Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Rating:
Summary: Marxists, Communists, Extreme Leftists-this book is for you
Review: It was a great torture to plow through Braverman's Marxist diatribes. An example: "...the detailed division of labor subdivides humans, and while the subdivision of society may enhance the individual and the species, the subdivision of the individual, when carried on without regard to human capabilities and needs, is a crime against the person and against humanity." Wow. If you enjoyed that passage, this book may be for you.

It is Braverman's opinion that the poor fellow who works to make straight pins would be oh so much more happy if he was capable of making the entire straight pin instead of just knowing how to put the head on the pin. It seems that in breaking his job down industry has robbed him of the glory of producing an entire straight pin. The fulfillment of creating the entire pin is lost to him forever because of the evil, dehumanizing, capitalistic management. Woe to the worker.

It's the same old story. Leftists complain and complain about the state of things but cannot offer a better alternative. My favorite current day lament: Jobs have been "dumbed-down" too much, but oh no, these dumbed-down jobs are being outsourced to other countries. Woe. Woe. Woe.

Unless you have no choice and this book is assigned to you by a marxist professor, my advice is RUN AWAY!

Rating:
Summary: Updating labor theory for the age of high technology
Review: Labor and Monopoly Power, by Harry Braverman, brings basic Marxist labor theory up to date for the modern age. Though written 25 years ago, Braverman's work is the ideal guideline to understanding the age of information technology. Braverman expertly explodes the smug myths of "knowledge age" boosters by drawing the parallels to earlier industrial technology. The major misapprehension exploded is the one that says workplace automation demands higher skills and upgrades jobs. Braverman, through developing and applying the ideas not only of Marx, but of management proponents such as Babbage, Taylor and Bright, makes a convincing case for the opposite. Computers, like other technology before them, are being applied in ways that expose two objectives: (1) the reduction of the absolute numbers of workers, and (2) the reduction of skills among the remaining workers. Braverman's 1974 book was prophetic in that it described longstanding capitalist relationships that, applied vigorously since that time, have led to increasing income inequality in America.

Rating:
Summary: Technological determinism
Review: This book is the classic in the field of labor process. Marx put the labor process at the center of his masterpiece, ¡®The Capital¡¯. But since then, not much, if any, studies were done in Marxist schools. This book filled the temporal gap between Marx and the 20th century in the Marxist tradition. The author focused on the labor process under the Fordism. Braverman illustrates convincingly how the work, under the discipline of scientific management or Taylorism, becomes fragmented, dull, and repetitive tasks. The work is degraded. There has been not much objection to this argument. But when it comes to technology, things are different. His argument has too much smell of determinism. The theme of this book could put in this way: how the peculiar technological change in Fordism affected the feature of work and the differentiation of working class. No dispute. But his prophecy on technological change seems to go too far: every new technology just destroys our jobs and degrades the work. This kind of grim image has proliferated with the high-tech wave of the 1990s. Should we listen to such a forecast? I don¡¯t think so.
Braverman made a wrong calculation. In the larger picture, technological innovations, driven towards cost-saving and enhancing efficiency, bring job growth with revamped competitiveness of the industry and economy-wide. For example, in the US economy, when the IT investment leaped up in service sector during the 1980s, unemployment rate skyrocketed. But despite continuous downsizing and rapid diffusion of IT, unemployment rate fell sharply in the 1990s. High rates in EU area and Japan should be attributed to the factors of business cycle or rigid labor market. If Harry Braverman took the helm, the economy would end up in bankruptcy to nobody¡¯s interest. It¡¯s the picture of France or Spain, Italy. Even in Italy, the technologically innovative north faces labor shortage not unemployment. Here we can hardly see any relationship between new technology and overall unemployment rate.
Sure. Every new technology makes old one obsolete, so it lead to deskilling of labor. But in turn, it entails its own skilled labor. Since the 1970s, the manufacturing sector experienced substantial technological upgrading. It resulted in the shift of labor market composition: jobs in manufacturing, less-educated work declined. Investment in earlier technologies negatively impacted mainly low-skilled production workers, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s, whereas investment in IT negatively impacted mainly low-skilled white-collar workers in the 1980s and 1990s. Resulting bloody downsizing and restructuring have decimated so many middle-paying jobs in factories and offices. Workers who lost those jobs, especially older workers, are likely fall into lower-paying jobs or, facing long-term unemployment, retire from the labor force. But all kinds of new jobs are being created as the old ones disappear, although the new jobs go to new entrants or younger workers moving up the job ladder.
Technophobe alarmists gain popularity because whatever the effect of creative destruction might be, the impact on employment is hardly painless. Technology is important. However, what is technology at all? It made no sense, were it not run by people. The impacts of technology on work are not simple, not necessarily direct, and cannot be considered in isolation. As seen above, their relation is not clear but spurious at best. The real mechanism lies in political and economic contexts that govern the conditions of work. Thus, when we talk about technology, we cannot forget about all those other human factors affect its use and what it does to the lives of workers, employers and citizens