By Nikil Saval
The Chronicle of Higher Education - April 14, 2014
But this white collar book: ah, there’s a book for the people; it is
everybody’s book. … It is all about the new little man in the big world
of the 20th century. It is about that little man and how he lives and
what he suffers and what his chances are going to be; and it is also
about the world he lives in, has to live, doesn’t want to live in. It
is, as I said, going to be everybody’s book. For, in truth, who is not a
little man?
—C. Wright Mills,
letter to his parents (1946)
In or around the year 1956, the percentage of American workers who
were "white collar" exceeded the percentage that were blue collar for
the first time. Although labor statistics had long foretold this
outcome, what the shift meant was unclear, and little theoretical work
had prepared anyone to understand it. In the preceding years, the United
States had quickly built itself up as an industrial powerhouse,
emerging from World War II as the world’s leading source of manufactured
goods. Much of its national identity was predicated on the idea that it
made things. But thanks in part to advances in automation, job growth
on the shop floor had slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, the world of
administration and clerical work, and new fields like public relations
and marketing, grew inexorably—a paperwork empire annexing whole swaths
of the labor force, as people exchanged assembly lines for metal desks,
overalls for gray-flannel suits.
It’s hard to retrieve what this moment must have been like: An
America that was ever not dominated by white-collar work is pretty
difficult to recall. Where cities haven’t fallen prey to
deindustrialization and blight, they have gentrified with white-collar
workers, expelling what remains of their working classes to peripheries.
The old factory lofts, when occupied, play host to meeting rooms and
computers; with the spread of wireless technology, nearly every surface
can be turned into a desk, every place into an office. We are a nation
of paper pushers.
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