Since a TMU is defined as one one-hundred-thousandth (.00001) of an hour, and there are thus 28 TMUs in each second, this means that a key punch machine is to be operated at the rate of 53/5 strokes per second when purely numeric punching is being done. For the punching of alphabetical characters, however, one additional TMU per stroke is allowed for “mental time." In this way, the AEtna specialists calculated that to punch numeric values in 26 columns, and alphabetic characters in 24, skipping over the other 30 columns, allowing for automatic duplication and allowing 20 TMUs (3 of a second), for consulting the information source, as well as 17.2 TMUs for additional handling, it should take .2295 minutes to punch the card and .2017 minutes for another operator to verify it on a second machine. Under 15 seconds per card is allowed, in other words, for key punching or for verification, including a 5 percent allowance for error. But since key punch operators have to handle work before and after punching, a further set of calculations is made in order to account for all the operator's time: a tabulation of 31 motions, including time for “stand," “sit," “get pencil," “initial cards," “open and close card clip," “open and close drawer," “get rubber band," “band cards,” etc.25
In the clerical routine of offices, the use of the brain is never entirely done away withany more than it is entirely done away with in any form of manual work. The mental processes are rendered repetitious and routine, or they are reduced to so small a factor in the work process that the speed and dexterity with which the manual portion of the operation can be performed dominates the labor process as a whole. More than this cannot be said of any manual labor process, and once it is true of clerical labor, labor in that form is placed on an equal footing with the simpler forms of so-called blue-collar manual labor. For this reason, the traditional distinctions between “manual" and “white-collar" labor, which are so thoughtlessly and widely used in the literature on this subject, represent echoes of a past situation which has virtually ceased to have meaning in the modern world of work. And with the rapid progress of mechanization in offices it becomes all the more important to grasp this.
The Mechanization of the Office
Machinery that is used to multiply the useful effects of labor in production may be classified, as we have seen, according to the degree of its control over motion. Insofar as control over motion rests with the operator, the machine falls short of automatic operation; insofar as it is rendered automatic, direct control has been transferred to the machine itself. In office machinery, however, the control over motion is generally incidental to the purpose of the machine. Thus the rapidity and precision of the high-speed printer are not required in order to print rapidlythere are other and faster ways to ink characters onto paper—but in order to record a controlled flow of information as it is processed in the computer. It is one part of a machine system designed to control not motion but information.
Information exists, in the main, in the form of a record of symbolic characters: the alphabet, numbers, and other conventional symbols. Until recently, the processing of these characters—that is to say, assembling and reassembling them in required forms and combining or analyzing them according to the rules of mathematics—was directly dependent upon the human brain. While various mechanical means for recording or combining them were in daily office use, such as the typewriter, the adding or calculating machine, and the bookkeeping machine, each of these machines could only carry or process information through a very short part of its total cycle before it again had to involve the human brain to move it into its next position. In this sense, the office process resembled a pipeline that required a great many pumping stations at very close intervals. The difficulty lay in the form in which information was recorded: so long as it took the form of a notation which could be apprehended only by the human senses, humans were required to seize it and move or manipulate it. Thus every key-driven mechanical adding or calculating machine depended on the line-by-line keyboard work of the operator, and its storage and processing facilities were limited to the capacities of a few mechanical registers. While this situation continued, every office machine remained on the primitive level of the hand tool, or power-assisted hand tool.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Clerical Workers
225
\* It is worth noting that this simple list of three unit times, with their total, is made into a "table" by the addition of two useless lines and two useless columns. This is typical of the manner in which management “experts" dress their presentations in the trappings of mathematics in order to give them the appearance of “science"; whether the sociologists have learned this from the schools of business administration or the other way around would make a nice study.