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Assignment 3 Braverman

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.