At first glance, the organization of labor according to simplified tasks, conceived and controlled elsewhere, in place of the previous craft forms of labor, have a clearly degrading effect upon the technical capacity of the worker. In its effects upon the working population as a whole, however, this matter is complicated by the rapid growth of specialized administrative and technical staff work, as well as by the rapid growth of production and the shifting of masses to new industries and within industrial processes to new occupations.
In the discussion of this issue in Taylor's day, a pattern was set which has been followed since. “There are many people who will disapprove of the whole scheme of a planning department to do the thinking for the men,\* as well as a number of foremen to assist and lead each man in his work, on the ground that this does not tend to promote independence, self-reliance, and originality in the individual," he wrote in Shop Management. “Those holding this view, however, must take exception to the whole trend of modern industrial development." And in The Principles of Scientific Management: "Now, when through all of this teaching and this minute instruction the work is apparently made so smooth and easy for the workman, the first impression is that this all tends to make him a mere automaton, a wooden man. As the workmen frequently say when they first come under this system, Why, I am not allowed to think or move without someone interfering or doing it for me!’ The same criticism and objection, however, can be raised against all other modern subdivision of labor."5
These responses, however, clearly did not satisfy Taylor, particularly since they seemed to throw the blame on his own beloved “modern subdivision of labor." And so in both books he went on to further arguments, which in Shop Management took this form:
It is true, for instance, that the planning room, and functional foremanship render it possible for an intelligent laborer or helper in time to do much of the work now done by a machinist. Is not this a good thing for the laborer and helper? He is given a higher class of work, which tends to develop him and gives him better wages. In the sympathy for the machinist the case of the laborer is overlooked. This sympathy for the machinist is, however, wasted, since the machinist, with the aid of the new system, will rise to a higher class of work which he was unable to do in the past, and in addition, divided or functional foremanship will call for a larger number of men in this class, so that men, who must otherwise have remained machinists all their lives, will have the opportunity of rising to a foremanship.
The demand for men of originality and brains was never so great as it is now, and the modern subdivision of labor, instead of dwarfing men, enables them all along the line to rise to a higher plane of efficiency, involving at the same time more brain work and less monotony. The type of man who was formerly a day laborer and digging dirt is now for instance making shoes in a shoe factory. The dirt handling is done by Italians or Hungarians.' 6
This argument gains force in a period of growth, of the rapid accumulation of capital through production on an ever larger scale, and of the constant opening of new fields of capital accumulation in new industries or the conquest of pre-capitalist production forms by capital. In this context, new drafts of workers are brought into jobs that have already been degraded in comparison with the craft processes of before; but inasmuch as they come from outside the existing working class, chiefly from ruined and dispersed farming and peasant populations, they enter a process unknown to them from previous experience and they take the organization of work as given. Meanwhile, opportunities open up for the advancement of some workers into planning, layout, estimating, or drafting departments, or into foremanships (especially two or three generations ago, when such jobs were customarily still staffed from the shop floors). In this manner, short-term trends opening the way for the advancement of some workers in rapidly growing industries, together with the ever lower skill requirements characteristic at the entry level where large masses of workers are being put to work in industrial, office, and marketing processes for the first time, simply mask the secular trend toward the incessant lowering of the working class as a whole below its previous conditions of skill and labor. As this continues over several generations, the very standards by which the trend is judged become imperceptibly altered, and the meaning of‘skill" itself becomes degraded.
Labor and Monopoly Capital
Effects of Scientific Management
89
\* I ask the reader, in passing, to note the bluntness of the phrase “a planning department to do the thinking for the men." The functions of planning departments have not changed, but in a more sophisticated age, and one in which debates rage about the organization of work, the managers are forewarned, and it is not thought necessary to speak so plainly.