Skilled labour organicity limits competitive wage discipline.

Evidence

To a limited but none the less important degree, phenomena similar to those created on a large scale by Fordism have been and still are occurring in certain branches of industry and in certain not yet “Fordised” establishments. To build up an organic and well-articulated skilled labour force in a factory or a team of specialised workers, has never been easy. Once the labour force or the team has been built up, its components, or a part of them, sometimes not only finish up enjoying monopoly wages but are not dismissed from work in the event of a temporary check in production. It would be uneconomic to allow the elements of an organic whole so laboriously built up to be dispersed, because it would be almost impossible to bring them together again, while on the other hand reconstructing it with new elements, chosen haphazardly, would involve not inconsiderable effort and expense. This is a limitation on the law of competition determined by the reserve army and by unemployment, and this limitation has always been at the origin of the formation of privileged labour aristocracies. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1146

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘organic well-articulated labour force’ and ‘reserve army’ appear again in the Islamophobia readings on how surplus labour is managed and racialized. — connects to: The core-periphery workforce split assumed by post-Fordism is implausible in intense international competition. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 507; Employer competition drives wages toward labour’s exchange value while monopsony allows rent extraction. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 798; Worker mental skills are productive but not scarce, so they pay no wage premium — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 1031