Sociology Take Home Final

Unequal Power Relationships and Laborers

The unequal power relationship that characterizes many employment relationships is characteristic of industrialized capitalism. Capitalism itself is defined by the manufacturing division of labor, which systematically divides the work of economic production into limited operations. The result is that no one man in the Capitalist system would know how to produce a good from start to finish, destroying the traditional notion of occupations, e.g. artisans or craftsmen.

Because each worker is only qualified to perform a particular, often narrow, task which creates no value in itself but must be combined with the fruits of other tasks by the Capitalist, the worker is at the mercy of the Capitalist who owns the means of production. The dominant mode of employment arising from the manufacturing division of labor is wage labor. In wage labor, a worker does not work to improve his own...
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