The tendency of the labor process exemplified in the various machine jobs is not confined to the workers grouped immediately around the computer. On the contrary, with the exception of a specialized minority whose technical and “systems" skills are expanded, this tendency increasingly affects all clerical workers. The reasons for this may be separated into two parts.
First, the formal demands of computerization extend far beyond those machine operators who work with the raw materials or finished products of the computer. Since coding operations are performed mechanically according to fixed layouts, the materials prepared by others for the machine rooms must also follow strict rules of form. Thus the clerk who uses nothing but paper and writing instruments, and who apprehends the information in the first instance from original source documents, is governed by the same rules of form. This has led to the possibility of transferring the work of the key punch operator to the other grades of clerk, a change which is now under way and which will undoubtedly accelerate. Under this system, the work of transcribing information into a form that can be used by the computer is spread throughout the office instead of being localized in machine rooms, by means of terminals or other simple keyboard machines that can be operated by any clerk. In this way, machine operation is generalized throughout the office. If, in the first instance, this involves a combination of jobs—that of interpreting being combined with that of keyboard operationthe next step is the simplification and even elimination of the judgmental steps involved in interpretation by tying the new keyboard machine to the computer and utilizing its storage and swift-search capacities. Thus, in a variety of ways, the reduction of data to symbolic form with accurate positional attributes becomes, increasingly, the business of the office as a whole, as a measure to economize on labor costs.
Second, a variety of other machines and systems are applied to other work processes not within the immediate orbit of the computer. For example, file clerks serve elaborate and semiautomatic machine systems which eliminate the need to know the sequence of the alphabet, or even the sequence of numbers; everything is eliminated but the task of placing under the photographic apparatus of the machine, as swiftly as possible, one document after another. Typists, mail sorters, telephone operators, stock clerks, receptionists, payroll and timekeeping clerks, shipping and receiving clerks are subjected to routines, more or less mechanized according to current possibilities, that strip them of their former grasp of even a limited amount of office information, divest them of the need or ability to understand and decide, and make of them so many mechanical eyes, fingers, and voices whose functioning is, insofar as possible, predetermined by both rules and machinery. As an important instance of this, we may note the changes in the work of the bank teller, once an important functionary upon whose honesty, judgment, and personality much of the public operation and relations of the bank used to depend. Attached to mechanical and electronic equipment, these employees have been transformed into checkout clerks at a money supermarket counter, their labor power purchased at the lowest rates in the mass labor market, their activities prescribed, checked, and controlled in such a way that they have become so many interchangeable parts. And it should be added that the teller's function, limited as it now is, will gradually be replaced by new mechanical-electronic equipment that originated in England and has been spreading in the United States. A cash machine which, activated by a customer card, supplies cash from the customer's account is no more than the first tentative step in this direction. So-called automated tellers are able, on the same principle, to transact any of a number of banking functions, including deposits to or withdrawals from savings or checking accounts, transfers between accounts, and loan repayments.³º Such equipment requires not so much a revolution in banking technology as the modification ofexisting equipment so that it may be used directly by the customer, with minimal opportunity for error or fraud. The fact that this is becoming increasingly common in trade and service areas indicates that much automated equipment is so simple to operate that it requires no training whatsoever; it also foreshadows the weakening of the demand for labor in fields of employment that have been expanding rapidly.
The trend in what is known as “secretarial work" assumes great importance in this transformation of clerical labor, for two reasons. First, it is an occupational category of enormous size. Some 2.75 million persons were employed as secretaries in the United States in 1970, according to the census for that year, almost all of them women. This is the largest single category of clerical labor. And second, we are at the beginning of a revolution in this field which will transform the office almost to the same extent as it is now being transformed by the computer. To understand this incipient upheaval, we must review this occupation and its fundamental rationale.
From a functional standpoint, the secretary came into existence as a device to extend the administrative scope of the entrepreneur and proprietor. Later, as the managerial structure grew, the secretary, from this same functional standpoint, came to represent a pure expression of the Babbage principle: it was thought “wasteful," from the capitalist point of view, to have a manager spend time typing letters, opening mail, sending parcels, making travel arrangements, answering the telephone, etc., when these duties could be performed by labor power hired at anywhere from one-third to one-fiftieth of the remuneration of the manager. But here the operation of the Babbage principle is further stimulated by the fact that the managers are organizing not the distant labor processes of subordinates, but their own labor. Since they tend to place an exaggerated value upon their own time, and a minimal value upon the time of others as compared with their own, the Babbage principle goes to work in the offices of managing executives with particular force, all the more so as it is intensified by the prestige attaching to managers with large staffs, the usefulness of a retinue of office servants for the transacting of personal matters, and other career, social, and personal considerations.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Clerical Workers
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