ABSTRACT
Ours has become a society of employees. A hundred years ago only one out of every five Americans at work was employed, that is, worked for somebody else. Today the ratio is reversed, only one out of five is self-employed. And where fifty years ago "being employed" meant working as a factory laborer or as a farmhand, the employee of today is increasingly a middle-class person with a substantial formal education, holding a professional or management job requiring intellectual and technical skills. Indeed, two things have characterized American society during these last fifty years: the middle and upper classes have become employees; and middle-class and upper-class employees have
been the fastest-growing groups in our working population - growing so fast that the industrial worker, that oldest child of the Industrial Revolution , has been losing in numerical importance despite the expansion of industrial production .
