Some of my most vivid memories of growing up in Detroit in the early 1950’s are waking up at five in the morning to see my grandfather off to his job at the mammoth Ford Rouge plant. In case we forgot the purpose of those ten or eleven tiring hours my grandfather was away from home, Vice President Nixon and other luminaries would appear on TV to remind us that we Americans have the highest standard of living in the world. In fact, we were assured that hard work could raise this standard yet higher by providing us with even more “needed goods”.
What TV was not telling us is that after a certain point higher consumption could mean a lower quality of life: more automobiles to carry workers farther and farther to meaningless jobs; TV to reproduce a wasteland in colour rather than in black and white, suburban homes to provide an escape from congested cities on even more congested freeways. In the process we lost the ability to walk, communicate with each other, and to live in a community instead of a subdivision.
In short, human activities have become fragmented, unrelated to one another and, most importantly, disjoined from living itself—they have become commodities. No one in industrial society suffers more from this fragmentation than industrial workers. We pay a double price: we sacrifice our lives on the job to obtain demeaned leisure.
I will examine the degradation of work and the way this degrades life by looking at industrial work at its best: skilled work and the more sophisticated attempts to enrich production work. By viewing work at its best, we can most clearly see how capitalism moulds the work process and defines the worker’s role in it. The very meaning of work changes from an activity or achievement into a wage relation whose purpose is the maximum extraction of profit. Capitalism, however, is not alone in subordinating human needs to production—it is a common feature of all industrial societies, whatever their ideological creeds.
In looking at industrial work at its best, we see a seemingly contradictory process taking place: skilled work is fragmented and degraded while production work is “widened” and “enriched”.
In reality, both processes attempt to control and integrate workers more effectively into a social relation which dominates them. Both processes are a response to the spirit of independence and actual rebelliousness of workers who haven’t forgotten that they are human. The purpose of work remains the production of commodities rather than the creation of use value for the workers and society.
The degradation of work is rooted in industrial society itself. In order to make work a creative and meaningful part of life it is necessary to create a society in which people control the productive process democratically by deciding what, how, when and for what purpose production takes place. This presupposes developing a production process that, in fact, can be controlled.
Skilled work gives us some unusual insights into how the worker becomes limited and dominated by the work process. There are certainly other aspects of work that present a glaring condemnation of the way this system organizes work: we could speak about coal miners suffering from black lung, or chemical workers becoming paralyzed from nerve damage as a result of handling chemicals, or the boredom of the assembly line. When we talk about the crushing monotony of the assembly line, however, it is the assembly line that appears as the culprit; but when we talk about skilled work it is not the nature of the craft, but the social relation of the worker to management that is under discussion. The full expression of the worker’s skill conflicts directly with the needs of management.
Skilled work can be satisfying because it is varied, challenging and creative. It begins far beyond where most job enrichment programmes for unskilled work leave off. Let’s take my trade, machining, as an example. You learn certain basic types of operations, each simple and relatively easy to learn, and you combine them with an indefinable ingredient, your own skill, to create what is often a tribute to your vision and experience. Being a skilled machinist eliminates the division between manual and mental labour. One of the real satisfactions of skilled work is that, like an artist, your hands produce what your mind conceives. Today more and more of the work process is being organized to limit your vision to the narrowest possible execution of someone else’s plans. If Michelangelo, for example, had to paint in this way, he would have painted the Sistine Chapel by numbers, filling in the colours of someone’s neatly laid-out design, or perhaps it would have been more efficient to have Michelangelo do all the blues, and have co-workers apply the other colours.
I’ve seen first hand how arbitrary the fragmentation of skilled work is by working in a small innovative shop in research and development where a good machinist often does the work of an engineer and an engineer experiments as a machinist. After all, the great pioneers of the industrial revolution came out of the metal working trades rather than the universities. People like Maudslay, or Whitworth or Stephenson or even James Watt came out of the crafts rather than the colleges.
When skilled work is challenging and creative in this way it relies heavily on the judgement and competence of the individual craftsman. To the extent that his skill gives him pride, it also provides a certain level of independence. However, it is precisely this independence that industry seeks to subvert; how can you control labour costs and maximize profits when an important segment of the work force has a high degree of independence? In order to limit this independence, managements have taken a number of important steps, usually in the socially neutral name of “efficiency”, that have degraded skilled work. First, planning and engineering are separated from the actual machine work itself. The strict division of the work process into machinists, technicians, and engineers is a social imperative to centralize control rather than a technical necessity. Final control doesn’t reside with the engineer, it remains with the manager, whose role is that of a glorified pimp who is anxious to manage the services of the engineer as call girl and the machinist as street walker. Frederick W. Taylor, the father of scientific management, candidly described the reality of industry today when he strongly urged that ‘all possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department…’ The word manage, itself, came into English from the Italian word “maneggiare” which meant “to handle and train horses”.
Furthermore, since there is still an important degree of autonomy left in deciding how to carry out management’s instructions, the machining trade is often broken down into its most basic elements: the lathe, the mill, the grinder, etc. The “all-round” machinist whose job it was to translate a conception into a finished product becomes the operator of a single machine. Here we cease talking about people, or even workers—instead we need “hands”. Companies advertise for a “lathe hand” or a “mill hand” because that is exactly what they need—a pair of hands to operate a machine. Since the rest of the worker comes along with the hands, the whole package is tolerated, but it is the hands that are essential.
Finally, new processes such as numerical control or computer control, in which a pre-programmed tape or computer programme determine exactly what the machine will do, put whatever discretiionary powers that remained with the worker in the hands of the manager. The skilled worker is demoted from a cog in the production process into a baby sitter for a machine. Like any baby sitter, the machinist is allowed to feed his subject, watch it, and clean up after it.
Iron Age, an important management weekly in the metal working field, described the full significance of the machinist as baby sitter:
‘Numerical control is more than a means of controlling a machine. It is a system, a method of manufacturing. It embodies much of what the father of scientific management, Frederick Winslow Taylor, sought back in 1880 when he began his investigations into the art of cutting metal.
“Our original objective,” Mr. Taylor wrote, “was that of taking the control of the machine shop out of the hands of the many workmen, and placing it completely in the hands of management, thus superseding rule-of-thumb by scientific control.”’
The effect of this degradation of skilled workers was brought home to me by a friend in Detroit when he said: ‘Do you know what they are doing to the trade? Why, they’re trying to make it nothing but a job!’ When a skilled worker today is asked what he does, he may say ‘I work for General Motors’ rather than ‘I am a machinist’. This is because he feels his primary relation on the job is to the corporation rather than to his craft.
As a society we are left with the enormous contradiction between the unique and varied intelligence that constitutes a person and the “hand” that industry wants to carry out its work. A machinist might require constant supervision by management to produce the bare minimum during his shift at work, giving the impression that even stricter supervision would be necessary for more production. Yet the same worker goes home and works until two o’clock in the morning in his garage making parts for his motorcycle at a rate of speed that would displace half of the machinists at work (were it applied), and with a quality that would virtually eliminate the need for an inspection division.
In this example, the type of work being done is the same, but the relation is different. In the factory, the worker executes a plan he had no role in formulating, often as part of a work process that does its best to relate to him as a mere pair of hands, for a product he has little or no relation to, and for which he sees only an indirect benefit for himself. The frustration of not being able to apply his skills on the job is often the motivation for doing it at home. In the splendour of his garage, planning and executing are merged, the work process is fully under his control. Work becomes a part of life.
The degradation of skilled work, of course, is occurring at a varying pace and in a different manner, depending on the industry or the trade. Where it occurs, it is usually not accepted passively by skilled workers. Whether in countless on-the-job struggles or in their unions, skilled workers are often the most vocal and best organized in their discontent, even though, compared to production workers they clearly have the best jobs at the highest rates of pay.
On the surface, the solution would appear to be to make skilled work more meaningful by reversing the trend towards more compartmentalized work and giving workers more say about how to do their jobs. But, this would put management at the mercy of the independence of its workers. It would cost them money, and companies are not in business to provide hospitable work environments, but to maximize profits.
Even more importantly, such reforms wouldn’t begin to tap people’s energies fully. Restoring some independence to skilled work would improve the job, but it would not challenge the relation of the worker to the work process, nor alter the basic nature of that process itself. Instead workers should decide what is to be done as well as how it should be done. Without this, the basic framework remains: the manager is the trainer and the worker is the horse. True, there are trainers who beat their horses and trainers who give carrots to their horses. There may even be trainers who eat with their horses, but I have never seen a horse ride a trainer. What we must do is eliminate the relation of trainer to horse among humans.
The same dynamic to maximize profits that has caused skilled work to become fragmented has caused some managers to investigate the widening of production work. The motivation is rather clear: production workers who have become aware of other possibilities in life besides dull, repetitive, meaningless work often manifest their discontent with sabotage, absenteeism, wildcat strikes and shoddy workmanship The same worker who on Thursday appears to be satisfied with his job, may not even be at his work bench on Friday or Monday.
Even at best, job enrichment is sold on the basis that increased “participation” will result in increased productivity. J.M. Roscow of the Work in America Institute, referring to proponents of job enrichment, said: ‘Their overriding concern—like Ford’s—is productivity. But … it’s their belief that job satisfaction … higher quality of working life … will not only make for more loyal, satisfied employees, but will actually increase productivity.’
There is a strong élitism that runs through many if not all of these plans: they produce jobs that are not inherently interesting, but only interesting “for workers”. I have never heard of a job enrichment professional being so taken with the result of his efforts that he decided to stay on that job after “enriching” it, and himself actually producing mirrors, dog food, or what have you.
Workers try to retain their humanity by escaping from the production process; job enrichment instead tries to further integrate them into essentially uninteresting work. Job enrichment plans assume that, when a worker puts in a dozen different kinds of bolts rather than the same one twelve times, the work is inherently more satisfying. Often the result is twelve boring jobs instead of one.
I asked a friend in Detroit who works in the pits (under the assembly line) what he thought of the Volvo plant where the cars are turned on their sides and work in the pits is eliminated. He was opposed to this idea because he had devised a way to do his timed operation in 30 seconds instead of 56 seconds and could therefore sit down out of sight when he was done. If he had been above ground, his additional 30 seconds would have been quickly “enriched”. What does this say about a society where workers are opposed to coming above ground at the workplace?
In order to encourage workers to come out of the pits, job enrichment programmes promise not only better working conditions, but “new horizons for work”. While the nature of work remains fundamentally unaltered, the prophets of these programmes manage to pervert the language we use to talk about work. It is not enough to talk about making some jobs more tolerable; instead we are offered a “new world of work”, “democratizing the work place”, and “dignity and freedom”.
Michael Maccoby, director of the Harvard Project on Technology, Work and Character, and also director of an experimental programme between Harman Industries and the UAW illustrates this new use of language. He speaks of four principles being the key to the programme: security, equity, democracy and individuation.
I would like to examine two of these concepts: democracy and individuation. Democracy is defined by Maccoby as ‘giving each worker more opportunities to have a say in the decisions that affect his life’. This is an insult to workers and to language. Democracy is not having a say, it is having the say. Counterposed to Maccoby, the dictionary defines democracy as ‘government in which the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives’. In all kinds of authoritarian systems workers have a say, but we would hardly call that democracy. Even in the ante-bellum South, slaves had certain rights and a limited control over the work they did. The question is, in case of conflict between democratic trappings and authoritarian control, which wins? While “job enrichment” might strengthen or even add democratic elements to the work place, its purpose is to make the fundamentally authoritarian organization easier to manage, not to make it basically democratic. What we are left with is a new definition of democracy for the work place: workers make no basic decisions, instead they have a say.
Individuation supposedly ‘expresses the goal of stimulating the fullest possible development of each individual’s creative potential’. A statement this sweeping is nonsense as long as we can even consider the primary definition of a person as a worker. If this can be accomplished within the work place it could only mean that people have limited potential. I reject that. People will only begin to fully realize their “creative potential” when work ceases to be a separate and compartamentalized part of life. They certainly won’t do it manufacturing mirrors for Cadillacs, the product made by Harman.
Some specific improvements that come out of a job enrichment programme can undoubtedly improve the job. However, they certainly do not change the character of work, which is what I believe must be done. In industrial society work is a prison. No doubt any prisoner would prefer being at a minimum security prison like Allenwood (where the Watergate criminals were sent), which would be akin to a benign capitalist system rather than a hell-hole like Leavenworth, the equivalent of a labour camp. But both remain prisons.
We define an institution as a prison when it incarcerates people, regardless of how pleasant the confinement might be. In the same way, when labour power is sold under capitalism, work becomes separate from life even though a certain flexibility might be conceded for efficient production.
In order to change the character of work, we cannot just look at the work place but we have to focus on the nature of the larger society. The limits of focusing on the work place were made comically clear by Dr. Robert N. Ford, personnel director for manpower utilization of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, in Senate hearings on worker alienation in 1972. Dr. Ford glowingly described the benefits of increased employee control over their work. So-called “customer service representatives” were given the right, without any consultation with superiors, to set credit ratings for customers, ask for, and determine the size of a deposit, and cut off a customer’s service for non-payment. When an autoworker’s telephone is cut off, it will be of little comfort for him to know that a phone worker somewhere is enjoying the increased responsibility of an enriched job. Unfortunately, Dr. Ford will not be around to hear the autoworker’s response.
Beyond the phone company, it is not enough for us to talk about humanizing the strip mining that destroys the environment, or manufacturing napalm in a more creative way, or building a frightening eleven million cars a year with teams rather than on assembly lines. It is not enough to question how we produce, if we neglect to consider what we produce, and the uses of that production. Is it too much to demand an enquiry into the ethics of industrial production?
The reward for enduring work under capitalism is called leisure. Those who do not work on assembly lines, or coke ovens, or in machine shops remind those who do, that while one half or more of a worker’s waking hours might be boring and meaningless, his leisure and retirement will be fulfilling.
Clark Kerr, former chancellor of the University of California, expressed this sentiment almost poetically:
‘The great new freedom may come in the leisure time of individuals. Higher standards of living, more free time and more education make this not only possible but almost inevitable. Leisure will be the happy hunting ground for the independent spirit … The economic system may be highly ordered and the political system barren ideologically; but the social and recreational and cultural aspects of life should be quite diverse and quite changing.’
Rather than leisure being the “happy hunting ground for the independent spirit”, it is degraded by the same forces that degrade work. Enforced leisure or retirement is not so much a jubilee as it is a parole whose quality has already been determined by the sentence served. On one level, the frustration and tension of the job are not easily left behind at the plant gate. Leisure becomes a frenzied managed activity to forget the job rather than a satisfying experience.
On a more basic level, the fragmented nature of life under capitalism and the intense drive of the system to sell what it produces lead us to seek satisfaction in commodities rather than in what we can do for ourselves. Leisure becomes an industry rather than a pursuit, providing us with more “efficient” alternatives for relaxation.
If we simply take a walk in the forest it may be pleasurable, but it does little to raise our “standard of living”. Instead, if we drive monstrous campers into camping grounds that are little different from housing estates, entire industries are created. Industries not just to manufacture campers, but to produce portable refrigerators, stoves, bathrooms, televisions. We certainly don’t have to worry about walking, because other industries come into being to provide exercise for us—figure salons, diet foods, etc. Even our dogs no longer have to exercise: diet dog foods are available to meet their “needs”.
At each step of the way, we require increasing numbers of experts to repair our campers, trim our bodies, recommend food for our dogs, and relax our minds. What industrial society gives us is the ultimate professionalism: armies of experts determining and having the weapons of manipulation to enforce our “needs”. After our “needs” are determined, one possibility only is offered to satisfy them: remain in the system and produce. Culture becomes the outer wall of the prison that is work. The system that makes work meaningless makes life meaningless: both reflect the drives of the society.
The central drive, production for profit, is incompatible with humanizing the society. We are told that production for profits is the only efficient way to provide us with a decent and satisfying life, yet at best, a relatively high standard of consumption has become far different from a fulfilling life. To produce this consumption requires that the vast majority of us remain as horses, and let’s face it, there are limits to the satisfactions and visions a horse can have of life. Discussions about improving work become essentially discourses on how the trainer can best harness the horse.
In order to free the productive activity of man and leisure from this subordination, the social relations in the society must be radically altered. I propose a full and democratic workers’ control of not only the work place but also of the society as a means to transform the nature of work and leisure in the most fundamental way. This demands a revolutionary change in society, confronting the industrial system, the state and all its institutions. Revolution, however, is not the solution: it is the condition that makes solutions possible. Workers’ control is the first step to eliminate work as a separate and alien part of our lives and thereby humanize the society. In the process, we should re-examine the use of industrial production as we know it.
As a skilled worker, I don’t just want to control the present industrial system and the culture it has defecated. I want workers’ control for a new and better society. It will be a victory for us, as workers, to democratically run industry, but it does not constitute a victory for us as men. It will be a triumph for man when we begin to cultivate new life styles based on a complete inversion of our present society. The entire monstrous edifice of relations of the production of goods can’t be merely taken over: it was brutally built with the needs of the present owners and managers in mind. We will have to lay new cornerstones and build on new human and humane foundations.
Perhaps this will enable us to regain those human functions that have been taken from us. Extraordinary dreams may become everyday reality. Today some of us have hopes of building these life styles within capitalist society. To the extent that this is possible it amounts to a few going over the prison wall, becoming the proverbial drop-outs, often to live dependent on the output of those that remain. If only a few make it, they may be tolerated. If too many attempt to escape all will be forced back. The only real alternative is to tear down the walls and abolish the institutions that imprison us. To paraphrase Eugene Debs’ words of half a century ago: if a soul remains in prison, none of us are free.
Instead of going over the wall or attempting to run our work-prisons co-operatively within capitalism, workers’ control is the first step towards building a system that will allow people to determine and fulfil their real needs. The inspiration of skilled workers who never fully resigned themselves to being only “hands” or “horses” may contribute to the replacement of industrial society, capitalist or otherwise, with one that will not separate work from life and thus impoverish both. For all of us, this will be a celebration of life.