The introduction of piecework systems in their various forms—straight piece rates, incentives, or the Taylor differential system—followed naturally on the heels of the other innovations. “One of the great changes which forced business men to revise their opinions about the wages system was the enormous growth of the operating side of business. It became necessary to employ hundreds of clerks, typists, and bookkeepers instead of a half-dozen or so. The management was confronted with a new condition in which it was impossible to determine whether or not the employees were living up to the standard of a fair day's work."18
The early “scientific" office managers were primarily concerned with the theory of existing procedures rather than with the mechanization of the office; like Taylor, they took the existing level of technical development as given. Although the basic instrument of office labor, the typewriter, was in universal use, and the instruments for adding, dictating, and ledger posting by mechanical means had already been devised, the mechanization of the office still lay far in the future. Insofar as office managers dealt with the tools and materials of office labor, they concerned themselves chiefly with the trivia of arranging, and selecting among, existing possibilities. Office layout was given an inordinate amount of attention, and the use of pneumatic tubes for communication between desks and offices, and of endless conveyor belts for the movement of work in process, became quite fashionable. The economies sought in the organization of masses of labor can be seen, to take a single instance, from the following: Leffingwell calculated that the placement of water fountains so that each clerk walked, on the average, a mere hundred feet for a drink would cause the clerical workers in one office to walk an aggregate of fifty thousand miles each year just to drink an adequate amount of water, with a corresponding loss of time for the employer. (This represents the walking time of a thousand clerks, each of whom walked only a few hundred yards a day.) The care with which arrangements are made to avoid this “waste" gives birth to the sedentary tradition which shackles the clerical worker as the factory worker is shackledby placing everything within easy reach so that the clerk not only need not, but dare not, be too long away from the desk.\*
“If the paper upon which the writing is done is of good hard quality and a fine pen is used instead of a stub pen, the use of a blotter, and the thousands of useless motions caused by it, may be dispensed with. It is a saving far exceeding the pen supply for years. The size and shape of the penholder should also be carefully studied and standardized." One manager made a “time study" of the evaporation of inks and found that nonevaporating inkwells would save a dollar a year on each inkwell. This is reported in all seriousness, along with the observation that the “rate of evaporation, of course, varies with the humidity, and the results would not be constant." A time study of the removal of pins or paper clips from correspondence before filing or destroying “showed that it required ten minutes to remove one pound of clips and pins. . . . It is true that the pins have to be put in the pin cushion, but this work can be done by the office messenger between trips. A thousand pins can be put in a pin cushion,"Leffingwell adds, with uncharacteristic inexactitude, “in fifteen to twenty minutes." He concludes this discussion on a hortatory note:
This brief outline ofhow the physical office may be standardized will give you an idea of the amount of detail to be considered. Under scientific management, however, the work of standardization is never quite complete. New and improved methods are constantly being evolved and tried out in order to keep up to date. The standards of today may be entirely revolutionized tomorrow. This is no excuse for not standardizing but is an argument for it. Some managers of steel companies, for example, were willing to let well enough alone, thinking that the investment they had in equipment was sufficient for all purposes and that it was folly to be continually remodeling. Carnegie, on the other hand, junked all his old equipment and installed modern machinery and methods. The result is well known. The office manager who has the courage of a Carnegie will win just as surely as the ironmaster did.20
By later standards, the equipment and methods of the early Carnegies of office management were crude, and represented merely the first response to the problem of the large-scale office. As in the factory, the solution to the problem was found first in the technical division of labor and second in mechanization. Although these are today aspects of the same process, historically they came about in stages, and it is preferable to separate them and deal first with the division of labor in office processes.
214
Labor and Monopoly Capital
Clerical Workers
215
\* “Save ten steps a day for each of 12,000 employees," said Henry Ford of his system of having stock-chasers bring materials to the worker instead of having the worker move around freely, “and you will have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy."19 All motions or energies not directed to the increase of capital are
of course “wasted" or “misspent." That every individual needs a variety of movements and changes of routine in order to maintain a state of physical health and mental freshness, and that from this point of view such motion is not wasted, does not enter into the case. The solicitude that brings everything to the worker's hand is of a piece with the fattening arrangements of a cattle feed-lot or poultry plant, in that the end sought is the same in each case: the fattening of the corporate balance sheet. The accompanying degenerative effects on the physique and well-being of the worker are not counted at all.