The New Worker

In the early years of industry, workers often labored to exhaustion and lived in poor conditions. This situation changed fundamentally in postwar Europe with the reduction of the blue-collar workforce and increased automation of industrial work. Manufacturing was simply cleaner and less dangerous than ever before. Meanwhile, a new working class of white-collar service personnel emerged. (See “Taking Measure: Postindustrial Occupational Structure, 1984.”) Its rise undermined economic distinctions based on the way a person worked, for those who performed service work or had managerial titles were not necessarily better paid than blue-collar laborers. The ranks of service workers swelled with researchers, planners, health care and medical staff, and government functionaries. As emphasis on service grew, entire categories of employees such as flight attendants devoted much of their skill to the psychological well-being of customers. By 1969, the percentage of service-sector employees had surpassed that of manufacturing workers in several industrial countries: 61.1 percent versus 33.7 percent in the United States, and 48.8 percent versus 41.1 percent in Sweden.

Postindustrial work life differed somewhat in the Soviet bloc. There, the percentage of farmers remained higher than in western Europe. A huge difference between professional occupations and those involving physical work also remained in socialist countries because of declining investment in advanced machinery and cleaner work processes. Men in both the U.S. and Soviet blocs generally earned higher pay and had better jobs than women. Uniquely in the Soviet bloc, however, women’s badly paying jobs included street cleaning, garbage collection, heavy labor on farms, general medicine, and dentistry. Somewhere between 80 and 95 percent of women in socialist countries worked, mostly under difficult conditions.

Farming changed as well, consolidating and becoming more scientific. Small landowners sold family plots to corporations engaged in agribusiness—that is, vast acreage devoted to commercial rather than peasant farming. Governments, farmers’ cooperatives, and planning agencies shaped the decision making of the individual farmer, while genetic research that yielded pest-resistant seeds and the skyrocketing use of pesticides, fertilizers, and machinery contributed to economic growth. For example, in the 1970s, a woman named Fernande Pelletier ran a hundred-acre farm in southwestern France, using the advice of a government expert to produce whatever foods might sell competitively in the Common Market and joining with other farmers in her region to buy heavy machinery. Agricultural prosperity required as much managerial and technical know-how as did success in other parts of the economy.