EMPLOYMENT, WHITE COLLAR (Social Science)

The concept of "white-collar" employment has been deeply embedded in ordinary language since the early twentieth century, denoting those who work in offices and apart from the dirtier "blue-collar" world of manual or physical labor. Historically, when the large majority of work was of the latter type and large corporations were just beginning to expand the ranks of office workers, the "white collar" symbolized new opportunities for upward mobility. Over time, however, an increasing economic complexity has created new categories and blurred the original lines, so that the term has gradually lost usefulness as an analytic concept. In 2006, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics declared that "the white collar and blue collar series are no longer useful categories and will be discontinued in 2007" in compiling its Employment Cost Index data.

For most of the twentieth century, white-collar employees were united by some perquisites that distinguished them in practice from blue-collar workers. For one thing, they were treated as nonproduction overhead and were, therefore, protected to a considerable extent from efforts to control production costs. White-collar workers were also paid salaries, rather than wages, and they generally enjoyed a high degree of job security. When layoffs were needed in production downturns, it was generally those on the factory floor who were let go.

White-collar employment grew substantially during the twentieth century, primarily at the expense of farm and manual workers. According to the Bureau of the Census data, white-collar workers increased from 17.6 percent of total employment in 1900 to 59.9 percent in 2002 (analyzed and reported by the Department for Professional Employees 2003, p. 5). But this general statement obscures many crucial distinctions.

CONCEPTUAL AND DEFINITIONAL INCONSISTENCIES

Even in its early usage, "white-collar" was less than coherent conceptually, covering at least three radically different types of workers. Clerical occupations were largely female, low-status, and low-wage; managers and professionals, on the other hand, were largely male and high in status and pay. A third piece of the white-collar picture was comprised of professionals, who themselves changed dramatically in status from largely independent workers in the early part of the twentieth century to primarily working for corporations at the end. There was practically no mobility among these three categories, and their wages varied widely. As unionization advanced in mid-century, for example, clerical workers were paid less than blue-collar workers, but managers and professionals were paid more.

This conceptual inconsistency has grown even more marked and complex with the growth of services and knowledge work. Beneath the seemingly precise counts in various surveys lie important dissimilarities in definitions. For example, most analysts believe there has been a significant growth in service work since the early 1900s, though they disagree on how to define it. Service work is, in some sense, different from the production of "things," which defines blue-collar work, but service workers are not necessarily white-collar. Building maintenance, for example, is certainly "manual" in nature, but it is not considered "office work."

The Census data calculate that about 14 percent of the U.S. workforce is in services, though an independent analysis by Marc Uri Porat in 1977 put the percentage at 30 percent, without counting "information workers." This is just one indication of the inconsistencies in the field.

Many analysts argue that a large economic discontinuity has occurred with the growth of "knowledge work" as a key part of the economy. There have been many attempts to count knowledge workers, starting with Fritz Machlup’s pioneering 1962 study. The estimates continue to vary rather widely, depending on what assumptions are made, but it is clear that adding this category produces a radically different view from that based on "collar." For instance, a recent study by Edward Wolff estimates that 15 percent of the workforce in 2000 were knowledge workers (producing new knowledge), 44 percent were data workers, 14 percent were service workers, and 24 percent were goods producers.

Percentages of workforce by "Collar" categories

Table 1

KEY THEORETICAL TREATMENTS

Theoretical treatments of white-collar work have struggled to identify consistent patterns, hampered in part by the diversity of definitions. One of the most famous, C. Wright Mills’s White Collar, focused on administrative staff in large corporations in the late 1940s. Mills found that these workers were caught in a psychology of "prestige striving," with no independent basis of identity, and he predicted they would remain a weak and confused force socially and politically. Marxist treatments, such as that of Nicos Poulantzas, have also often suggested that white-collar workers lack a clear class identity and can potentially be drawn to either side of the primary class divide. Some, however, have identified distinct and independent forms of white-collar consciousness: Barbara and John Ehrenreich sketched a new "professional-managerial class"; Robert Merton sketched a "bureaucratic personality" based on "strong sentiments which entail devotion to one’s duties, a keen sense of the limitations of one’s authority and competence, and methodical performance of routine activities"; and Olivier Zunz suggests that middle managers and professionals in America have adopted a distinctive "rational" ethic. Scholars of Nazi Germany, meanwhile, have suggested that white-collar workers provided a reactionary base for Hitler’s rise (Kocka 1980).

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: PRODUCTIVITY, UNIONIZATION, AND SECURITY

The growth of white-collar occupations has posed a new problem for economic analysts: The productivity of these workers is very hard to measure. There was deep concern in the 1980s about the slowdown of productivity growth, especially in the white-collar and technical ranks. However, this concern was accompanied by a debate about whether the slowdown was real or merely an artifact of measurement failure. Steven Roach, the chief economist at the investment bank Morgan Stanley, suggests that "it may well be that white-collar productivity improvements are simply much harder to come by than blue-collar ones" (Roach 1998).

A good deal of attention has been paid to the potential for unionization of this sector. Many scholars and practitioners have assumed that white-collar workers are resistant to unionism because of their identification with management, and for the first half of the twentieth century their unionization rate was apparently very low. In some countries, such as Sweden, however, white-collar employees (including managers) have formed strong unions of their own; and since the 1950s there has been a substantial growth of white-collar unionism in the United States as well—especially among professionals such as teachers and nurses.

Among the most dramatic and important developments since the 1970s has been the breaking of the widely recognized "psychological contract" of loyalty and job security between corporations and their white-collar forces. Beginning with the 1974 recession, and accelerating greatly in the 1980s, corporate managers began to explicitly consider middle managers as a focus of potential cost saving. This was in part a rational response to the growing weight of white-collar labor costs, but it was also linked to a broader ideological shift that downplayed the value of stability and security and emphasized instead values of entrepreneurship and individual risk taking. Though economists have found only modest evidence of real changes in white-collar employment tenures, there has been strong documentation (e.g., Leinberger & Tucker 1991, Heckscher 1995, Cappelli 1999, and Newman 1998) of a sharp shift in "mindset" among managers and technical staffs. There is now a mix of fear and anger at the loss of security and enthusiasm for new opportunities, though this mindset has not yet settled into a consistent attitude toward the widespread changes these workers are facing.