{"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":147,"pdf_page":86,"physical_index":86,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d82f9e1f1f3de1be0a6b081abd2280c124bd82f91a34ce65963fd873da2d5287"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Limiting our focus to the past 15 years, we examined various bibliographies and indexes in an effort to pull together the literature relevant to our field of interest. Over 500 bibliographic titles were selected for careful scrutiny and analysis. The overwhelming majority of these speculated about the effects of automation based upon general impressions, discussions with a few industrialists or union leaders, or a few very limited case studies conducted by others. If an article or book discussed automation and manpower, it typically referred to employment opportunities resulting from technological change, the effects on the occupational structure of the plant or industry, or the effects on the skill composition of the labor force. Only a small number of studies made any effort to investigate and analyze the effects of automation on job content and the worker characteristics required of the changing jobs.\\*\n\nThis very paucity of systematic information and analysis makes all the more important James R. Bright's unique study, referred to earlier in this chapter. In 1954, research was begun at the Harvard Business School on the \"managerial implications\" of “automation.\" In 1958, Bright published a volume entitled Automation and Management, which begins with a survey of the evolution of mechanization in manufacturing (with special attention to the electric lamp and shoe industries) and then analyzes in great detail thirteen of the most advanced production systems in operation at the time of the study. These included the Ford Cleveland Engine Plant; a highly automated bread bakery; a small integrated oil refinery with the reputation of being an outstanding example of automatic control; a new automatic production line for the manufacture of oil seals; the foam rubber mattress department of a rubber company, in which the entire process, from raw material stores to finished product warehouse had been integrated into a single radically new system; a chemical plant making commercial fertilizer; a feed and grain plant with a high degree of automaticity; a small coal mine which attempted extensive use of automatic equipment; a plating plant in which a complex production sequence was subjected to a highly automatic handling system; an instrument manufacturer with a unique work-feeding system; an electrical parts manufacturer who applied automatic methods to assembly operations; another plating plant with a differing system of work organization; and a V-8 engine plant. Bright later wrote several articles (see, for example, the July-August 1958 issue ofHarvard Business Review) and, most important, a summary of his conclusions with regard to skill written in 1966 for the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress.\n\nWhile the Bright studies dealt in general with the “management\" aspects of automation, the principal focus was the “skill requirements\" of increasingly mechanized industries. It must be pointed out that Bright nowhere indicates a concern with this aspect of his subject from the point of view of the worker, but views the problem entirely from the management standpoint. His approach is detached and rigidly factual, and his concern is expressed in his final conclusion: “I suggest that excessive educational and skill specification is a serious mistake and potential hazard to our economic and social system. We will hurt individuals, raise labor costs improperly, create disillusion and resentment, and destroy valid job standards by setting standards that are not truly needed for a given task. . . .\"3i\n\nIn the preface to his book, Bright notes: “A controversial area of this study will lie, no doubt, in my conclusions regarding the skill required of the work force in the automated plant. The relationship of skill requirements to the degree of automaticity as a declining rather than increasing ratio is not commonly accepted, or even considered.\" Nevertheless, after exploring his tentative conclusions with three to four hundred industrialists, and in presenting his findings to “at least a dozen industrial audiences totaling perhaps three thousand persons,\" he notes that “in general, these conclusions have not been strongly challenged\" except with regard to plant maintenance skills, and even these challenges he attributes to “intense personal experiences\" peculiar to special situations.32\n\n146 Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nMachinery\n\n147\n\n\\* Horowitz and Herrenstadt are to be thanked for this survey, but unfortunately the remainder of their article is just as useless as the literature they criticize. It is an attempt to assess “worker characteristics required of the changing jobs\" entirely on the basis of the descriptions of “job content\" in the second and third editions, 1949 and 1965 respectively, of the Dictionary ofOccupational Titles published by the Department of Labor. A more arid and unrewarding exercise can hardly be imagined, and the result is that after scores of pages of meticulous tabulation and statistics, the authors conclude that “the overall or net change in the skill requirements\" during these fifteen years was \"remarkably small\"; that the \"small net change\" was \"the product of numerous offsetting changes\"; and that the result \"on balance\" is “either inconsequential or inconclusive with respect to overall skill levels.\"30","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}