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Deskilling, upskilling and job polarization

Importance of skills: standards of living + equality in the work place
Debate: is capitalism going to raise or diminish living standards?

Three views on capitalist employment: (which explain the historical direction of skill change)
1
...

Skill: job content and task-specific training
Mechanization and management control
2
...

3
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A critic of the growing degradation of work: the deskilling of job
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- Neomarxist: he applied the Marx’s theories: workers are constrained economically by the absence of alternatives to sell
their labour powers to employers
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There may be unequal power and potential antagonistic relations




May lead to low effort from workers
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Problem of labour control: workers sell their labour time but not effort
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The concerns with
labour control dictated the choice of technology
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Assembly line (the speed dictate efficiency)


This lead to deskilling


Main forces deriving deskilling
1
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Taylorism: as the key strategy for labour control “how best to control alienated labour”
F
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Taylor (1856) – American engineer who worked on efficiency ! scientific management
He argued that managers should study the organization of work for optimization
Taylorism
Braverman distinguished 3 components:
1
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Break down process into its simple parts
(Knowledge in hands of managers)
3
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McDonald’s brothers in 1948 divided the food preparation into separate tasks performed by different workers
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Eric Schlosser “the new division of labour meant that a worker only had to be taught how to perform one task
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Deskilling, upskilling and job polarization

Upskilling
Daniel Bell
th
- Harvard sociologist who focused on America in the 20 century
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Due to technological change, such as the use of computers
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Change of societies (continuous change)


Argument:
- Idealized service work
- misjudged the sociological significance of professional work
- neglected the gender dimension of work
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Few people argue to have a dominant position towards upskilling or deskilling
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The difference is the sectors they were
created on
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Economists: due to technology ! they assume that wages reflect skills
2
...


Eg
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multitasking

There is in fact evidence of both upskilling and deskilling ! which lead to the emergence of a polarization of skill thesis
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There is little growth in mid-level jobs
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Vidal saw a 15% decrease in low-skill job share in the USA from 1960 to 2005
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Yet, there was an increase in the share of low wage jobs, implying
that there should be another explanation
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With
strong unions, Fordist firms provided relatively high wages for relatively low-skill jobs
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Huge increase in 1908s
Main economic reason: SBTC (skill-biased technical change)
the development of personal computers and related information technologies increased demand for skilled workers
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Fundamental problems for the SBTC:
- Wage inequality stabilized in the 1990s
- Fails to explain the closing of the gender gap and the stability of the racial wage gap
- Inequality trends differ across similar countries (eg
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Alternative explanations of income inequality:
- Institutions: variation across national institutional contests
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