The emphasis in this passage is upon the increase in clerical work in the processes of production. But Galloway soon extends the idea to cover the total office function in the capitalist enterprise:
Execution implies control—control of the factory organization—control of the financial organization—control of the marketing organization. It is the work of the office organization, under the supervision of the office manager, to devise records, methods, and systems for carrying out the function of control and for co-ordinating the activities of one department with those of another.'4
With the growth of the control function, and with the consequent transformation of these functions of management into independent labor processes, comes the need to control the new labor processes, according to the same principles as those applied to the factory. Leffingwell thus says at the opening of his work:
Time and motion study reveal just as startling results in the ordinary details of clerical work as they do in the factory. And after all, since every motion of the hand or body, every thought, no matter how simple, involves the consumption of physical energy, why should not the study and analysis of these motions result in the discovery of a mass of useless effort in clerical work just as it does in the factory?15
These early practitioners of scientific management applied to the office the basic concepts of the Taylor system, beginning with the breakup of the arrangement under which each clerk did his or her own work according to traditional methods, independent judgment, and light general supervision, usually on the part of the bookkeeper. Work was henceforth to be carried on as prescribed by the office manager, and its methods and time durations were to be verified and controlled by management on the basis of its own studies of each job. Thus Leffingwell instances the installation of the Taylor system in the offices of the Curtis Publishing Company, which conducted a large mail order operation. The opening of mail was reorganized, with the result that five hundred pieces per hour were handled by one clerk, as against the previous one hundred; the same efforts were applied to the standardization of over five hundred other clerical operations.
Stenographic output and other forms of typing were studied most carefully. “Some typewriter concerns equip their machines with a mechanical contrivance which automatically counts the strokes made on the typewriter and records them on a dial." This meter was used in conjunction with a time clock, which the typist punched at the start and finish of each job. Metering of this kind was used as the basis for piecework payments (it took some time before management experts discovered that under such a regimen typists never used the tabulator key, always the space bar, in order to increase their count). Companies using typewriters without such advanced equipment made use of the square-inch method described in many textbooks down to the present day. A celluloid sheet ruled in square inches is placed over the typed page, and the number of characters within the area of type is shown at the end of the last line. "If the letter is double-spaced," Galloway adds with the meticulous scientific spirit that characterizes his school, “the number of square inches is of course divided by two." The same result is obtained with a line gauge which measures length and number of lines. But these devices are merely preliminaries to the elaborate systems for recording output, typist by typist, by day and by week, so that the number of lines transcribed from dictation, copied from other documents, etc., is subject to continuous check.16 Dictation time is also recorded, at first by the page and later, with the spread of dictation machines, by mechanical means. The object is a report which accounts for the time of every stenographer. The entire charting system resembles a factory production record, and is used in the same way for setting minimum standards and raising average standards of production.
As in the case of the factory, the system of production records is in itself a way of increasing output, apart from any changes in office methods. “As a means of knowing the capacity of every clerk," wrote Leffingwell, “and also as a means of spurring him to even better efforts, the planning department keeps daily records of the amount of work performed by each clerk and his relative efficiency. The keeping of such records alone has been known to greatly increase the efficiency of many offices." A great many of the effects obtained by scientific management came from this alone, despite the pretense that the studies were being conducted for purposes of methods improvement. When Leffingwell says, for example, that “the output of one clerk was doubled merely by the re-arrangement of the work on the desk," we may understand this was an effect of close and frightening supervision rather than a miracle of efficiency; this was understood by the managers as well, although concealed beneath a “scientific” mystique. 17
From the beginning, office managers held that all forms of clerical work, not just routine or repetitive ones, could be standardized and “rationalized." For this purpose they undertook elaborate studies of even those occupations which involved little routine, scores of different operations each day, and the exercise of judgment. The essential feature of this effort was to make the clerical worker, of whatever sort, account for the entire working day. Its effect was to make the work of every office employee, no matter how experienced, the subject of management interference. In this way, management began to assert in the office its hitherto unused or sporadically exercised right of control over the labor process.
212 Labor and Monopoly Capital
Clerical Workers
213