High Tech Low Pay: A Marxist Analysis of the Changing Character of the Working Class

Its theories eerily prescient of modern-day times, this treatise—first published more than 20 years ago—examines the devastating impact of the scientific and technological revolution on wages and employment in the United States and illustrates how this revolution led to unprecedented levels of exploitation in those countries that received massive U.S. corporate investment. Among its tenets is the position that the phenomenon now known as globalization would dramatically change the composition of the U.S. working class from a highly skilled and highly paid, largely white, male “aristocracy” to a composition of a far greater percentage of low-paid black, Latino, and other immigrant workers. The indictment also maintains that rather than bringing Western-style prosperity to the rest of the world, globalization would only intensify the misery in poor countries and bring new levels of unemployment and impoverishment to workers in both the U.S. and other industrialized countries. This polemic further posits that the growing demolition of vast sections of highly paid workers and their sinking to the level of the more oppressed sections spells out a new constellation of internal forces in the working class that will fundamentally alter the relationship between black and white workers.