Marxists have long regarded the construction of “skills” as driving the division between manual and non-manual workers, and thus, as the root cause of social inequalities and workers’ alienation. In Capital Volume I Marx argued that capitalism’s tendency towards mechanization would lead to the increasing deskilling of workers, an idea later embraced by Henry Braverman in the 1970s in his pioneering work on monopoly capitalism. For Braverman, technological advancement in capitalist societies created the conditions in which “the more science is incorporated into the labor process, the less the worker understands of the process; the more sophisticated an intellectual product the machine becomes, the less control and comprehension of the machine the worker has” (295).
Braverman was referring to a Fordist world in which the majority of workers in the Global North were employed in manufacturing and industrial production. With the growing relocation of many factories to the Global South and the expansion of tertiary economies (see Figure 4) in the Global North from the late 1970s onward, some of his hypotheses required correction as tumultuous economic development have led to the re-organization of global labor.
Instead of a linear process of “deskilling” of the workforce through constant automation, what we have witnessed since the 1970s instead is a rather heterogenous process of patch-worked mechanization within the same sector, and an increasing polarization and segmentation of skills, occupations, and economic branches between high-skill and low-skill. What is interesting here is that it is particularly the sectors with low levels of mechanization that have resorted to a workforce defined as “low-skilled”—unlike the situation predicted by Braverman. As we will discuss in more length shortly, the lack of mechanization in these sectors has been even used as a justification to either prevent workers’ upskilling, or to treat such low-automated sectors as too labor intensive and too low in productivity to be entitled high wages.
Furthermore, such a situation of polarization and segmentation of skills, occupations, and sectors has engendered a growing racialized and gendered dynamic. A large portion of those employed in the bottom sectors of the segmented labor market and paid low wages have been migrants, ethnic minority workers and/or female workers.
On the one hand, the labor markets of the Global North in the last forty or so years have undergone what has been commonly described as a process of feminization. Such a process under the aegis of neoliberalism has not only implied that women have entered the labor market en masse, but also—as Guy Standing showed in the late 1990s—that the low wages and bad working conditions that have been historically reserved for feminized subjects have now been extended to an ever larger proportion of the working class through various forms of precarious and low-pay contracts.
On the other hand, many low-pay and precarious jobs have been occupied by migrant and ethnic minority laborers. From the 1973 Oil Crisis onward, we have witnessed what Alessandro De Giorgi calls the simultaneous process of de- and re-bordering richer nations. This means that while the so-called stoppage policies of the mid 1970s in Northern Europe and the USA were meant to send non-nationals the message that they were no longer welcome—at least rhetorically—those same borders were selectively left open to allow enough migrants to meet the growing demand for cheap labor.
As a result, an increasing number of occupations in the lower echelons of the labor market have been increasingly reserved for racialized and disposable populations, as so-called native born workers are no longer willing to engage in the famous DDD (Dirty, Dangerous and Demanding) and CCC (Caring, Cooking and Cleaning) jobs that tend to pay abysmally low wages. The processes of de-bordering and re-bordering that have been put in place by the richer countries in the last forty years were thus meant for nothing but to control, select, and govern labor mobility. Whether the European Union’s “freedom of movement,” the points-based immigration systems in countries like Australia or Canada (and soon UK), or the de facto toleration of nearly 12 million undocumented migrants in the USA, these policies lock migrants into a subordinate position, render them without political rights, and make them instantly disposable or deportable. This type of flexible and instrumental process of de- and re-bordering parallels the increased flexibilization of the labor market, which capital deems necessary to accumulate profits in times of sluggish growth and low profitability.