å Monday, September 19th, 2016

Harry Braverman speaks about, how the capitalist true purpose is to boost the productivity and lower the cost of the labor force. This is achieved by breaking down each job to its simplest form to be able to maximize its profit. As the capitalist system needs to create division of labor, it does so by detailing the workmanship to the simplest form possible, as it aims to destroy craftsmanship.

In “ The Making of the working Class” The distinction that Harry Braverman is making between productive and unproductive work is that the capitalist system has used science and technology to make it possible to increase productivity and profit. This in turn created a shift that lessened the need for skilled workers. Due to this shift, in return created the need for robotic unskilled workers. As in the sample of the textile mills, with the industrialization of it’s manufacturing it lost their skilled workers. The machines were able to mass produce and increase its outputs. Its skilled workers were no longer needed and are then forced to go into unproductive work fields. This was usually in the accounting, banking or marketing firms that were considered to be very controlled industries, the workers there were considered cheap labor and very easily replaceable by other workers.

During our conversations in class, we had a discussion that related to this weeks’ reading. One of the comments made during that conversation was in relation to creating a workforce of “doers” and “thinkers”. “Doers” representing the workers who provide manual labor and/or create thing with their hands. “Thinkers” being represented by the workers who use more of the intangible elements of labor that do not require maximum physical effort. In Braverman’s “The Making of the U.S. Working Class” we tend to dive a bit deeper into this discussion and analyze the development of the workforce in the U.S. and the authors’ perspective on how it works.

It was interesting but not surprising to understand how the workforce is technically divided into categories and then sub categories.  The understanding being that while the working class is broken down into categories of sex, region and race, the underlying goal is to separate them into one of 2 categories. the “employers” and the “employees”. In order for this to work within our society, the workforce has to be created in the fashion that the employers provide the materials and goods, while the employees provide the manual labor that produce the product. He also mentions how not introducing education to the masses of laborers solidifies the separation of these classes and keeps the rich richer, and the work to the side of the laborers.

According to Baverman, the idea of capitalism is the reasoning why these two categories exist. He argues that the goal of producing labor and creating the workforce is to gain capital. The creation of a labor workforce is to maintain employer’s production of capital. As I read into the article, I argue that employees do not reap the benefits of capital but are conditioned to understand that labor is the basis of their work ethic and survival. He uses our history here in the U.S. and slavery to help us understand this ideal as slaves were used as free labor and the land owners benefited through their production.

It just seems interesting to me how the idea of capitalism and the creation of working classes seems to always end in how society benefits from the struggles of others. We tend to see in this article that the privileged, who have access to resources, property and capital still grow off the sweat and tears of the individuals who breaks their backs to survive. Leaves me to wonder if there will ever be a shift in the construction of the working class in the near future.

In the making of The U.S Working Class, Braverman describes how the working “class” has been formed over the centuries into different categories. We see in history, during the times of slavery, fewer percentages of actual labors (mainly because the laborers were slaves). As time went on, those slaves eventually became owners of their own farms. Braverman then gives statistics on how the small percentage of actual workers began to increase verses the amount of entrepreneur or business owners. When we think of the business owners who are sometimes also as skilled as the actually people they employ, we still are used to separating them from the idea that they are workers. This thought has been created over time as a social way of looking at people as two separate things and giving them separate titles (employer and employee). This hierarchy is one of the social aspects of the way the working class was labeled.

Braverman describes the methods of training over time and the shift in how learning a trade or craft would typically take many years of apprenticeship. Now, it has become standard to make jobs simple so that an employee would be able to be trained within a couple of days, weeks or months. This has created a culture in which people in the working class are more like robots that can be changed out without creating a disruption in the entire operation.

In order for the capitalistic methods of society to continue, productive work must be controlled. One example was with the reclassification of gender roles in the work place. For example, socially classifying certain types of jobs as a woman’s job my perhaps control the pay grade, keep the level of skill at an entry level to make the person on the job as replaceable as possible. In productive work such as businesses that produce goods that may in return benefit the entire society or in return bring money to the government are forms of productive work.

Some examples that Braveman uses as unproductive work are those that do not bring the government and profit, such as any type of public assistance programs or benefits to banks and insurance companies. These industries have a large number of working class people, but these industries are likely to have workers who are less skilled therefore paid less

All of these changes in the working class system have contributed in some way to increase the power of capitalism. Braverman is explaining how the working class is somehow steering the direction of the working class into positions and labels that make the working class replaceable. These small changes have been occurring for hundreds of years are all contributions to the creation of the U.S working class and enforcing a capitalistic society.