This is one of those books that ended up getting a good bit of press
because it was a novel way of looking at something that is an everyday thing.
The way that white collar workers do their work didn’t just happen that
way, but it was a result of deliberate choices – from the architecture of the
buildings that the work is done in to the furniture that the workers sit on. I
hadn’t thought too deeply about it, thinking that the way things are was just a
bit like the way things were, only with computers. I was wrong, and Saval
tracks the changes, focused on the United States from the industrial revolution
on. The white-collar worker has not been devoid of the standardization and
alienation that the blue-collar worker had and rebelled against. The white-collar
worker just never saw their white-collar chains; instead, they looked up,
hoping to move up the ladder (no matter how false that metaphor is or
was).
The potential for striving has, writ large, been the barrier to class
to recognition of the white-collar worker for generations. The lack of upward mobility
except for into the white-collar ranks is what led to unionism and workers
improving their lots. The myth of upward mobility in white-collar terms is a
form of social control that is not readily seen.
Saval tracks this, and it makes me think if this has been a deliberate
move. As production has been mechanized, there are fewer production workers and
more support staff in ancillary roles to production. As more workers move out
of production and the workforce is more and more professionalized, white-collar
membership is the mass of workers. It is the cube that keeps them apart and
alienated. Maybe it is a prison of sorts.
Me?
I’m not part of this at all.
My office has a door.
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