de-skilling
de-skillingA term which summarizes the central ideas of Harry Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century (1974). His thesis was that capitalist forms of production reduce the cost of labour by breaking down complex work processes into smaller, simpler, and unskilled tasks. This continuous fragmentation process replaces the skilled craft worker by unskilled labour requiring little training, so that jobs in the secondary sector of the labour-market are substituted for jobs in the primary sector. In consequence, wages and employment conditions are pushed down to the lower levels typical of the secondary sector; unemployment and insecure employment become widespread; and people in the de-skilled jobs become alienated from their work.
The thesis has attracted a lot of interest...
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