“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.

Breaking down the question

The statement makes two linked empirical claims: that the manual labour class has substantially declined, and that the non-manual labour force has grown, both driven by a new technological revolution. The instruction critically examine requires you to test these claims rather than accept them — to marshal evidence and theory on both sides and reach a qualified verdict.

The quotation echoes the post-industrial thesis of Daniel Bell, who argued that automation and information technology shift employment from manufacturing to services and from manual to professional, technical and clerical work. Your task is to grant what is true in this — the shrinking of the classic factory proletariat in advanced economies — while confronting the counter-arguments: that non-manual work is itself often proletarianised, that manual labour has been relocated rather than abolished, and that the picture differs sharply between developed and developing societies.

For the analytical base on how production is organised, draw on the note on the social organization of work.

How to approach it

Structure the answer as a genuine examination: state the thesis, present the evidence for it, then subject it to sustained critique, and synthesise.

• The affirmative case — post-industrialism, deindustrialisation, the rise of the service and knowledge economy, and the growth of white-collar employment.
• The technological driver — automation, computerisation and the changing occupational structure.
• The critique — proletarianisation of non-manual work (Braverman), the global relocation rather than disappearance of manual labour, informalisation, and the persistence of a manual working class.
• The developing-society qualification — where the thesis fits poorly.

Keep the two parts balanced; a 30-mark critically examine is graded on the quality of the counter-argument as much as the exposition.

Model answer

The proposition captures a real and much-debated transformation in the occupational structure of advanced capitalist societies, but as a general law it is overstated and geographically parochial. It must be examined rather than endorsed.

The case for the statement. Daniel Bell's theory of the post-industrial society provides its theoretical backbone. Bell argued that the axial principle of the new society is theoretical knowledge, and that employment shifts decisively from the secondary sector of manufacturing to the tertiary and quaternary sectors of services, information and professional expertise. Empirically, the mature industrial economies have indeed seen dramatic deindustrialisation: the share of the workforce in manual factory jobs has fallen, while professional, technical, managerial and clerical occupations have expanded. Robert Blauner's earlier work anticipated part of this, suggesting that advanced automation could restore a measure of control and reduce the alienation of the old assembly line. Rising educational levels, the growth of the service economy, and the information-technology revolution all lend the statement genuine force. In this reading, the archetypal proletarian of nineteenth-century industry — the manual factory worker — is being displaced by the white-collar employee and the knowledge worker.

The critical counter-argument. Several powerful objections qualify or contradict the thesis.

First, the proletarianisation of non-manual work. Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital, argued that the growth of white-collar employment does not signal the rise of a comfortable new middle class. On the contrary, mechanisation, computerisation and the division of labour progressively de-skill clerical, sales and service jobs, subjecting them to the same degradation, routine and managerial control once applied to manual work. The typist, checkout operator and call-centre worker are, in this view, a new proletariat in non-manual guise. The manual–non-manual boundary therefore does not track the class boundary, and a fall in manual work need not mean a fall in the working class.

Second, the relocation rather than abolition of manual labour. Manufacturing has not vanished; it has been globally redistributed. The new international division of labour has shifted mass manual production from the old industrial cores to newly industrialising economies. The world's manual working class has, if anything, grown enormously — it is simply concentrated in different regions. What looks like the decline of labour from within one national economy is partly an optical effect of globalisation.

Third, informalisation and precarity. Even where manual employment persists, technological and organisational change has produced casual, contract and gig work rather than the disappearance of labour. The new economy generates large numbers of low-paid, insecure service jobs — cleaners, delivery workers, care workers — that are manual or quasi-manual and far from the knowledge-worker ideal. Technology has thus polarised the labour market between high-skill professionals and a growing mass of precarious service labour, rather than uniformly upgrading it.

Fourth, the developing-society qualification. In societies such as India, the thesis fits poorly. The vast majority of the workforce remains in agriculture and the informal sector; formal manufacturing employment has never been dominant, and any growth of the information-technology and service sector coexists with a huge manual and agrarian labouring population. The linear march from manual to non-manual work described in the statement is a feature of a few mature economies, not a universal trajectory.

Synthesis. The technological revolution has genuinely reshaped the occupational structure: in the advanced economies the manual factory proletariat has contracted and non-manual employment has expanded. To that extent the statement is correct. But it is misleading as a general claim. Much non-manual work has been de-skilled into a new form of proletarian labour; manual production has been relocated globally rather than eliminated; technology has bred precarity as much as professionalism; and the pattern barely applies to the developing world. The relationship between technology and labour is therefore not a simple decline of the working class but its recomposition — across skills, sectors and continents.

Examiner's perspective

This is a critically examine question, so the marks lie in the balance. A script that only elaborates Bell's post-industrial optimism, however fluently, cannot reach the top band. The examiner is looking for Braverman's de-skilling thesis as the decisive counterweight, ideally supported by the global relocation of manufacturing and the reality of informalisation.

The strongest answers also refuse a Eurocentric frame, noting explicitly that the statement misdescribes societies like India. Correct attribution — Bell for post-industrialism, Braverman for proletarianisation, Blauner on automation and alienation — signals command. The examiner rewards a clear thesis that the working class is being recomposed rather than abolished, argued through structured points rather than a list of trends, and closed with a crisp, qualified verdict.