The New Working Class? White-Collar Workers and Their Organizations: A Reader

The New Working Class? White-Collar Workers and Their Organizations: A Reader

In recent decades there has been a considerable relative decline in the numbers of manual workers in production industries who have in the past formed the backbone of trade union organisation. In most western countries, ‘white-collar’ employees now constitute roughly half of the labour force. In many cases unionism among such workers has long been weak, and ambivalently related to the traditional labour movement; but lately there have been signs of change in both respects, and these are examined by Richard Hyman and Robert Price in The New Working Class?

Such writers as Marx and Weber provided early interpretations of the rise of white-collar employment, and the insights of both have been extensively applied by post war sociologists. Debate has centered, firstly, on the class position of the new occupational groups of technicians, clerical and administrative workers, and salaried managers. Are their interests opposed to those of the manual working class or convergent with them? More fundamentally, do all those workers conventionally termed ‘white-collar’ actually share a common class identity? Secondly, what factors inhibit or encourage unionization among these workers? What explains the upsurge of organization and militancy in recent years? How far is the character of white-collar unionism distinctive?

Richard Hyman and Robert Price have assembled, often from sources inaccessible to most students, the most important contributions to the existing literature on both sets of issues. The editors provide an explanatory introduction to the readings, offering detailed critical guidance to the empirical background and the theoretical controversies which underlie the debates on this significant topic.

Richard Hyman and Robert Price 

Macmillan Press

1983

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English

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