Right, but isn't that a qualitative, rather than a quantitative argument? That is, that the labour involved in moving things around hasn't been changed all that much by immaterial/affective labour. I guess part of what I'm wondering is how we would go about measuring whether the changes brought about to a physical job by informational or affective factors are significant enough to be evidence of the hegemony of immaterial labour.
The argument of people like Hardt and Negri is that jobs which aren't themselves informational are being reorganised by immaterial labour. Now, this may not be true, but you can't disprove it just by pointing to the relative numbers of informational vs. physical jobs.
It's possible I'm just taking too literally a fairly throwaway remark in your review of Empire from way back; but it did strike me as odd that you chose to present truck drivers as a counter-example to H&N, when that's one of the examples they give of a non-immaterial job that is affected by the supposed hegemony of immaterial labour. --
"There are very few members of the establishment press
who will defend the idea that things like aggressive
flatulence, forced feedings of swill, or even a barely-
muted hostility on the part of the candidate would
justify any kind of drastic retaliation by a professional
journalist - and certainly nothing so drastic as to
cause the Democratic front-runner to cut short a major
speech because some dangerous freak was clawing at his
legs and screaming for more gin."
-- Hunter S. Thompson Tim http://www.huh.34sp.com/