IJSL 2021; 270: 115–122

Discussion

David Block*
The linguistic division of labour across
occupations: moving the discussion on
https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2021-0048
Received April 9, 2021; accepted April 9, 2021; published online May 24, 2021

Abstract: In this short paper, I begin by providing background for inquiry into the
division of labour across occupations, examined from an economics of language
perspective. I then critically discuss the four papers that compose this special issue
on the topic, before closing with three suggestions for factors to bear in mind in
future research.

Keywords: class; communication skills; division of labour; economics of language;

language labour; multilingualism; social reproduction theory

1 Background
Examining developments in economies around the world in recent years, but in
particularly in the wealthier nations of the world (e.g., North America, the EU
countries, East Asia), we see a growing share of the job market devoted to employ-
ment based on the manufacture, organisation, distribution and use of information in
activities mediated by a range of advanced technologies that have made communi-
cation faster and more extensive than it has ever been. So, whether we are talking
about retail or the provision of any number of services (e.g., accommodation, food
and drink, entertainment and so on), there are two shifts at work, one substantive and
the other temporal. First, as Srnicek (2017) notes, the notion of production, and
related notions such as ownership of the means of production, can no longer be
understood exclusively in material or industrial terms; rather, in what is known as the
fourth revolution, the gig economy or cognitive capitalism, there is the extraction of
data, its conversion into information, the development of knowledge of this infor-
mation and, finally, the communication of information, all of which, in turn, become
integral to, or dominant in, or even the totality of, what is understood as production.

*Corresponding author: David Block, Departament d’Humanitats, ICREA, Universitat Pompeu

Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, E-mail: davidmartin.block@upf.edu
116 Block

Second, because the aforementioned processes of extraction, conversion, knowledge

acquisition and communication are based in rapidly evolving technologies, they
have become accelerated, and in this acceleration, it is the final process, commu-
nication, which has become more important than ever before. In short, we live in
times of accelerated information flows in which communication is vital.
Communication is understood here as multimodal, that is as involving the
organisation, deployment and uptake of semiotic resources in human–human
interaction and what is becoming more common, human–machine interactions
(machine–machine interaction is also on the increase, although this is perhaps
an issue to be discussed on another occasion). Communication skills once un-
derstood almost entirely as giving and receiving information using the basic
senses to process language – listening, reading, writing and speaking – are now
seen as abilities such as meta-discursive conversation management; detecting
and expressing feelings (including the showing of empathy); showing friendli-
ness and openness; being a good observer, listener or reader; showing respect
and responsiveness to others; and conveying confidence and calm. Having these
skills has become valuable in workplaces because they are deemed to lead to
effective communication, which in turn has the payoff of making companies
more competitive, increasing customer satisfaction, creating a better in-house
working environment and facilitating faster and better decision-making. And all
of these developments are, in turn deemed to improve a company’s performance.
Communication skills have thus become the order of the day: they are written
into job descriptions and serve as a guide to hiring (and firing) and they are “out
there”, in circulation. On the one hand, there is the burgeoning communication
skills genre, which has joined and become intermeshed with other relatively new
self-help genres, such as relationship counselling and workplace management.
On the other hand, there is the infiltration of communication skills into education
at all levels, from primary school to post-graduate study programmes.

2 This issue
It is against this backdrop that this special issue appears, with the aim of examining
the language division of labour from an Economics of Language perspective. In
principle, this perspective involves the linking of economic variables with linguistic
variables via the application of neoclassic economic theories, concepts and research
methods (Grin et al. 2010); however, in recent years, there have been calls for the
field to become more interdisciplinary, taking in theories and research methodolo-
gies from a range of social sciences disciplines and not just working on links between
economics and linguistics (Gazzola and Wickström 2016). This special issue reflects
 Moving the discussion on 117

this trend in that the contributing authors come from anthropology (Heyman),
economics (Balcar, Doupokovà), sociology (Alarcón, Morales, Ubalde) and trans-
lation studies (Pym and Torres-Simón).
In the introduction, Amado Alarcon provides a helpful broad brush of the key
elements at play in recent transformations of economies and job markets:

Since information is linguistically encoded, informational capitalism makes language central

to production processes, increasing linguistic work, demanding new language skills from its
workers, and producing its own jargon, codes, and communication protocols. Language
becomes a key component of productivity, employability, wages, and control. Not just raw
material and product, but foreign languages, computer languages, numerical systems,
scripts, or protocols are current work tools that professionals must master daily.

Alarcon goes on to emphasise that within the division of labour, which is part and
parcel of capitalism, there is a linguistic division of labour. I think it important to
highlight two key aspects of this division. First, it is based on concrete languages
such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, Czech, Russian and many others, which co-exist
in contact situations in different ways, as the authors of the contributions to this
special issue make clear. In this sense, with regard to English, there are very obvious
differences among the different contact situations in which it exists: with Czech in the
Czech Republic (Balcar and Doupokovà); with Spanish in the border areas between
Mexico and the United States where Spanish is ever-present (Ubalde and Heyman;
Morales) and in more interior locations, such as Houston, where a substantial
number of Spanish speakers live in anglophone-dominant environments; and
finally, with a long list of languages in translation contexts around the world (Pym
and Torres-Simón). Second, the linguistic division of labour exists because across the
professions where language skills are becoming more and more necessary (e.g., law,
medicine, education, in-person services) and in professions where this tendency has
not been in evidence to a significant degree (construction, manufacturing, cleaning,
deliveries), the language skills required in specific languages are, necessarily, very
different. Thus, while legal and medical workers may find themselves in increasingly
multilingual environments, building cleaners and garment factory workers work in
conditions that have not altered significantly over the decades (I will return to this
latter issue at the end of this paper).
The four main articles in this special issue examine the linguistic division of
labour in 21st century capitalism from four different angles. In the first contribu-
tion, Josep Ubalde and Joshua Heyman analyse the effect of non-English language
fluency on occupational attainment and to compare US citizens and immigrants
with regard to how much being bilingual benefits them in the job market. The
authors find that immigrants, due to their status as immigrants, have less access to
better paid occupations. This is in part due to the fact that the particular skillsets
118 Block

that they have are not valued in the job market, or, in any case, are not valued in the
same way as those of long-time residents or citizens. This means that a language,
such as Spanish, is valued differently depending on who is using it: if it is used by a
Mexican migrant working in the low-level service sector, it has little or no value;
however, if is used by a non-immigrant, it is likely to have value in real terms,
particularly in high-level jobs in finance (we can imagine a bank with close ties to
banks in Spanish-speaking Latin America countries). If there were no such payoff
for Spanish in terms of conditions and pay, people with no heritage relationship
with Spanish would not bother to learn it for such instrumental reasons. One
lesson I take from this article is that although linguistic diversity is integral to and
even celebrated in multicultural/multilingual environments, it is not necessarily
valued, and indeed is often not valued at all, when it comes to employment
and pay. From this perspective, in the job market in the United States, being
bi/multilingual offers no real advantages, except in very specific cases such as
high level professionals working in international and globalised work settings.
Of course there have always been professions in which language labour
(Boutet 2001) has been important and even a defining feature, and where in very
transparent ways workers are paid to exhibit and use their language skills. Lan-
guage teaching is one such sector; another is translation (including both text
translation and interpreting). In their contribution, Anthony Pym and Ester Torres-
Simón discuss translation, centring their attention on its increasing automation.
Automation is a long-term process that reduces the number of translation sector
jobs while increasing the value of those jobs that remain. This occurs because
computers are good at organising and accessing knowledge, but not at what
Pym and Torres-Simón term the mastery of knowledge: while in the former case
automation may do the job, in the latter case human beings are necessary. For
example, where sophistication is the priority, such as in marketing, automation
will only get a company so far, as a technology like machine translation is not
equipped to detect errors or other anomalies such as stilted or inappropriate ex-
pressions in the texts produced. However, within any re-evaluation of translation-
based jobs, there is wage dispersion as different sectors of the economy pay
differently. Put simply, if the sector is wealthy (for example, business and com-
merce, where there is a great deal of international contact and transaction), then
more money is paid. An additional point of interest in Pym and Torres-Simón’s
article is their suggestion that those who work in translation should not try to
compete with automation, but rather seek to re-situate themselves in changing job
markets, concentrating on what they, and only they, can do. Among the tasks that
remain within the domain of human beings are the following: editorial work,
revision and reviewing, project management, dealing with the intricacies of ter-
minology, data-based management, interpreting translated data and rewriting.
 Moving the discussion on 119

Returning to a more general perspective with regard to employment, albeit one

centred on a single nation state, and Jiří Balcar and Lucie Doupokovà examine the
growing importance of communication skills in the Czech labour market, such as
the ability to handle information and language competence (in Czech as the official
language and in English as the international lingua franca). Drawing on occupa-
tional data provided by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of the Czech
Republic, the authors focus specifically on job seekers’ education and employ-
ability and the weight of age, class background and gender in the qualifications
they bring to the market, the kind of jobs they obtain and the salaries and wages
they receive. The focus on gender is particularly important given the number of
studies showing that women do not fare as well as men on the job market, both in
terms of the quality of employment and salary. This is born out in Balcar and
Doupokovà’s research as male workers are found to be more likely to benefit from
having English language competence than female workers. The authors also note
that half of the jobs in the Czech Republic require no communication skills at all.
This is very important point for the authors to make and I will return to it below.
In the final contribution to this issue, Maria Cristina Morales moves us back to
the United States, as she analyses linguistic occupational segregation along the
Texas-Mexico border: the cities of El Paso, Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville, where
the percentage of the population classified as Latino/a ranges from 83 to 96%, and
the non-border city of Houston, where this population is 45% of the total. Morales
focuses on eight job types, from management, business and finance at the top of the
scale to production, transportation and material moving at the bottom. Using what is
known as the “occupational index of dissimilarity”, which provides a measure of
differences in work conditions (e.g. are there fringe benefits?) as well as salaries and
wages received, she examines how a worker’s language profile is a factor across
three such profiles: Spanish-only speakers, Spanish–English bilinguals and
English-only speakers. Her key finding is that while being a Spanish–English
bilingual is advantageous in the border cities, it seems to have little effect on job
prospects in Houston, where Spanish speakers tend to be racialised and segmented
into lower income jobs.
Taken together, these four papers achieve the aims of this special issue on
linguistic division of labour across occupations, as outlined by Alarcón in the
introduction, in that they highlight the inequalities that both underlie and are
reproduced in job markets in which we see an ever-increasing demand for lan-
guage and communication skills as a key component of the labour power required
of workers. Reading and thinking about these papers leads me to suggest three
possible future frames for further research in this area of inquiry, which I will now
briefly outline.
120 Block

3 Three further considerations

In the data presented in these papers I see a clear link between class position and an
individual’s possession (or non-possession) of the communication skills that some
jobs require. Class, as Ellen Meiksins Wood suggested, may be seen in two ways: as
“a form of stratification, a layer in a more hierarchical structure, differentiated
according to ‘economic’ criteria such as income, ‘market chances’ or occupation” or
as “a socio-historical … relation between appropriators and producers, determined
by the specific form in which, to use Marx’s phrase, ‘surplus labour is pumped out of
the direct producers’” (Wood 2016 [1995]: 76). In my work over the past several years
(Block 2014, 2018) I have tended to see class in both ways, and beyond them,
according to long list of dimensions. Thus, while I believe it important to focus on the
relationships of workers to the means of production and the material circumstances
around which – and the conditions under which – they provide their labour power
and are exploited by those who own and control the means of production, I am also
concerned with the different subject positions, characteristics, behaviours and ac-
tivities which also index class and may be seen as political, social and cultural. In my
view, research on the linguistic division of labour would benefit from the inclusion of
this broadened view of class. For example, individuals classified as working class
Spanish/English bilinguals in the United States are no doubt (1) situated in class
hierarchies according to the kind of employment they are engaged in, (2) provide
labour power in unequal relations with capitalists who, in turn, exploit them and (3)
are defined in society according to a long list of class-indexing dimensions such
as educational level, technological knowhow, social contacts and networking,
consumption patterns and housing.
Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) (e.g. Bhattacharya 2017) is another area of
inquiry with the potential to enrich discussions of the language division of labour,
especially if researchers in this area are genuinely concerned with gender as a key
variable in such processes (albeit one inextricably interrelated with other identified
variables). SRT has emerged out of earlier work examining the relationship between
Marxism and feminist theory (e.g. Vogel 1983), working more specifically under the
banner of “Social-Reproduction Feminism” (SRF). There the focus has been on the
“historical reality that labour-power is predominantly renewed daily and genera-
tionally through privatised households in which women (including both unpaid
mothers, grandmothers, and other family members, as well as paid caregivers) do
most of the work” (Ferguson et al. 2016: 30). Further expanding horizons, SRT parts
from the premise that an understanding of capitalism that only focuses on what Engels
(1976 [1878]: 187) called “the laws governing the production and exchange of the
material means of subsistence in human society” is a very limited one, and that any
 Moving the discussion on 121

understanding of capitalism worth its salt will necessarily have to include in the
equation how the entire system sustains itself in terms of the generation and main-
tenance of both individuals and the institutions and facilities in which reproductive
work is done. A part of this reproductive work is, without a doubt, language labour in
that the immediate caregivers of infants and young children are, by default and as a
matter of course, tasked with providing language input and shaping their charges’
output (much like language teachers). Given this state of affairs, I believe that it is
incumbent on researchers focusing on the linguistic division of labour to explore links
with SRT research and scholarship.
Attention to class inequalities along with a focus on the social reproductive
activities of women across class lines worldwide leads me to a third and final
suggestion for future research, namely that we should not be taken in by a certain
hype regarding the relative weight of jobs requiring communication skills and,
more specifically, language labour (Block 2020). Thus, as we see in the contribu-
tions by Ubalde and Torres, Balcar and Doupokovà and Morales, even in advanced
economies, there is still a good proportion of the workforce employed in jobs in
which communication skills and language labour are of little or no importance.
More importantly, if we move outside the more advanced economies of the world,
we come face to face with the lived realities of industrial production in the early
21st century. In many cases, these realities are eerily close to how Marx and Engels
described the effects of rapid industrialisation in England in the mid-19th century
(see Engels 2009 [1845]; Marx 1990 [1867]), leading David Harvey to write:

the labour conditions in the clothing factories of Bangladesh, the electronics factories in
southern China, the maquiula factories strung along the Mexican border [with the United
States] or the chemical complexes in Indonesia are much closer to those which Marx was so
familiar (Harvey 2014: 129)

In such contexts, what kind of communication skills are required and how much
language labour might we find? I would venture in the first instance, few, and in
the second instance, very little. In this sense, in any discussion of how global
capitalism brings about changes in the nature of labour in the most economically
advanced countries of the world, researchers need to avoid making the assumption
that these changes apply to all employment. The same applies when we shift our
focus to regions of Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Mexico and other countries
which currently host the industrial bases of the world. Ultimately, any discussion
of the linguistic division of labour across occupations needs to be geographically
framed and “the economy” needs to be examined in a balanced, global manner,
not just concentrating on those sectors that fit a theory about the direction that the
economy is taking.
122 Block

Acknowledgements: I thank John Gray, Alexandre Duchêne and Amado Alarcón

for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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