Doug Henwood wrote: > > Carrol Cox wrote: > > >How are supervisory employees defined? If they include, for example, > >such employees as the four managers assigned to Red Lobster restaurants, > >quite a few of those supervisory employees are probably nearer the > >second than the fifth quintile. 18 hour days for barely more than their > >waitresses get. > > <http://bls.gov/opub/ted/2000/apr/wk4/art03.htm> > > About one in five workers have supervisory role > > Research indicates that approximately 1 in 5 full-time workers has > some level of supervisory responsibility. About 9 percent are team > leaders, 10 percent are first-line supervisors, 2 percent are > second-line managers and fewer than 1 percent are third-line > executives. >
This is not real important, because when one is trying to get a grip on class-dynamics in nation of 300 million or so one can't worry about 5% here or there, and 80% working class would eliminate a lot of blue-collar romanticism from thinking about class. That said, It would be interesting to have some knowledge of the 9% "team leaders" and some proportion of the 10% supervisors. One of the turning points in the union movement after WW2 was when the UAW refused to honor the foremen's picket line when they tried to unionize. And in the postoffice (which has a ridiculous proportion of "supervisors") they also have what they call 204Bs, who substitute for supervisors but rarely get promoted, aren't in the union, and really amount to a built=in low-paid scabbing force. I wonder how much difference it would make to include local, state, & federal employees. You get a lot of real bureaucrats (plus cops etc.) there, but you also get the mass of public school teachers, community colleges, and non-elite state college faculty and staff, plus sanitation workers, street workers, firefighters, social workers, public health workers, parks & recreation staff, etc. etc. etc. The civil-service staff at ISU will apparently not be getting any raise next year; I can't remember when they did get a decent raise. Carrol > Share of full-time workers by level, all industries, 1997 > > Percent > No supervisory role 78.0 > Team leaders 9.0 > Supervisors 10.0 > Managers 2.0 > Executives Less than 0.5 percent > > [...] > > Find out more in James Smith, "Supervisory Duties and the National > Compensation Survey" (PDF 92K), Compensation and Working Conditions, > Spring 2000 <http://bls.gov/opub/cwc/archive/spring2000art2.pdf>.
