and social care. I have hesitated to include health care in the knowledge sector because it is about regenerating body and mind, and the body is traditionally considered as external to knowledge. But I have come to the conclusion that health and social care are primarily about aid that experts provide for individuals not primarily due to instrumental economic reasons but due to more altruistic motives. Aid, altruism, and cooperation are an expression of emotional care and lie at the very heart of society and social action. Hence, I consider health and social care as knowledge work. In comparison to the distinction of traditional transformative labor, traditional services, and postindustrial services provided by Erik Olin Wright (1997, 138), I haven’t included finance and insurance in the postindustrial sector because I think that handling money hasn’t so much to do with knowledge because money is a very traditional medium of circulation. Other than Wright, I consider entertainment as part of the knowledge sector because it is oriented on recreating the mind. The next two tables show the distribution of wage labor in the four sectors of the US economy in 2005. Due to statistical reasons that don’t allow an exact sector matching, the statistics here are limited to employees and don’t include the self-employed. The economic structure has been modeled for the following calculations according to the definitions of the four economic sectors given above. The analysis shows that in 2005, 44.21 percent of US wage labor was employed in the knowledge sector, 40.19 percent in the traditional service sector, 14.15 percent in the secondary sector, and 1.44 percent in the primary sector. There was a total of approximately 141,217,000 part- and full-time workers, of which 89.8 percent were full-time workers and 10.2 percent part-time workers. It is interesting to see that the share of part-time workers in the tertiary and quaternary sector is significantly higher than in the primary and secondary sector. Hence, knowledge work and traditional service work seem to be predestined for irregular employment relations.
Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting Primary Mining Primary TOTAL PRIMARY Utilities Secondary Construction Secondary Manufacturing Durable goods Wood products Secondary Nonmetallic mineral products Secondary Primary metals Secondary Fabricated metal products Secondary Machinery Secondary Electrical equipment, appliances, and components Secondary Motor vehicles, bodies and trailers, and parts Secondary Other transportation equipment Secondary
Full and part time (in 1000) 2005 1473 564 2037 554 7567
Full time (in 1000) 2005 1279 557 1836 545 7315
Part time (in 1000) 2005 194 7 201 9 252
579 508 465 1525 1166
564 496 459 1504 1148
15 12 6 21 18
436 1100 673
429 1093 669
7 7 4 151