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. In that same respect, a movement with about 20 million members, even in a labor force of 100 million persons, is one that will exercise considerable influence for a long time.

  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; but these are outside the scope of this essay. The issues I shall deal with, some of them theoretical in nature, derive largely from the analysis of the changes in the composition of the work force, and the nature of the post-industrial society that I have sketched earlier.

  EDUCATION AND STATUS

  The most striking aspect of the new labor force is the level of formal educational attainment. By 1980, only 1 in 16 adult workers (25 years and over)—about 5 million—will have had less than 8 years of schooling, while 7 in every 10 adult workers, about 52 million, will at least have completed 4 years of high school. In 1968, by contrast, 1 in 10 (about 7 million) had completed less than 8 years of schooling and 6 in 10 (about 37 million) had completed 4 years of high school.

  Many will have gone further. Nearly 1 in 6 persons, 25 years and over (about 13 million) will have completed at least four years of college, as against 1 in 7, or about 8.5 million, in 1968. Moreover, in 1980 about 9.2 million adults, 1 in 8, will have some college training, though less than four years.

  Not only is there a much greater degree of educational attainment, but there is also a greater degree of cultural homogeneity. 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. In 1950, about 54 percent of the blue-collar labor force (skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled) were either foreign-born or of foreign or mixed parentage. By 1960, this figure had fallen to 26 percent.14It is likely to fall further.

  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. To what extent does this change create the basis for a new consciousness or a new militancy? Those entering into plant and factory work today step into conditions far better than those their parents experienced. But, as we all know from generational experiences the gains of the past count little in the present. The crucial point is that however much an improvement there may have been in wage rates, pension conditions, supervision, and the like, the conditions of work themselves—the control of pacing, the assignments, the design and layout of work—are still outside the control of the worker himself. 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. To what extent, then, the entry of a new, young, educated work force creates a very different psychology and new kinds of demands about the character of work, remains to be seen.

  In a modern society, few groups remain unorganized for long. The professionals in the United States—engineers, doctors, teachers—are organized. These are primarily professional organizations, though in the case of teachers in the large urban centers, a number of these unions are affiliated with the AFL-CIO. The major question in the next two decades will be the character of these organizations: will they retain their traditional guild form, or become more militant and aggressive labor unions? One force that will seek to turn these organizations or newly formed professional groups in a more militant direction is the younger professionals, particularly in medicine and community-affairs activities, many of whom learned their organizational skills in the student protest movements of the 1960s. In addition, these professionals are increasingly subject to budgetary constraints, and while the income of professionals rose steadily in the 1960s, in the next decade that rise will be levelling off. Much depends, in this instance, on government policy, particularly its willingness or unwillingness to fund social programs, and on the extent of unemployment among intellectuals. The organization of professionals will be a major feature of post-industrial society, as the organization of skilled and semi-skilled workers was characteristic of industrial society. What form these organizations will take remains to be seen.

  THE BLACKS

  In an essay of almost a decade ago, in which I formulated the theme of the post-industriad 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 gne can sketch a rough picture of class society in the United States thirty years from now. ... By that criterion, thirty years hence, class society in the United States will be predominantly color society.”15

  The situation today is not as bleak as it was a dozen years ago. Blacks were 4 percent of the professional and technical group in 1960, but the proportion had almost doubled to 7 percent in 1970. They were 5 percent of the clerical group in 1960, and 8 percent in 1970. Thus, in these cey sectors, the pace of gain has been striking. But the total numbers are still small. Only 22 percent of black males are professional, technical, and clerical$ as against 43 percent of white males. (Thirty-six percent of bdack females are professional, technical, and clerical, as against 64 percent of white females.) Eighteen 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 white16

  The single largest group of black workers are semi%skilled (28 percent of the males, as against 19 percent of white males). 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 slgw, particularly in the construction and skilled trades (14 percent of blacks are skilled as agaanst 21 percent of whites) in upgrading black workers. Whether t`e 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 political indepefdence of the blacks—at least of the top leadership —is one of the realities of the politics of the seventies.

  WOMEN

  The fact is that a service economy is very largely a female-centered economy—if one considers clerical, sales, teaching, health technicians, and similar occupations. In 1960, 80 percent of all workers in the goods-producing area were men, and 20 percent women; conversely, in the services sectors only 54 percent of all workers were men and 46 percent women. 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.17

  The fact that the service industries are so largely unorganized creates a special problem for t`e labor movement in its relatiof to women. In 1958, women unionists totaled 3.1 million, or 18.2 percent of total union members`ip; by 1968, their number had rasen to 3.7 million, or 19.5 percent of all members. During these 10 years, unions added over 2 million new members to their rancs, and women made up 30 percent of that increase; since 1958, 600,000 more women in the United States have joined unions.

  During those same ten qears, however, the number of
woeen in the labor force grew from 32.7 percent to 37.1 percent. T`us the ratio of women union members to employed women has declined over the decade from 13.8 to 12.5 percent. Moreover, most women are grouped into a few unions. A considerable number are blue collar 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. The bulk of the others are in communication-workers, teachers, and government-workers unions.

  For a variety of sociological reasons, women have been more difficult to organize than men. Fewer women have thought of their jobs as “permanent,” and have been less interested in unions; many female jobs 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. 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.

  THE NON-PROFIT SECTOR

  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; those which handle distribution and trade, as well as finance and insurance; those which provide professional and business services, such as data-processing; those which derive from leisure demands, such as travel, entertainment, sports, recreation, including the media; and those which deal with communal services, particularly health, education, and government. The latter has been the largest-growing area since the end of World War II.

  The growth, in effect, has been taking place in the non-profit sector of society. In 1929, according to estimates of Eli Ginzberg and his associates, the non-profit sector accounted for 12.5 percent of all goods and services purchased. By 1963 it stood above 27 percent, and it is still rising.18In 1929, 4,465,000 persons were employed by government and non-profit institutions, or about 9.7 percent of the labor force. By 1960, 13,583,000, or 20 percent of everyone employed, were in the non-profit sector; at that time, the number employed by government was 8,300,000. Government employment has risen rapidly (a rate of 4.5 percent a year), reaching 11.8 million in 1968, and an estimated 16.8 million in 1980. (While there are no immediate figures for the rise of the remaining non-profit sector, principally health, one can assume a substantial rise there, too.)

  More important, the non-profit sector is the major area of net new jobs, i.e. actual expansion as against replacement. From 1950 to 1960, the non-profit sector accounted for more than 50 percent of new jobs, and in the period from i960 to 1970, government alone contributed one-third of the new jobs in the service areas.

  Are there significant differences in the ethos of those engaged in the profit and non-profit sectors? There have been almost no studies in this field. Yet, since the heart of the non-profit sector is health, education, and research, which by 1975 will comprise about 6,000,000 persons,19 one can assume there is 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 that of the society as a whole. It is in this area that the greatest pressure for social change will come.

  THE “NEW” WORKING CLASS

  In a recent dialogue, the romantic French Marxist, Regis Debray, tested Chile’s President Salvador Allende on his revolutionary purity:

  DEBRAY: . . . 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.

  ALLENDE: The proletariat; that is, the working class.

  But the problem for an advanced industrial society is: What is the working class? Is it the “factory worker,” the “industrial worker,” or, even more widely, the “blue-collar worker?” (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. The classical proletariat consisted of factory workers whose class-consciousness was created by the conditions of their work.) But even at its most comprehensive definition, the blue-collar group is in an increasing minority in advanced or post-industrial society. Is the proletariat, or the working class, all those who work for wages and salaries? But that so expands the concept as to distort it beyond recognition. (Are all managers workers? Are supervisors and administrators workers? Are highly paid professors and engineers workers?)

  For a long time, Marxist sociologists simply ignored the issue, and argued that the “inevitable” economic crises of capitalism would force a revolutionary conflict in which “the working class” would win. 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 it was in this sense that C. Wright Mills also used the idea in his 1951 book, White Collar. 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. 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.’ Within the whole structure of power, they are dependent variables. Estimates of their political tendencies, therefore, must rest upon larger predictions of the manner and outcomes of the struggles of business and labor.”20

  The German sociologists, and Mills, had been writing principally about managerial, administrative, and clerical personnel. But when it became evident, particularly in the 1950s, that there was a large-scale transformation in the character of skilled work itself, with the expansion of engineering and technicians in the advanced technological fields—aerospace, computers, oil refining, electronics, optics, polymers—and that this new stratum was becoming occupationally more important as well as replacing the skilled workers as the crucial group in the industrial process, the problem of sociological definition became crucial.

  The first Marxist to seek a theoretical formulation was the independent French radical Serge Mallet, who, in a series of articles in Les Temps Modernes and the magazine La Nef in 1959, 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. These studies, plus a long essay, “Trade Unionism and Industrial Society,” were published in France in 1963 under the title La Nouvelle Classe Ouvrière (The New Working Class). Though untranslated, 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). 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. The breakup of the SDS left the tendency without a home.

  The Mallet thesis is quite simple. 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. 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. Thus they are “reduced” to the role of a highly trained working class. 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. 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 de
gree of productivity of these enterprises. 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.” It is true that there exists between them and the masses of workers an appreciable difference in the level of living. 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. It is central, of course, to the writing of Thorstein Veblen (little known to the French), who, in The Theory of Business Enterprises (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. 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 potential of the production engineer as the indispensable “General Staff of the industrial system.”