The progressive elimination of thought from the work of the office worker thus takes the form, at first, of reducing mental labor to a repetitious performance of the same small set of functions. The work is still performed in the brain, but the brain is used as the equivalent of the hand of the detail worker in production, grasping and releasing a single piece of“data" over and over again. The next step is the elimination of the thought process completelyor at least insofar as it is ever removed from human labor——and the increase of clerical categories in which nothing but manual labor is performed.
Office Work as Manual Labor
The management experts of the second and third generation after Taylor erased the distinction between work in factories and work in offices, and analyzed work into simple motion components. This reduction of work to abstract labor, to finite motions of hands, feet, eyes, etc., along with the absorption of sense impressions by the brain, all of which is measured and analyzed without regard to the form of the product or process, naturally has the effect of bringing together as a single field of management study the work in offices and in factories. The modern “science" of motion study treats office and factory work according to the same rules of analysis, as aspects of the unvarying motions of human “operators." A typical handbook by a management engineer thus begins with a section headed “The Concept of the Universal Process," and in discussing work “in a shop, warehouse, store, office, or any other area," first takes pains to establish the general applicability of work measurement and production control systems to work of every kind: “Each situation presents a different surface appearance, and so the work which is performed in each of these diverse areas is ordinarily assumed to be very different. But a very marked similarity of basic purpose exists in all of these areas. . . . The universality of the process may be seen by analyzing that which goes to make up the process. To say that wherever humans labor they are performing the same types of work certainly seems to be a ridiculous statement. This seems to be even more inaccurate when it is remembered that much work is mental in nature, and not physical. But the statement is true."24 “Universal standard data," the collection of which began with an eye principally toward factory work, are now applied at least as frequently to work in the office.
In addition, standard data have been collected specifically for office purposes, in the form of studies of particularly common office motions that are offered as interchangeable parts from which office managers may assemble their own complete operations. The Systems and Procedures Association of America, for instance, has assembled in compact form such a manual, entitled A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards: A Compilation of Standard Data Used by Large American Companies (Detroit, 1960). The organizations which contributed their materials to this handbook are the General Electric Company, Stanford University, the General Tire and Rubber Company, Kerr-McGee Oil Industries, Inc., Owens-Illinois, Harris Trust and Savings Bank of Chicago, and the Chicago Chapter of the Systems and Procedures Association.\*
The clerical standards maintained by these organizations begin with unit time values for the various elements of motion, as we have described above in Chapter 8, but they go on to agglomerate elemental motions into office tasks, and to offer the office manager the standards by which labor processes may be organized and calibrated. For example:
\* The tables in the Guide are published without direct identification of the source corporation, but the information given makes identification clear in most cases. Thus “Company A," from whose data most of the examples used here are taken, is identified only as a“large manufacturer of electrical appliances and allied products," but of the cooperating parties, the only organization that fits this description is General Electric, which contributed the office standards used in its Distribution Transformer Department, manufacturer of heavy power-processing equipment. In what follows, we manage to catch a glimpse of the office standards and analyses under which modern office workers are actually supervised, whether they know it or not, and this is superior to looking at textbook standards.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Clerical Workers
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