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From International Socialism, No.19, Winter 1964/5, p.29.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
White Collar Redundancy
Dorothy Wedderburn
Cambridge, 7s. 6d.
The important thing lacking in this study of redundancy among white-collar workers at English Electric Aviation’s factories at Luton and Stevenage is a definition of a white-collar worker. Dorothy Wedderburn makes this distinction between white-collar and manual workers: ‘The manual worker’s position is characterised by insecurity, even in times of full employment, unknown to most white-collar workers.’ The important tendency is for the white-collar job to be more and more tied to the production line, and for the white-collar worker to become more and more proletarianised. This is shown by the author in the case of the differences between weekly- and monthly-paid staff. The weekly-paid staff received lower wages and much lower severance pay. The focus in this book is on the interesting contrast between these two groups of staff, but the author fails to make a comparison between white-collar and black-collar workers facing redundancy, which would have been more relevant. Secondly, a point that arises from the typical way in which sociologists treat their subjects, redundancy here is looked at as a phenomenon and not as a growing objective condition of all workers under a capitalist system that is struggling to rationalise itself. Here redundancy is looked at in complete isolation from the fact that it is becoming part and parcel of workers’ lives. And because of the methods used in this survey the solutions are conformist: for example, reconstitution of pension schemes to allow the worker to take his pension with him, and state unemployment benefits ‘related more closely to levels of actual earnings.’
The trade unions as usual went through their vigorous round of negotiations, arriving back where they started. The only compensation that our brothers at English Electric can have is that only four unions were involved – lucky they didn’t work at Ford’s!
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