Decomposing Books, Records and Desks

 Braverman and Class Solidarity After the Professional Managerial Class

Abstract

In Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974) Harry Braverman pointedly compares a chemical operator’s work of reading and checking dials to the pedestrian ability of reading a clock (155). By posing the question of whether it is really harder to read a dial than to tell time, he challenges the idea that outstanding skills are needed to fill the positions that manage and control the labour processes after a division of labour. He writes that the tasks of reading instruments and keeping charts “endear” the middle classes who classify these straightforward faculties as technical skills warranting professionalization, higher wages and levels of authority. Such attitudes among the working class are examined in the chapter, “The Middle Layers of Employment.” In it, Braverman focuses on managerial or professionally adjacent workers who “act professionally” (80) on behalf of capital. Among workers in the middle layers, there are hierarchical gradations between management in terms of authority, as well as between staff, which are indicated by technical expertise and a “tenuous working independence” (281). According to Braverman, possessing either authority or technical expertise represents an “unavoidable delegation of responsibility” (280). If authority is the defining character that fixes the middle layers between disciplining the working masses and selling labour power to the bourgeoisie then you don’t need a technical skill to wield authority. Possessing authority, or being proximate to power, isn’t a skill set, it’s an unfixed sociohistorical economic circumstance (Coombs, 1978). While I read Braverman’s dials vs. clocks query as faintly facetious, my contention in this commentary develops from this analogy to challenge conflations of authority with skill as it appears in scientific management.