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Segmented Work, Divided Workers
The historical transformation of labor in the United States
AUTHORS:David M. Gordon Richard Edwards Michael Reich DATE PUBLISHED: May 1988

Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States
by David M. Gordon, Michael Reich, Richard Cluff Edwards

Segmented Work, Divided Workers presents a restatement and expansion of the theory of labor segmentation by three of its founding scholars. The authors argue that divisions with the US working class are rooted in a segmentation of jobs since World War II. They explain the origins of job segmentation through a careful and systematic historical analysis of changes in the labor process and the structure of labor markets since the early 1800s. this analysis builds, in turn, upon hypotheses about successive stages in the history of capitalist development. Segmented Work, Divided Workers integrates this economics analysis with a careful historial appreciation of the complexity of working-class experience in the United States.

A. Preface: This book examines the political and economic divisions among workers in the US. This division stops any attempt for a broad labor movement in this country. The term “segmentation” is chosen mainly because it suggests that there were more than 2 important divisions in the labor market (as the “dual labor market hypothesis” accepted). This book addresses two main questions: “Where did labor segmentation come from in the United States?” and “Why did it develop?”
B. Historiographical innovations in the study of labor: This book offers a “detailed historical hypothesis (39)”. It does not offer a theory for all capitalist countries, only the US.
1. These are discontinuous stages, and not the evolutionary model like Lee and Passell offer.
2. Many labor historians focus only on the workers effort to organize themselves. A very Marxist approach. This book focuses on the combined effort of capitalists and labor.
3. Institutionalist studies of labor divisions and segmentation focus on union bargaining, and job skills. This study emphasizes the processes of capitalist development which led to segmentation.
C. The historical transformation of labor
1. Main argument: The one key fact is that “The American working class is internally divided among many economic, political, and cultural dimensions. (2)” One cannot understand these cleavages without understanding the effects of “labor segmentation.” This current crisis is not the first crisis in capitalism. There have been three major crises in US capitalism, each resulting in a major structural change in the organization of work. Labor segmentation is the 3rd of these major changes. The “overlapping stages of initial proletarianization, homogenization, and segmentation have shaped the development of the labor processes and labor markets in the US.” Each of these stages crystallized with an economic crisis, like the current one. The crisis is resolved through the emergence of a new institutional structure. Class conflict is a central issue in the emergence of the new institutional structure.
2. Current explanations of working class divisions:
a) Postindustrial tendencies have blurred the divisions between capitalists and workers.
b) Braverman: The “wait and see” approach. Although workers seem divided now, the continued degradation of labor will eventually bring the workers together to unite.
c) Gutman: The “new social history.” The working class was not created all at once in the United States and wage workers came from various racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Waves of immigration brought antagonism among workers instead of solidarity. The problem with this is that it does not explain why the labor movement was unable to develop a working-class culture that would overcome these divisions.
d) Institutional labor economists: Unions have produced a cooperative and well-working environment through collective bargaining.
3. The hypothesis here is that “The disunity of the U.S. working class persists in large part as a result of objective divisions among workers in their production experiences; these objective divisions constitute both a consequence of continuing capitalist development in the United States and a barrier to a unified anticapitalist working-class movement. (8)”
4. The US working class is examined here by examining the interactions between;
a) Long swings in economic activity. These are periods of about 25 years that show vigorous economic activity, followed by an equal period of stagnation.
b) Social structure of accumulation. This is the specific institutional environment within which the capitalist accumulation process is organized. This includes production, distribution, credit. Each long swing is associate with a distinct structure of accumulation.
c) The labor process and labor markets.
5. These interactions lead to the hypothesis that 3 structural changes have affected the labor process within each of the 3 long swings of capitalist development.
a) Exploration. Beginning during the stagnation period of a long swing. Capitalist begin to explore new methods of labor management.
b) Consolidation. The exploration causes a period of rapid capital accumulation. The workers resist the explorations and are eventually consolidated.
c) Decay. Stagnation, crisis and workers struggles begin to underline the existing structures of the labor process.
D. Long swings and stages of capitalism
1. Review of the theoretical perspective of this book: historical materialist, Marxist
a) Capitalism is the wage-labor system of commodity production for profit. The owners of the means of production (capitalists) employ the producers (workers).
b) Five tendencies of capitalist development (illuminated by a historical materialist perspective)
(1) Capitalist accumulation wants to expand the boundaries of the capitalist system
(2) Capitalist accumulation increases the size of corporations and concentrates the control of ownership in fewer hands
(3) The accumulation of capital spreads wage labor as the prevalent system of production
(4) Capitalist accumulation continually changes the labor process by the introduction of improved technologies.
(5) Workers respond to the capitalist accumulation with their own activities and struggles.
c) An understanding of long swings and the stages of capitalism are essential for understanding capitalist development. This takes a middle ground between Marxist historical determination, and recent works like E.P. Thompson who concentrate only n the workers lives.
(1)
E. Summary of argument: The thesis is that “three major structural transformations have shaped the labor process and labor markets in the United States. (228)” This summary is offered because the “detailed analysis” is “difficult for some readers to digest. (228)”
1. Initial proletarianization: This accompanied the development of capitalist production in the US. While this trend continues to the present, the initial phase lasted from 1820 to 1890. This was the period when wage labor became predominant. The control of the work varied among employers--some employed strict supervision, others let the workers control their job. Competition played a small role in determining wages. Skills were passed on from older to younger workers. This period in the US is different from other countries because it emerged without a feudal past. So, workers were drawn from native white male agricultural workers, young native women and children, immigrants, and artisans. Innovations in extending the flow of immigration helped consolidate the initial process of industrialization by the 1850s. There was then a period of rapid growth between 1850 and 1870. Then problems in productivity began.
a) The percentage of the labor force that worked in “goods production” (manufacturing, mining, and construction sectors) increased by 2/3s.
b) The labor process remained virtually the same during these years. There was no increasing output per worker. Output increased by increasing the number of workers.
2. Homogenization: This overall period extends from 1870 to WWII. The crisis of the 1870s revealed the insufficiency of the untransformed labor process. The entrepreneurial profits were stagnating. More and more jobs were reduced to a common, semiskilled operation. Control over the labor process was with the employers and foremen. The control used was direct supervision , or pacing to “drive” the workers. The labor market became more competitive. Skills were much less controlled by the workers. The response to this stagnation was the increased use of mechanization, the greater use of foremen to supervise workers, and decreasing reliance on skilled labor. Consolidation occurred through the merger movement at the turn of the century. These new large corporations undercut unified worker opposition. They did this through centralized personnel departments, cooperation with craft unions, and manipulation of ethnic differences among industrial workers. The major decay of the drive system took place in the Depression.
a) From 1870 to 1900 net surplus (revenue retained by manufacturers after wage and salary were covered) fell. Thus, surplus rises in the early periods of a new structure of labor management and falls after a long period of this management.
b) Employers responded to the crisis by a homogenization of the labor process. The key to homogenization was mechanization. Mechanization transformed the labor process. The workers began to encounter more equipment on the job (increase of capital/labor ratio). This ratio fell during the depression.
tags radna snaga u americi, amerika, američki laborizam laburizam, laboristički laburistički pokret, laboristi laburisti, kapitalizam, proletarijat, akumulacija, stagnacija, monopolistički kapital