100 Labor and Monopoly Capital
The chief conclusion of the Mayo school was that the workers' motivations could not be understood on a purely individual basis, and that the key to their behavior lay in the social groups of the factory. With this, the study of the habituation of workers to their work moved from the plane of psychology to that of sociology. The “human relations" approach, first of a series of behavioral sociological schools, focused on personnel counseling and on ingratiating or nonirritating styles of “face to face" supervision. But these schools have yielded little to management in the way of solid and tangible results. Moreover, the birth of the “human relations" idea coincided with the Depression of the 1930s and the massive wave of working-class revolt that culminated in the unionization of the basic industries of the United States. In the illumination cast by these events, the workplace suddenly appeared not as a system of bureaucratic formal organization on the Weberian model, nor as a system of informal group relations as in the interpretation of Mayo and his followers, but rather as a system of power, of class antagonisms. Industrial psychology and sociology have never recovered from this blow. From their confident beginnings as “sciences" devoted to discovering the springs of human behavior the better to manipulate them in the interests of management, they have broken up into a welter of confused and confusing approaches pursuing psychological sociological, economic, mathematical, or “systems" interpretations of the realities of the workplace, with little real impact upon the management of worker or work.\*
If the adaptation of the worker to the capitalist mode of production owes little to the efforts of practical and ideological manipulators, how is it in fact accomplished? Much of the economic and political history of the capitalist world during the last century and a half is bound up with this process of adjustment and the conflicts and revolts which attended it, and this is not the place to attempt a summary. A single illustration, that of the first comprehensive conveyor assembly line, will have to suffice as an indication that the wrenching of the workers out of their prior conditions and their adjustment to the forms of work engineered by capital is a fundamental process in which the principal roles are played not by manipulation or cajolery but by socioeconomic conditions and forces.
In 1903, when the Ford Motor Company was founded, building automobiles was a task reserved for craftsmen who had received their training in the bicycle and carriage shops of Michigan and Ohio, then the centers of those industries. “Final assembly, for example," writes Eli Chinoy, "“had originally been a highly skilled job. Each car was put together in one spot by a number of all-around mechanics."12 By 1908, when Ford launched the Model T, procedures had been changed somewhat, but the changes were slight compared with what was soon to come. The organization of assembly labor at that time is described as follows by Keith Sward:
At Ford's and in all the other shops in Detroit, the process of putting an automobile together still revolved around the versatile mechanic, who was compelled to move about in order to do his work. Ford's assemblers were still all-around men. Their work was largely stationary, yet they had to move on to their next job on foot as soon as the car-in-the-making at their particular station had been taken the whole distance——from bare frame to finished product. To be sure, time had added some refinements. In 1908 it was no longer necessary for the assembler to leave his place of work for trips to the tool crib or the parts bin. Stock-runners had been set aside to perform this function. Nor was the Ford mechanic himself in 1908 quite the man he had been in 1903. In the intervening years the job of final assembly had been split up ever so little. In place of the jack-of-all-trades who formerly “did it all," there were now several assemblers who worked over a particular car side by side, each one responsible for a somewhat limited set of operations. 13
The demand for the Model T was so great that special engineering talent was engaged to revise the production methods of the company. The key element of the new organization of labor was the endless conveyor chain upon which car assemblies were carried past fixed stations where men performed simple operations as they passed. This system was first put into operation for various subassemblies, beginning around the same time that the Model T was launched, and developed through the next half-dozen years until it culminated in January 1914 with the inauguration of the first endless-chain conveyor for final assembly at Ford's Highland Park plant. Within three months, the assembly time for the Model T had been reduced to one-tenth the time formerly needed, and by 1925 an organization had been created which produced almost as many cars in a single day as had been produced, early in the history of the Model T, in an entire year.
The quickening rate of production in this case depended not only upon the change in the organization of labor, but upon the control which management, at a single stroke, attained over the pace of assembly, so that it could now double and triple the rate at which operations had to be performed and thus subject its workers to an extraordinary intensity oflabor. Having achieved this, Ford then moved to flatten the pay structure as a further cost-cutting measure:
The Habituation of the Worker
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\* The actual place of industrial psychology and sociology in corporate policies was succinctly expressed by three specialists in industrial engineering at the end of an article called “Current Job Design Criteria": “It can be concluded that company policies and practices [this refers to the companies studied in the article] in job design are inconsistent with programs and policies in human relations and personnel administration. On the one hand, specific steps are taken to minimize the contribution of the individual, and on the other hand he is propagandized about his importance and value to the organization."" But this is more than an “inconsistency," since job design represents reality while personnel administration represents only mythology. From the point of view of the corporation, there is no inconsistency, since the latter represents a manipulation to habituate the worker to the former.