UMS uses a number of selected jobs or types of work whose work content is known and divides them into ranges of time. . . . One national organization had by the end of 1960 almost finished establishing universal standard data elements for all plants. Anyone in any plant could use the same standard for the jobs in his department. Fifty-two thousand universal elements had been isolated and studied. The data are placed on punch cards and magnetic tape to utilize a computer with a large memory. Plans will allow each foreman anywhere in the country to call into a central unit, to get a standard time for the job in which he is interested. . . . A foreman can, for example, get a standard time for a job that may only be running a couple of hours. These jobs were not studied previously because it took too long to make the studies.ª1
The picture of mechanization and skill cannot be completed without reference to those industries where mechanization has made the process so automatic that the worker takes virtually no physical part in it whatsoever. This theoretical ideal can be but seldom realized, and most plants considered “automatic" still require a great deal of direct labor of all sorts. But in the chemical industry it very often comes closer to realization than elsewhere, because of the nature of the continuous processes employed and the possibility of moving the entire product-in-preparation within enclosed vessels and piping. Thus the chemical operator is singled out, time and again, as the outstanding beneficiary of “automation," and the praises of this job are sung in countless variations. The work of the chemical operator is generally clean, and it has to do with “reading instruments" and “keeping charts." These characteristics already endear him to all middle-class observers, who readily confuse them with skill, technical knowledge, etc. Yet few have stopped to think whether it is harder to learn to read a dial than to tell time. Even Blauner, who selected this work as his example of the tendency of modern industry to bring the total process of production back within the ken of the worker, admits that chemical operators need know nothing about chemical processes.ª² He cites one oil refinery personnel executive who has placed a limit on the I.Q.'s of workers hired for operating jobs, another who calls them “only watchmen,' and reports this outburst by a chemical operator:
It takes skill to be an operator. Maybe you've heard of this job-evaluation program that's been going on. Well, our supervisor thinks there's not much skill in our work. The way he described our jobs for the job-evaluation program, it's like he thinks you could train a bunch of chimps and they could do the job, He thinks we’re a bunch of idiots. That has caused unhappy feelings.43
Transfers from operations to maintenance are common, Blauner says, but there are virtually no transfers in the other direction. This may also have something to do with pay rates, since, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for June 1971, the highest average pay rate among chemical operators (Class A) is lower than the lowest average classification among maintenance mechanics. Class B chemical operators are paid on the level of stock clerks.ª4
What happens in such an industry is comparable to what happens in other production systems: the automation of processes places them under the control of management engineers and destroys the need for knowledge or training. “In the chemical industry, although the division of labour does not as a rule take the form of the assembly line, the modernization of equipment has considerably lessened the time needed to train ‘experienced' workers. In a factory for distilling coal-tar (Lyons, 1949), the training of a ‘good distiller,' which previously took about six months, to-day takes three weeks. This is due particularly to the process of continuous distillation, resulting from more numerous and more sensitive measuring devices."45
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Machinery
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