Hospital Workers: Class Conflicts in the Making

Abstract

There is a real and conscious need for hospital workers to have meaningful work and to be adequately recognized for this work, both materially and in terms of respect and status within the institutions in which they are employed. These needs are frustrated by the conditions of work in the large modern hospital. Two main stabilizing forces, operating in part on different sets of workers, prevent hospital workers from collectively asserting their needs against the hospital's priorities. For the unskilled and semiskilled workers there are forces which lead to a typical industrial work ethic–alienation from the content of their work. For the skilled workers, there is the ideology of professionalism. The result is an increasing division of the nonmanagerial hospital work force into two groups with opposing class identifications: a proletarianized body of semiskilled and unskilled workers and a large group of skilled workers who are allowed to participate, through the ideology of professionalism, in the real status of the doctors.