Summary of Chapter 20: A Final Note on Skill
Braverman notes that his argument in this book goes against the “popular view” of his time, that increased mechanization leads to an increase in skilled work, because there is a need for training to use the machinery.
The concepts of “skill,” “training,” and “education” are themselves sufficiently vague, and a precise investigation of the arguments which are used to support the thesis of “upgrading"” is further hampered by the fact that they have never been made the subject of a coherent and systematic presentation. We can grapple with the issue only by attempting to give coherence to what is essentially an impressionistic theory, one which is obviously considered so self-evident as to stand above the need for demonstration. (294)
He criticizes discussion of “average skill” in this regard, when it is really an issue of polarization.
The mass of workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labor process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers.
“For most of those who hold it, the ‘upgrading’ thesis seems to rest upon two marked trends. The first is the shift of workers from some major occupational groups into others; the second is the prolongation of the average period of education” (295). This is “a splendid example of the manner in which conventional social science accepts carefully tailored appearances as a substitute for reality.”
B not surprisingly demolishes the argument for the first trend (that workers have been “upgraded” into higher skill levels) by showing that the supporting statistics have been created retroactively “based not upon a study of the occupational tasks involved, as is generally assumed by the users of the categories, but upon a simple mechanical criterion, in the fullest sense of the word” (297). To illustrate this he gives a great example of the difference between horse-driving and automobile-driving occupations:
Let us take as an example the categories of teamster on the one side, and the operators of motor vehicles (such as truckdrivers, chauffeurs and taxidrivers, routemen and deliverymen, etc.) on the other. These categories are important because that of teamster was, before World War I, one of the largest of occupational groups, while the drivers of various sorts are, taken together, one of the largest today. The former are classified, retroactively, among the “unskilled” laborers, while the latter, because of their connection with machinery, are classed as operatives and hence “semi-skilled.” When the Edwards scale is applied in this fashion, a skill upgrading takes place as a consequence of the displacement of horse-drawn transport by motorized. Yet it is impossible to see this as a true comparison of human work skills. In the circumstances of an earlier day, when a largely rural population learned the arts of managing horses as part of the process of growing up, while few as yet knew how to operate motorized vehicles, it might have made sense to characterize the former as part of the common heritage and thus no skill at all, while driving, as a learned ability, would have been thought of as a “skill.” Today, it would be more proper to regard those who are able to drive vehicles as unskilled in that respect at least, while those who can care for, harness, and manage a team of horses are certainly the possessors of a marked and uncommon ability. In reality, this way of comparing occupational skill leaves much to be desired, depending as it does on relativistic or contemporary notions. But there is certainly little reason to suppose that the ability to drive a motor vehicle is more demanding, requires longer training or habituation time, and thus represents a higher or intrinsically more rewarding skill than the ability to manage a team of horses. (297-8)
It is only in the world of census statistics, and not in terms of direct assessment, that an assembly line worker is presumed to have greater skill than a fisherman or oysterman, the forklift operator greater skill than the gardener or groundskeeper, the machine feeder greater skill than the longshoreman, the parking lot attendant greater skill than the lumberman or raftsman. (298)
The “semi-skilled” category and descriptions barely differs from the “unskilled”. The issue of some required training is raised, but B points out that even “unskilled” job typically require some training. The operative/assembly line jobs, which the statisticians take as “semi-skilled” and thus an upgrade for formerly “unskilled” workers, are typically easier to learn [and thus in actuality less skilled, per Braverman] than the jobs that are being left behind. B denounces this as the “imaginary creation of higher categories of skill by nomenclatural exercises” (300). He goes on to emphasize the range of skills represented in the category of “farm laborer,” contradicting contemporary sociologists who imagine that any movement of workers out of this category is an upgrade. Likewise, statisticians consider “service worker,” as well as clerical work, as higher categories than industrial operative or laborer, but Braverman has already pointed out in previous chapters how these categories obscure an actual deskilling and decrease in pay.
The reflex response which causes governmental and academic social scientists automatically to accord a higher grade of skill, training, prestige, and class position to any form of office work as against any and all forms of manual work is a tradition of long standing in American sociology which few have ventured to challenge. … The weight of the prejudice which rates all “white-collar” above all “blue-collar” work is such that the growth of the former at the expense of the latter is again taken as evidence of an increase in skill and training for which no real factual backing is required, so self-evident is this conclusion for the conventional wisdom (301-2)
Another argument the sociologists Braverman is arguing against put forward as evidence of increased skill is increased education. B points out this has to do with far more than work:
In this we see first of all the fact that the requirements of literacy and familiarity with the numbers system have become generalized throughout the society. The ability to read, write, and perform simple arithmetical operations is demanded by the urban environment, not just in jobs but also for consumption, for conformity to the rules of society and obedience to the law. Reading and figuring are, apart from all their other meanings, the elementary attributes of a manageable population, which could no more be sold, cajoled, and controlled without them than can symbols be handled by a computer if they lack the elementary characteristics of identity and position. Beyond this need for basic literacy there is also the function of the schools in providing an attempted socialization to city life, which now replaces the socialization through farm, family, community, and church which once took place in a predominantly rural setting. Thus the average length of schooling is generally higher for urban populations, and the shift of a population from farm to city brings with it, almost as an automatic function, an increase in the term of education. (302)
B recounts the history of how high school diplomas became widely seen as requirements for many jobs in the US, for reasons unrelated to the actual skill required in work, such as policies to control unemployment.
The postponement of school leaving to an average age of eighteen has become indispensable for keeping unemployment within reasonable bounds. In the interest of working parents (the two-parent-job-holding family having become ever more common during this period), and in the interest of social stability and the orderly management of an increasingly rootless urban population, the schools have developed into immense teen-sitting organizations, their functions having less and less to do with imparting to the young those things that society thinks they must learn. In this situation the content of education deteriorated as its duration lengthened. The knowledge imparted in the course of an elementary education was more or less expanded to fill the prevalent twelve-year educational sojourn, and in a great many cases school systems have difficulty in instilling in twelve years the basic skills of literacy and numbers that, several generations ago, occupied eight. This in turn gave a greater impetus to employers to demand of job applicants a high school diploma, as a guarantee – not always valid – of getting workers who can read. (304)
He goes into a lengthy and quite savage critique of the education system:
We cannot neglect the direct economic impact of the enlarged school system. Not only does the postponement of the school-leaving age limit the growth of recognized unemployment, but it also furnishes employment for a considerable mass of teachers, administrators, construction and service workers, etc. Moreover, education has become an immensely profitable area of capital accumulation for the construction industry, for suppliers of all sorts, and for a host of subsidiary enterprises. For all these reasons – which have nothing to do with either education or occupational training – it is difficult to imagine United States society without its immense “educational” structure.... The schools, as caretakers of children and young people, are indispensable for family functioning, community stability, and social order in general (although they fulfill even these functions badly). In a word, there is no longer any place for the young in this society other than school. Serving to fill a vacuum, schools have themselves become that vacuum, increasingly emptied of content and reduced to little more than their own form. Just as in the labor process, where the more there is to know the less the worker need know, in the schools the mass of future workers attend the more there is to learn, the less reason there is for teachers to teach and students to learn. In this more than in any other single factor – the purposelessness, futility, and empty forms of the educational system – we have the source of the growing antagonism between the young and their schools which threatens to tear the schools apart. (304-5)
Braverman turns to the central thesis of the book:
For the worker, the concept of skill is traditionally bound up with craft mastery – that is to say, the combination of knowledge of materials and processes with the practiced manual dexterities required to carry on a specific branch of production. The breakup of craft skills and the reconstruction of production as a collective or social process have destroyed the traditional concept of skill and opened up only one way for mastery over labor processes to develop: in and through scientific, technical, and engineering knowledge. But the extreme concentration of this knowledge in the hands of management and its closely associated staff organizations have closed this avenue to the working population. (307)
[And this is not because of any inherent aspect of technological development, but because of the particular shape this development takes in a capitalist system.]
B moves on to the next key point, which is what lessons this study of labor in monopoly capitalism can have for a post-capitalist society: “The worker can regain mastery over collective and socialized production only by assuming the scientific, design, and operational prerogatives of modern engineering; short of this, there is no mastery over the labor process.” This can to an extent build off the current educational system:
But such an education can take effect only if it is combined with the practice of labor during the school years, and only if education continues throughout the life of the worker after the end of formal schooling. Such education can engage the interest and attention of workers only when they become masters of industry in the true sense, which is to say when the antagonisms in the labor process between controllers and workers, conception and execution, mental and manual labor are overthrown, and when the labor process is united in the collective body which conducts it. (308)
In this light, B criticizes certain schemes for workplace democracy which he thinks do not go far enough in actually challenging control over the means of production:
The demands for “workers 'participation” and “workers’ control,” from this point of view, fall far short of the Marxist vision. The conception of a democracy in the workplace based simply upon the imposition of a formal structure of parliamentarism – election of directors, the making of production and other decisions by ballot, etc. – upon the existing organization of production is delusory. Without the return of requisite technical knowledge to the mass of workers and the reshaping of the organization of labor – without, in a word, a new and truly collective mode of production – balloting within factories and offices does not alter the fact that the workers remain as dependent as before upon “experts,” and can only choose among them, or vote for alternatives presented by them. Thus genuine workers’ control has as its prerequisite the demystifying of technology and the reorganization of the mode of production. This does not mean, of course, that the seizure of power within industry through demands for workers’ control is not a revolutionary act. It means rather that a true workers’ democracy cannot subsist on a purely formal parliamentary scheme.
In this context he remarks that the Soviet Union, which seized ownership from the bourgeoisie but did not institute true worker’s control in the workplace, was stuck in the “abortive first stage of revolution” from a truly Marxist perspective.
In contrast to B’s more hopeful vision, the current capitalist system separates knowledge and skill from labor, robbing humanity of “its birthright of conscious and masterful labor” (309). He ends by casting back to the previously noted, almost refreshingly naive directness of the Taylorians, who had explained that under Scientific Management there is in fact no “unskilled” labor, because all workers will have been trained to carry out their specific tasks:
It is this conception that lies behind the shabby nominal sociology in which the sociologists find “upgrading” in the new names given to classifications by the statisticians. “Training a worker,” wrote Frank Gilbreth, “means merely enabling him to carry out the directions of his work schedule. Once he can do this, his training is over, whatever his age.” Is this not a perfect description of the mass of jobs in modern industry, trade, and offices?
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