{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","uuid":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","normalized_title":"laborandmonopolycapitalthedegradationofworkinthetwentiethcentury","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","isbns":["0853459401"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital%20The%20Degradation%20of%20Work%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"102 / 103","pdf_page":64,"physical_index":64,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"114a222b83787f4955973dc1179bd63a959d7113b34363bb547a8610d6e33fb9"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Before the advent of the assembly line, the company had made a general practice of dispensing more or less liberal bonuses in order to stimulate production and individual initiative. But the moment moving belt lines came into being, Ford did away with incentive pay. He reverted to the payment of a flat hourly rate of wages. The company had decided, said Iron Age in July 1913, to abandon its graduated pay scale in favor of “more strenuous supervision.\" Once the new wage policy had been put into effect, the run-of-the-mine Ford employe could expect no more variation in his earnings than in the operations which he was called upon to perform. His maximum pay was frozen, seemingly 14 for good, at \\$2.34 per day, the rate of pay which was standard for the area\n\nIn this way the new conditions of employment that were to become characteristic of the automobile industry, and thereafter of an increasing number of industries, were established first at the Ford Motor Company. Craftsmanship gave way to a repeated detail operation, and wage rates were standardized at uniform levels. The reaction to this change was powerful, as Sward relates:\n\nAs a consequence, the new technology at Ford's proved to be increasingly unpopular; more and more it went against the grain. And the men who were exposed to it began to rebel. They registered their dissatisfaction by walking out in droves. They could afford to pick and choose. Other jobs were plentiful in the community; they were easier to get to; they paid as well; and they were less mechanized and more to labor's liking.\n\nFord's men had begun to desert him in large numbers as early as 1910. With the coming of the assembly line, their ranks almost literally fell apart; the company soon found it next to impossible to keep its working force intact, let alone expand it. It was apparent that the Ford Motor Co. had reached the point of owning a great factory without having enough workers to keep it humming. Ford admitted later that his startling factory innovations had ushered in the outstanding labor crisis of his career. The turnover of his working force had run, he was to write, to 380 percent for the year 1913 alone. So great was labor's distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963. is\n\nIn this initial reaction to the assembly line we see the natural revulsion of the worker against the new kind of work. What makes it possible to see it so clearly is the fact that Ford, as a pioneer in the new mode of production, was competing with prior modes of the organization of labor which still characterized the rest of the automobile industry and other industries in the area. In this microcosm, there is an illustration of the rule that the working class is progressively subjected to the capitalist mode of production, and to the successive forms which it takes, only as the capitalist mode of production conquers and destroys all other forms of the organization of labor, and with them, all alternatives for the working population. As Ford, by the competitive advantage which he gained, forced the assembly line upon the rest of the automobile industry, in the same degree workers were forced to submit to it by the disappearance of other forms of work in that industry.\n\nThe crisis Ford faced was intensified by the unionization drive begun by the Industrial Workers of the World among Ford workers in the summer of 1913. Ford's response to the double threat of unionization and the flight of workers from his plants was the announcement, made with great fanfare early in 1914, of the \\$5.00 day. Although this dramatic increase in wages was not so strictly adhered to as Ford would have had the public believe when he launched it, it did raise pay at the Ford plant so much above the prevailing rate in the area that it solved both threats for the moment. It gave the company a large pool of labor from which to choose and at the same time opened up new possibilities for the intensification of labor within the plants, where workers were now anxious to keep their jobs. “The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day,\"Ford was to write in his autobiography, “was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made.\"!6\n\nIn this move can be seen a second element in the adjustment of workers to increasingly unpopular jobs. Conceding higher relative wages for a shrinking proportion of workers in order to guarantee uninterrupted production was to become, particularly after the Second World War, a widespread feature of corporate labor policy, especially after it was adopted by union leaderships John L. Lewis resolved upon this course of action shortly after the war: in return for encouraging the mechanization of the coal-mining industry and the reduction of employment, he insisted upon an increasing scale of compensation for the ever smaller and ever more hard-driven miners remaining in the pits. The bulk of the organized labor movement in production industries followed his lead, either openly or implicitly, in the decades thereafter. And these policies were greatly facilitated by the monopolistic structure of the industries in question. The workers who were sloughed off, or the workers who never entered manufacturing industries because of the proportional shrinkage of those industries, furnished the masses for new branches of industry at lower rates of pay.\n\nIf the petty manipulations of personnel departments and industrial psychology and sociology have not played a major role in the habituation of worker to work, therefore, this does not mean that the “adjustment\" of the worker is free of manipulative elements. On the contrary, as in all of the functionings of the capitalist system, manipulation is primary and coercion is held in reserve—except that this manipulation is the product of powerful economic forces, major corporate employment and bargaining policies, and the inner workings and evolution of the system of capitalism itself, and not primarily of the clever schemes of labor relations experts. The apparent acclimatization of the worker to the new modes of production grows out of the destruction of all other ways of living, the striking of wage bargains that permit a certain enlargement of the customary bounds of subsistence for the working class, the weaving of the net of modern capitalist life that finally makes all other modes of living impossible. But beneath this apparent habituation, the hostility of workers to the degenerated forms of work which are forced upon them continues as a subterranean stream that makes its way to the surface when employment conditions permit, or when the capitalist drive for a greater intensity of labor oversteps the bounds of physical and mental capacity. It renews itself in new generations, expresses itself in the unbounded cynicism and revulsion which large numbers of workers feel about their work, and comes to the fore repeatedly as a social issue demanding solution.\n\n102\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nThe Habituation of the Worker\n\n103","previous_page":63,"next_page":65}