fast food as manufacturing

[MICHAEL YATES]

As Ursula Huws points out in her fine new book, "The Making of a Cybertariat" (disclosure:  I did most of the editing for Monthly Review Press.  You can hear her interview with Doug Henwood in his LBO radio archives.  Doug was very impressed with her), it is often hard to categorize workers into broad industrial categories.  She says, "From accountants to lorry drivers to cleaners there are many large groups of workers whose classification is essentially an arbitrary by-product of the size and degree of specialization of their employers and whether or not there is a policy of subcontracting work."   Now I see that the economists in Bush's CEA may have read her book.  In the recent EROP, they suggest that maybe fast food workers should be classified in manufacturing. (see today's NYT, page C2, "In the New Economics: Fast-Food Factories").  This change would allow a complete rewriting of recent labor market history.   More and more the Bushites sound like they are in a Saturday Night Live skit.   Michael Yates