The report deals with what it calls “the effects of work problems on various segments of our society":
Here we find the “blues" of blue-collar workers linked to their job dissatisfactions, as is the disgruntlement of white-collar workers and the growing discontent among managers. Many workers at all occupational levels feel locked-in, their mobility blocked, the opportunity to grow lacking in their jobs, challenge missing from their tasks. Young workers appear to be as committed to the institution of work as their elders have been, but many are rebelling against the anachronistic authoritarianism of the workplace. Minority workers similarly see authoritarian worksettings as evidence that society is falling short of its democratic ideals. Women, who are looking to work as an additional source of identity, are being frustrated by an opportunity structure that confines them to jobs damaging to their self-esteem. Older Americans suffer the ultimate in job dissatisfaction: they are denied meaningful jobs even when they have 20 demonstrable skills and are physically capable of being productive.
Absenteeism and the quit rate, cited as evidence of a “new worker attitude," tend to vary with the availability of jobs and may have partly reflected the decline in unemployment rates at the end of the 1960s. But in the atmosphere of discontent of that period these were interpreted, no doubt with some truth, as an indication of a new resistance to certain forms of work. The automobile plants, and especially their assembly lines, were cited as a prime example, as witness this 1970 report in Fortune:
For management, the truly dismaying evidence about new worker attitudes is found in job performance. Absenteeism has risen sharply; in fact it has doubled over the past ten years at General Motors and at Ford, with the sharpest climb in the past year. It has reached the point where an average of 5 percent of G.M.'s hourly workers are missing from work without explanation every day. . . . On some days, notably Fridays and Mondays, the figure goes as high as 10 percent. Tardiness has increased, making it even more difficult to start up the production lines promptly when a shift begins—after the foreman has scrambled around to replace missing workers. Complaints about quality are up sharply. There are more arguments with foremen, more complaints about discipline and overtime, more grievances. There is more turnover. The quit rate at Ford last year was 25.2 percent. . . . Some assembly-line workers are so turned off, managers report with astonishment, that they just walk away in mid-shift and don't even come back to get their pay for the time they have worked.21
At the Chrysler Corporation's Jefferson Avenue plant in Detroit, a daily average absentee rate of 6 percent was reported in mid-1971, and an annual average turnover of almost 30 percent. In its 1970 negotiations with the union, Chrysler reported that during 1969 almost half its workers did not complete their first ninety days on the job. In that same year, the Ford assembly plant at
Wixom, on the outskirts of Detroit, with an 8 percent quit rate each month, had to hire 4,800 new workers in order to maintain a work force of 5,000. For the automobile industry as a whole, the absentee rate doubled in the second half of the 1960s, and turnover doubled as well.\* Only with the increase in unemployment in 1971 and thereafter was the situation stabilized to some degree.23
A much-discussed strike in January 1972 at the Lordstown, Ohio, General Motors plant gave the world a glimpse of the conditions in this “most advanced"and “automated" plant in the industry, which General Motors regarded as a pilot plant for the future. At its designed speed, the assembly line at Lordstown turns out 100 Vegas an hour, giving each worker 36 seconds to complete work on each car and get ready for the next car. The immediate issue in the dispute was an increase in the pace of operations the previous October. "What the company is discovering is that workers not only want to go back to the pre-October pace, but many feel that the industry is going to have to do something to change the boring, repetitive nature of the assembly line work or it will continue to have unrest in the plant. An official familiar with the sessions said, ‘What they're saying is you've got to do something. I don't know what it is but you've got to do something. ,,924
Accounts of this kind are not confined to the assembly line, or even to the factory. The Special Task Force report attempts a summary of office trends in the following comments:
The auto industry is the locus classicus of dissatisfying work; the assemblyline, its quintessential embodiment. But what is striking is the extent to which the dissatisfaction of the assembly-line and blue-collar worker is mirrored in white-collar and even managerial positions. The office today, where work is segmented and authoritarian, is often a factory. For a growing number of jobs there is little to distinguish them but the color of the worker's collar: computer keypunch operations and typing pools share much in common with the automobile assembly line.
Secretaries, clerks, and bureaucrats were once grateful for having been spared the dehumanization of the factory. White-collar jobs were rare; they had a higher status than blue-collar jobs. But today the clerk, and not the operative on the assembly-line, is the typical American worker, and such positions offer little in the way of prestige. . . .
22
Labor and Monopoly Capital
Introduction
23
\* A number of European reports indicate that this situation was not limited to the United States. For example, a report from Rome said the Fiat Motor Company, Italy's largest private employer with more than 180,000 employees, 147,000 of whom are factory workers, had 21,000 employees missing on a Monday and a daily average absenteeism of 14,000. Throughout the Italian economy, an Italian management association reported, an average of at least 800,000 workers out of a total of nearly 20 million were absent daily. This was attributed to “the increasing disgust of younger people with assembly-line discipline and the recent influx of untrained southern Italians into northern factories." 22