CLASS SITUATION, WHITE COLLAR UNIONIZATION AND THE 'DOUBLE PROLETARIANIZATION' THESIS: A COMMENT.

The article presents comments on social scientist Rosemary Crompton's paper on class situation and unionization in the white collar sector. In her paper Crompton argued for an analysis of white collar unionization which included explanatory reference to the class situation of white collar workers and couched this reference in terms of production, rather than distributive, relations. Notwithstanding the unresolved conceptual difficulties of a production relations based approach, its theoretical pay-off in explaining white collar unionism is, in principle, to locate a new structural ambiguity underlying the ambiguities of the white collar worker's market and work situations and hence to generate an additional account for the ambiguities and fragmentation of white collar workers' responses to collective organization. Thus analysed, this structural ambiguity in the white collar class situation can now be made to do theoretical work in explaining white collar unionization. Crompton's initial intimations of its empirical consequences tended to be both over-simplified and implausible.