Work changed dramatically during the second half of the twentieth century, although at the beginning of the twenty-first century there is a widespread feeling that even more fundamental changes lie ahead.
To put it briefly, in the second half of the twentieth century there was a change from a dual European society, with two different working sectors, towards a more homogeneous work society. The dual society was characterized by a combination of two major contrasting sec-tions. A predominantly agrarian or artisanal sector, with much family-based work, often only basic education, sometimes vocational training, and often precarious but highly respected economic independence and traditional family work values coexisted alongside a modern work sector which was mostly hierarchical, almost exclusively male in the middle and higher ranks, predominantly industrial, with lifelong professional activities, low unemployment rates, advanced social security, and highly organized industrial relations. This dual society was gradually displaced by a more homogeneous work society characterized by more work in the service sector, more women in important jobs, less hierarchical and more fluid professional life courses, continuous lifelong training, higher unemployment rates, less security, and more diversified industrial relations.
By the end of the Second World War the largest employment sector was still agriculture. In Europe as a whole industry only became the largest employment sector in the s and s, in part because of industrialization on the periphery of Western Europe, in Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Finland, and in part because of the industrialization of communist Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. In the industrial societies of the European heartlands this was a second summer of industrial society, with the continuation of mining and the steel industry, and of the chemical and electronics industries, but also with the new growth industry, the motorcar corporations and their suppliers. The model of industrial society prevailed in Western as well as Eastern Europe. Economic
growth and prosperity was seen as depending fully upon the rise of industrial labour. Europe was in fact almost the only society in the world that was industrial in the full sense, i.e. whose industrial sector was the largest employment sector. In all other modern societies the service sector was the largest employment sector, and had always been larger than the industrial sector.
By the s and s Europe as a whole had also become a service society, mainly due to the rise in public services and economic ser-vices (commerce, communications and transport, banking, insur-ance, consulting, the professions). It is important to note that this service society penetrated rural areas much more than the industrial society had done, and rendered them less distinctive than before. This trend, however, was largely confined to Western Europe. In Central and Eastern Europe until – industrial societies persisted, with Czechoslovakia and the GDR as the oldest and most distinctly indus-trial societies. The service sector only became predominant in this part of Europe after –, in a brutally rapid transformation creat-ing substantial unemployment among former industrial workers. In Europe as a whole it is as yet unclear whether the model of industrial society still prevails or whether some new form of service society will predominate in the public arena and in politics.
Superficially, patterns of female employment do not appear to have changed dramatically during this period. Overall female labour activ-ity rates remained roughly constant, or at least did not show any substantial increases. But below the surface several crucial changes occurred in the second half of the twentieth century. This is the period of the rise of working mothers. This process can be seen in most European countries, in Eastern even more than in Western Europe, in Northern more than in Southern Europe. The female cycle of work changed from a model in which work was given up at mar-riage to one that was similar to that of males. During this period a new feature unique to Europe emerged. In no other modern society in the world were female activity rates lower than here. In other big industrial societies––in the United States, Japan, let alone the USSR––female activity rates were visibly higher. This mainly had to do with female work in Western Europe as a whole, regardless of large differences between relatively high activity rates in Scandinavia and Britain, and low activity rates in Southern Europe. Only in the s, with the rise in female activity rates in Western Europe, did this
European phenomenon seem to have disappeared. Moreover, appreciation of women’s work changed fundamentally during the second half of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the period women worked largely because of external pressures, in the post-war period to avoid poverty, in the era of prosperity to finance the new consumption patterns, to which we shall return. Gradually, however, work outside the household began to be seen as a normal focus of life for women as well as for men, as a means of developing one’s person-ality and planning one’s life. By the end of the century patterns of female and male work had not become identical, but they were def-initely more similar than they had been around the middle of the century.
More dramatic for male as well as female work were changes in the basic character of work. To be sure, the nature of work varied enor-mously according to the large variety of activities in different Euro-pean countries. The history of the transformation of labour refers primarily to work in the more advanced economic sectors, rather than to the whole variety of types of labour. With this qualification in mind, one can say that in the earlier part of the second half of the twentieth century there was a move away from handicrafts and indi-vidual work supported by machines, and from autonomous work groups or family-oriented work, towards what is often called ‘Tay-loristic’ and hierarchical work. This was characterized by a range of features: more complex workplaces with a more rigid division of labour, often in connection with conveyor belts or assembly lines; a strict and complex hierarchy in factories and offices; often simple, sometimes mindless work requiring only relatively low qualifications in the lower ranks; primarily lifelong occupational activities and low unemployment; male dominance in the middle and higher echelons of the hierarchy; visible social distinctions between unskilled labour, skilled labour, clerks, and managerial personnel; mass trade unions and highly organized industrial relations and strikes; advanced sys-tems of social security, usually based on distinct hierarchies of pay and the assumption of lifelong occupation. This Tayloristic and hier-archical work had already emerged in the inter-war period, but con-tinued to become more important in the three decades or so after
. For sociologists of work of the s this was the culmination of history.
During the last two or three decades of the twentieth century
transformations in the character of work ran in yet another direction.
Fully automated production lines and computerized offices emerged.
These systems replaced mindless repetitive work, which became too expensive. The installation, control, continuous alteration, and repair of these systems was the main content of the new type of work. It was done by highly qualified labour with continuously changing work-places and often also with continuously changing work. Fixed, long-term work contracts tended to be replaced by specific task-oriented contracts. Work and continuous training were closely intertwined.
Lifelong steady work became rarer. Flexibility, innovation, imagin-ation, achievement, replaced former virtues such as punctuality, loyalty, obedience, reliability. Changing jobs and changing occupa-tions became more frequent; cycles of work became more dis-continuous and less predictable. Unemployment also became more frequent.
Hence, new requirements for social security systems emerged, while mass unionization of these types of worker was more difficult.
Mass trade unions and mass strikes tended to decline in many Euro-pean countries and were replaced by more spontaneous, more limited, even individual forms of labour conflicts. Industrial relations became less highly organized, and more decentralized and local.
Some contemporary social scientists even predict that paid work out-side the household is losing its central place in the life of Europeans and will be replaced by other activities still to be chosen and estab-lished. Other social scientists argue that the most traumatic indicator of these changes, the spectacular rise of unemployment, can be found only in Europe since the s and did not occur in some European countries. Hence, under more favourable conditions work could keep its central position in the life of Europeans, though in a funda-mentally changed form.