“There has been a substantial decline in labour class and increase in labour force in non-manual jobs with the advent of new technological revolution.” Critically examine. (2010)
The statement fuses two different claims: an occupational one, that manual jobs shrink while non-manual jobs grow, and a class one, that the working class itself is disappearing. The first is broadly true of advanced economies and only partly true of India; the second does not follow from it, because occupational category and class position are not the same thing.
The claim at its strongest
- Daniel Bell (The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 1973) argued that employment shifts from goods-production to services, that theoretical knowledge becomes the axial principle, and that the professional and technical stratum grows fastest.
- Clark Kerr and colleagues’ logic of industrialism made technology the cause: advancing technique requires an ever more educated, non-manual workforce, so industrialising societies converge.
- John H. Goldthorpe‘s Oxford Mobility Study found that absolute upward mobility rose in post-war Britain chiefly because the service class expanded — there was simply “more room at the top”.
Why the class inference fails
- C. Wright Mills (White Collar, 1951) showed that the new middle class is propertyless. Clerks and salespeople sell not skill with things but “skills with persons” — a personality put on the market — producing self-estrangement and status panic. Growth of non-manual work is growth of a dependent salariat, not of owners.
- Harry Braverman (Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974) argued that routine non-manual work has been deskilled: as clerical staff expanded, the office was reorganised into a production line for mental work, and retail and service jobs lost their all-round craft content. The result is proletarianisation. John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler supplied the market evidence: male clerks earned 122% of the average manual wage in 1913–14 but only 96% by 1971.
- Against this, David Lockwood (The Blackcoated Worker, 1958) distinguished market, work and status situation and found clerks still advantaged in job security, promotion prospects and fringe benefits. Proletarianisation is therefore uneven, sharpest at the routine base.
- From the other direction, the Luton affluent worker study by Goldthorpe and Lockwood (1968–69) refuted embourgeoisement: well-paid car workers had privatised, consumption-centred lives and an instrumental orientation to work, yet remained working class in identity and voting. Affluence changed lifestyle, not class.
Indian evidence: no linear march
India shows the reverse of the predicted sequence. The Periodic Labour Force Survey records agriculture’s share of workers rising from 42.5% in 2018-19 to 46.1% in 2023-24, standing at 43.0% in 2025, with manufacturing at 12.1% and construction at 12.0% — manual labour has been relocated, not abolished. Only 23.6% of workers are in regular wage or salaried employment, against 56.2% self-employed and 20.2% casual. Much of the new “non-manual” employment is a low-paid service proletariat of delivery riders, security guards and telecallers; the Union Budget of 2025-26 conceded as much by extending e-Shram registration and health cover to about a crore gig workers.
Conclusion
The technological revolution has restructured the composition of the labour force far more than the structure of class. In India manual labour has not declined at all, and where non-manual work has grown it has largely been proletarianised — which is why the statement describes a change of occupational label rather than the dissolution of the working class.