Furniture production is being remade in the image of the automobile industry. It has increasingly become a mass-production process in which the skills and effects of woodworking and cabinetmaking are disappearing. Shaping is done on automatic contour-profilers operated by unskilled labor. Routers for grooving and cutouts are done by template-controlled machines with a cam and sensing system of programming. “Unskilled operators need only to feed material to the machine; in some applications, even feeding is automatic."26 “The use of pneumatic power clamps and assembly machines is speeding the assembly of frames, case ends, drawers, and chairs, while requiring fewer and less-skilled workers. One machine takes parts directly from a tenoner, feeds metal parts from hoppers, inserts these parts, drives pins or nails, and ejects a completed shelving onto a conveyor at a rate of 7 to 10 per minute, and only one operative is required to load the hoppers and pinners. Another machine takes panels, aligns and joins them perfectly square, drives staples to hold the assembly true while the glue dries, and permits the assembly of a kitchen cabinet by one man every 60 seconds."27 Painting has been mechanized, using automatic spray and flow-coating techniques. Upholstery work is now done with precut, preformed, and stretch materials, thus putting an end to the traditional skills of that trade.
In meatpacking, the industry which was the first in the United States to introduce conveyor lines, the on-the-rail dressing system has displaced the older conveyor. “In rail systems, stunned cattle are hoisted to a high conveyor rail, on which they are slaughtered and then moved through all dressing operations to the chill cooler. Workers, stationed on mechanized platforms which move vertically and horizontally according to the requirements of each task, use power knives and saws. Mechanical hide strippers, which grasp and peel the hide from the carcass, substantially reduce the skilled hand-cutting operations once necessary to remove a high-quality hide without damage. Labor savings per unit may be between 25 and 60 percent on the kill line. These savings are in reduction of waiting time between performance of individual tasks, which are now machine-paced and synchronized, and elimination of constant repositioning of the carcass necessary in the older bed’ system."28 There is a machine which permits an image of each carcass to be projected on a screen so that workers can be guided in making major cuts by a pointer which indicates them; far fewer workers need to know how and where to cut a carcass. Machines emulsify, form, smoke, cook, chill, peel, wash, and package frankfurters. Electronic machines that weigh and package poultry along with mechanical pluckers process up to 9,000 chickens an hour, although, we are told, the prevalence of "low wage rates in poultry packing plants" is among the factors which “tend to retard technological change" in that branch of the industry.29
In the manufacture of wearing apparel, every aspect of the production process is being energetically attacked. Since this is an industry which is characterized by the existence of many shops, most of them relatively small, a great many are still in the stage of traditional “rationalization," breaking down operations into a large number of smaller and simpler steps. At the same time these steps are being speeded up by the introduction of a variety of devices, chiefly attachments to sewing machines such as needle positioners, automatic thread cutters, pleaters, and hemmers. The use of two- or three-layer bonded materials, which eliminate separate linings, and synthetic fabrics, which may be processed by novel methods such as the electronic fusing of seams in place of sewing, opens up new vistas for cheapening and transforming mass-produced clothing. Advanced production methods are copied from sheetmetal and boiler-shop techniques: die-cutting to replace hand cutting, patterngrading equipment which produces different size copies of a master pattern, etc. There is a photoline tracer which guides a sewing head along the path of a pattern placed in a control unit. Improving on this, a photoelectric control is used to guide a sewing head along the edge of the fabric. In these latter innovations we see the manner in which science and technology apply similar principles to dissimilar processes, since the same control principles may be applied to complex contours, whether on steel or cloth.
In typesetting, the printing industry first took the path of eliminating the linotyper's skill through the use of tape-controlled linecasting, the essence of which was the separation of the keyboard from the casting of lead slugs. The operator prepares a control tape on a machine much more rapid and simpler to operate than the linotype. But the use of photocomposition in tandem with the electronic computer has enabled the industry to begin the elimination of metal type altogether, and along with it the need for the operator to justify lines and hyphenate words, since these functions can be performed by a computer which utilizes a record of the syllabification of almost every word in the language. That this rids the typesetter of one more load of useless knowledge has already been amply pointed out, but no one has yet pointed to the knowledge acquired in its place.
Despite the variety of means used in all the innovations we have been describing, their unifying feature is the same as that which we noted at the outset of this discussion: the progressive elimination of the control functions of the worker, insofar as possible, and their transfer to a device which is controlled, again insofar as possible, by management from outside the direct process. It is this which dominates the new place of the worker in production processes, and it is this above all which is slighted or entirely neglected in conventional assessments. The knowledge of labor and production processes which the outsider may gain from a study of nontechnical sources is limited by the vague and imprecise impressions which pass for information, and from which sociologists and journalists, already too eager to achieve optimistic conclusions, glean their notions about the trend of labor in modern society. Morris A. Horowitz and Irwin L. Herrenstadt did an exhaustive survey of such materials in the course of their attempt to study changes in skill requirements of various occupations, and they report the following:
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