Reflections upon “The Effects of Industrial, Occupational and Sex Segregation on Blue-Collar Markets” – 35 Years Later

When my older sister was a graduate student in biology at the University of Rochester, the department head advised her to change her surname if she wanted to be hired locally as a teacher. So my father had the children's surname changed from Formicola to Form, and she soon found work at a local high school. After I learned in introductory economics that rent, wages, prices and unemployment are solely a consequence of supply, demand and interpersonal competition, I rejected that discipline as a major. Economic theory simply did not describe the occupational world that I knew. There were no Italian surnames among the postal carriers, school teachers or high-wage workers in Kodak, Bausch and Lomb or the firm that became Xerox.

Somewhat later at the University of Maryland, my dissertation director C. Wright Mills was working with Hans Gerth at Wisconsin to translate some of Weber's essays on social stratification. Gerth's written English was ­awkward. As Mills's knowledge of German was modest, he asked me about some passages they were struggling with. Thus, I learned about class, status and power. Weber's notions about labor markets resonated with my own experience. My dissertation was built around these concepts in a study of a federally established suburb, Greenbelt, Maryland. The research focused on the social stratification that emerges in a one-class community that has developed no traditions. Residents had little power. They could make no decisions on rental rates, ­community growth, transportation, schools, movie prices or health services because federal officials supervised the town. Status stratification emerged as a consequence of an individual's having achieved leadership in working with voluntary organizations. The findings (Form 1945) marked a research program that lasted until 1995.

In subsequent lectures and publications, first at Kent State in Ohio and then at Michigan State, I described differences in the level of control over work for workers in five categories: managers, independent professionals, civil servants, the unionized and lone workers of low skill (see Miller and Form 1951:394-403; Form and Miller 1960:401-5; Miller and Form 1964:760-2). Managers control their own activities. Professionals (e.g., physicians and lawyers) control entry into their own arenas. The civil service is controlled bureaucratically. Union-management bargaining represents contested control, and individuals bargain as best they can in the free labor market (Form and Huber 1977).

At about that time, economists like Robert Averitt, Gary Becker, Barry Bluestone, Ester Boserup and John Dunlop were broadening their discipline to include the societal setting of firms. In 1971, I benefited from a joint appointment between the Department of Sociology and the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In daily contact with labor economists like Lawrence Kahn, Francine Blau, Koji Taira, Melvin Rothbaum and Milton Derber, I found that much could be gained by interdisciplinary dialogue. Sociologists could contribute knowledge about societal factors that influence economic organizations such as the intergenerational accumulation of educational advantage, the strength of weak ties in the labor market, ancestral linkages of elites and occupational ethnic and religious homology. These advantages were conceptualized as social capital, a supplement of human capital.

When Robert Bibb, a Ph. D. candidate at Illinois, took an interest in the study of blue-collar women workers, he was exposed to my typology of labor markets. Although the categories had been derived from observations of specific firms, in our work together Bibb and I analyzed labor markets at the societal level. To be sure, some criteria were the same: level of education, amount of work experience, presence of a labor union and specific occupation. However, labor economists such as Becker (1971) had introduced other factors such as employment sector (core or periphery) in which the firm is embedded, number of employees and size of community in which the firm is located.

Thus, Bibb and Form (1977) launched a research program that produced 12 articles that were incorporated along with other materials into two monographs on the stratification of working-class markets (Form 1985, 1995). The findings of this research challenged the conclusions of the then guru of the radical sociologists, Harry Braverman (1974), who claimed that monopoly capitalism was responsible for a continuing deskilling of the working class. However, Braverman's scholarship was flawed because the historical-longitudinal trends revealed that precisely (a favorite Marxist word) the opposite tended to be true (Parnes 1976; Spenner 1979; Form 1985:8-10). The jobs that required the least in skills declined in number over the course of a continuing process that also created a demand for better educated workers prepared to tackle newly created and more sophisticated jobs.

Bibb and Form (1977) thus helped to introduce an area that became known as labor market stratification. Arne Kalleberg and Aage Sørensen (1979) were the first to review the sociology of labor markets in depth. Paula England and Steven McLaughlin (1979) analyzed sex segregation and gendered inequities in income, and Barbara Reskin (1979) demonstrated sex segregation in the social organization of science. Sociologists continue to investigate group equity in the labor market. For example, Dozier (2010) found that when women as a whole increase their representation in the professions and management, Black women tend to earn lower wages than White women. Gebel and Giesecke (2011) related changes in skill-based temporary employment to the risks of unemployment.

Although sociological theory in 1977 was advanced enough to expand our understanding of how labor markets function, adequate data simply were not available. Moreover, Bibb and I lacked the resources to generate them. Fortunately, the National Science foundation organized a committee to urge the U. S. Bureau of the Census to gather such data, and I was among the social scientists chosen to meet with the staff of the Bureau to specify questions to be included in future censuses. The staff members were sophisticated social scientists and statisticians who not only shared our aspirations but also needed academic voices to pressure the Bureau itself to undertake further change. The Census of 1990 thus came to include a wide variety of data that lent itself to thorough sociological analysis.

Nonetheless, for reasons not given to us outsiders, the Bureau of the Census also impeded longitudinal research on working-class stratification by abolishing in the 1980 Census the category “self-employed” and collapsing semiskilled and skilled workers into one category. Earlier censuses had demonstrated that self-employed skilled workers who hired other workers earned incomes equal to or more than those of professional employees. However, Kaufman (2002) found that by examining the three-digit occupational codes, a researcher could approximate the level of the original skill classification.

During the 1970s and the 1980s, the data on ethnic differences among male workers came to be fairly well known but studies of women workers had been neglected. Many women had entered the labor force during World War II to replace men drawn into the armed forces, but in the immediate postwar period, most women were pushed out of their jobs to accommodate returning veterans. Then, somewhat to the surprise of social scientists, rising prosperity drew many women, single or married and with or without children, into the labor force to stay. This process was accompanied by the emergence of a renewed women's movement, an event due in part to a fact that surprised many sociologists. Promotion in a given managerial or professional occupation yielded a higher level of income for a man than for a woman.

Facts about gender equity became better known after the initial barriers to hiring women were breached in sociology departments. Over time, as the sex composition of departments changed, there was an explosion of research on gender equity such as the economic and status returns to research productivity. The research on occupational gendering has highlighted the sex difference that makes a difference: no man can bear a child. After the invention of the plow, which made land the chief form of wealth, elite males ensured that law and custom would regulate women's sexual behavior so that a man could be certain that the child who inherited his wealth was his own. Eurasian women were consigned to the hearth till after the industrial revolution began to alter the division of labor. The fact that women still devote more time to caring for home and children than do men (Sayer 2005; Bianchi, Robinson and Milkie 2006) exposes a lingering examplar of a gendered division of labor between household and public arena.

In sum, Bibb and Form (1977) made it clear that over the long run, machines had taken over the tasks that required little skill. Meanwhile, the educational attainment of the labor force had continued to rise, which enabled workers to cope with more complex jobs. The process of increasing resources by inventing new tools leaped forward about 10,000 years ago and (barring unfortunate nuclear events) this trend seems likely to continue. Thus, America's most pressing social need is for a substantial increase in quality of training for public school teachers to attract the most able students, along with a salary level appropriate for professionals. This is easy to say but politically very difficult to do.

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