Socialist Progressives
Related: About this forumCubed
White Collar Blues: An Interview with Nikil Saval
5.20.14
by Jake Blumgart
Even at a time of low pay and degraded working conditions, meritocratic notions surrounding white collar work are hard to dispel.
Many Americans spend an ungodly amount of their lives in an office. They spend more time with their colleagues than their friends and family. And unlike the office jobs of yore, todays white-collared masses are not rewarded with pensions or job protections. Instead, like the blue-collar economy, the professional workforce is beset by the same forces of precarity, wage stagnation, and terrible benefits.
N+1 editor Nikil Savals new book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, takes a look at the history of white collar working conditions, their promise of social mobility, and the office dwellers strange place in Americas class structure. No other workplace, no matter how degraded, has been such a constant source of hope about the future of work and the guarantee of a stable, respectable life, he writes.
In the nineteenth century office, workers held an awkward position between the forces of labor and capital, often siding with the latter despite periodic upsurges in organizing. The office worker was, according to Saval, a symbol of reaction during the Red Scare following World War I, in much the same way hardhats were popularly considered the embodiment of backlash in the early 1970s.
Saval has worked in a few publishing houses, but now toils in the freelance trenches. Cubed is his first book ...
More here - https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/white-collar-blues-an-interview-with-nikil-saval/
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)Lives with and dresses like and works with the master, self-deceptively thinking one day...
TBF
(32,004 posts)TexasTowelie
(111,938 posts)to Human Commodities--something to dispose of after usage.
TBF
(32,004 posts)"human resources" has always rubbed me the wrong way. Equating the humans in the building with all the other resources - the supplies for example. It is a way of dehumanizing and treating people poorly. Productivity and profit are always the goal with people only worthy if they are assisting in the quest of more market share.