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Productive Labor

Marielis Rosado
September 18, 2016
SOC 32014
Productive & Unproductive Labor
In “The Making of the Working class”, by Harry Braveman, he talks about unproductive and productive labor. As it was hard to understand what the difference is between both, he goes in details about it. Productive and unproductive labor is not based on the business, career, or performance but it is based on the labor that it produces and when their productivity of labor remains stable or unstable throughout the process. Those traits define productive and unproductive labor. Productive labor is very much needed for any society, as it is the type of labor that will bring more opportunities and positive outcomes to any society.
As mentioned in the passage, productive labor could be those jobs that most people do not consider productive due to their performance. Jobs like clerical work and transportation are part of productive labor. Part of productive labor is useful objects, useful values and useful services. These are important for the production or that type of labor to remain being needed. Productive labor is considered productive because the business only continues to rise very much. Due to it continuous rising in labor these business are able to offer more job opportunities.
I was surprised to see what some of the unproductive labor are. One of the unproductive labors is construction. After reading the passage I was able to understand why construction would be part of unproductive labor. Construction jobs is not always steady, today you might have a lot of work but then in a week there might not be any projects to need workers to finish the job. Unproductive labors are labors that keep rising and declining. Unproductive labor is unsteady jobs due to the rising and declining of the labor, due to this it causes a lot of workers to get terminated. Many workers end up unemployed due to these unproductive labors; the unemployed rates keep rising and declining.
The differences between both productive and unproductive labor is big, as productive labor is the type of job you can count on for producing and improving for both the individual and the business itself. Productive labor has more opportunities and as mentioned above it has nothing to do with the career. It was surprising to see that there are unproductive labors in every neighborhood which many of us do not consider unproductive. As we all would just like productive labor in our neighborhood I believe both, productive and unproductive labor, go hand in hand.