The white-collar working class

The myth that white collar workers are not part of the working class remains as strong as ever.

White collar workers such as office workers, teachers and nurses make up a large section of the workforce. While in some cases, they can earn more than blue collar workers, many earn less than mechanics, builders and other tradespeople, white collar workers face the same struggle to make ends meet.
But in the last few decades, some white collar trade unions like the Post Primary Teachers Asociation (PPTA) and the NZ Nurses Organisation (NZNO) have been the most militant and organised. These unions not only stand up for their members, they also defend public health and education and raise wages across the economy by setting higher benchmarks for pay.
Under capitalism, workers' jobs change all the time. The nature of white collar jobs has changed massively over the last 100 years. Clerical workers in the 19th century were regarded as middle class. Their pay, status and even dress made them more akin to managers. A clerical job was a prized job and was usually a lifetime post. No clerical worker thinks that today.
The growth of white collar jobs throughout this century has been accompanied by the growth in the number of women workers, who are often paid less. It is no coincidence that just as the number of women students has finally matched that of men at universities (and in some cases, such as Otago and Auckland universities, outnumbered men) pay for graduates has declined relative to pay for (overwhelmingly male) tradespeople.
Over the last 40 years office work has become increasingly deskilled and dependent on machinery. Work has become boring and repetitive. The introduction of costly technology (computers, faxes and photocopiers) has changed the pattern of work inside the office.
Investment in machines means that white collar jobs are no longer nine to five. Many offices are now open 24 hours a day. Certainly, in terms of pay, an office worker is part of the working class. Computer technology also acts as a hidden foreman. It is used by management to record and monitor how much work a worker does.
Clerical work has taken on more and more characteristics of manual labour. Call centres have become the cotton mills of the 21st century. Advances in telecommunications have allowed multinational corporations to centralize all of their administration, and in many cases to outsource it to cheap labour countries like India. Cadbury’s Dunedin factory’s pay is no longer administered here – it has been outsourced to the Philippines.
These changes have led to what has been called the "proletarianisation" of clerical workers. Increasingly white collar workers are joining unions and going on strike. Today unions with many white collar members, such as the PPTA and NZNO are as large and organised as their manual counterparts, if not larger. White collar workers are on strike as often as any other group.
It suits the ruling class to pretend that white collar workers are not working class. Bosses want white collar workers to identify with the mythical “middle class”, instead of the working class. Magazines like “The Listener” savagely attack organised workers like the teachers, in the interests of well-heeled professional ‘mums and dads’.
Campaigns like the Unite petition to raise the minimum wage to $15 encourage white collar workers instead to identify with the rest of the working class and to take an interest in the whole of society, not just their suburban backyard.