The Polarisation of the Service Sector

The polarization of the Service Sector

Agricultural and manufacturing industries have been the primary components of the 20th century’s economy. However, strong developments in the service sector are leading it to become the dominating sector.  Therefore, I have attempted to analyse the skill trends within this principal sector in the UK and in North America. I have found that the service sector seems to experience a deskilling of lower wage jobs and an upskilling of higher wage jobs leading to an increasingly polarized labour market due to the influences of technology, management practices, and a more globalized, liberal economy.

The propagation of technology in the workplace can be attributed as the reason behind deskilling. Indeed, interviews of UK agency care managers demonstrated the use of IT logs systems in their workplace led to an intensification of “mundane” tasks performed. The duplication of procedures resulted in work intensification and reduced the time the care workers spent with the patient. Agency care workers were administered these systems having no control over their creation, thus experiencing a separation between job conception and execution. Workers talked of “feeling powerless” and being “chained to the desk” which can be seen as management’s effort to supervise the care workers and control their service provision (Carey 2007). Management choices over the implementation of technologies are shown to have Tayloristic deskilling effects: the fragmentation of jobs into specific, standardized tasks.

Empirical research on the shipping industry also revealed technology’s impact on skills. The creation of the steam engine substituted sailing practices and thus the need for able-bodied seamen, who were replaced by unskilled engine room operatives.  These operatives earned less than the seamen on sail and steam ships (Chin A, Chinhui J, Thompson P). Technology, here, created a lesser remunerated and skill requiring job.

Today’s economy, characterized by a greater interconnectedness between countries, has occasioned amplified competition. Therefore, the steam engine was quickly adopted to increase voyage time and profits. Thus, businesses’ drive to gain profits has been heightened globalization, and can result in deskilling. A study of UK railways demonstrates this phenomenon. Rail privatization, consistent with the neo-liberal economic agenda to increase the service’s profits, created a loss of knowledge within the industry. Job losses among supervisors and train drivers, and the subsequent hiring of less skilled workers to reduce labour costs, resulted in deskilling. Sadly, passengers paid the price of the occupational deskilling with their lives in deadly crashes (Cole, Cooper 2006).

As globalization intensifies, Chinese immigrants are more incited and capable of searching for employment abroad. However, a Canadian study reveals the deskilling associated with this migration. Skilled Chinese service sector professionals in Canada, unable to receive recognition for their achievements, are forced into unemployment or jobs requiring lower skills. An interview stresses that Canada uses “professionals to do menial labour” (Man 2004). Not only are Chinese immigrants deskilled, China is also losing skilled workers, resulting the deskilling of the nation’s service sector. Globalization thus seems to amplify the process of deskilling.  

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