{"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":227,"pdf_page":126,"physical_index":126,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8c0259312572c08ca462bedf04cdef886ca592ade34fd2b1b49ed1b2404189bf"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"The change began with the machine for counting punched cards invented by Dr. Herman Hollerith in 1885 and used to tabulate the United States census of 1890. The importance of this invention lay not in any technical advance, but entirely in the concept it embodied. In recording bits of data, each on its own card, by means of a system that gave to each column and rank of the card a specific meaning, the punched-card system made available a means of“reading\" and “interpreting” simple data without direct human participation. Now, through one means or another of sensing the holes, machines could sort and classify, combine and tabulate, the bits of data on the cards. The significance of the method lay in the recasting of the form of the information so that it could be picked up by a machine.\n\nThis revolutionary conception passed through a series of purely technical improvements in the years that followed, first electromechanical, in which electrical impulses were made to control mechanical registers, and then electronic, in which information is handled and stored by means of the electrical impulses themselves and the mechanical elements virtually disappear. The effect upon the storage and handling capacities of computing systems has been enormous. In contrast to the punched card, which in its standard form stores eighty characters on a surface slightly larger than two playing cards, the common type of magnetic disk pack, which consists of eleven fourteen-inch disks mounted a half-inch apart, will hold up to 29 million characters. And these can be transferred at the rate of 156,000 characters per second to or from the computer processing unit, within which they may be manipulated in operations that are measured in millionths or even billionths of a second each. Thus once the information is recorded, bit by bit, by means of key-driven machines, it may be summoned, brought together from diverse sources, arranged, combined mathematically, etc., in very short periods of time, and the results displayed on a screen, or more commonly recorded by the high-speed printer which is itself a typewriter that puts to shame the combined efforts of scores of typists.\n\nThe computer system working on these principles is the chief, though not the only, instrument of mechanization of the office. Its first applications were for large-scale routine and repetitive operations which to some extent were already performed mechanically: payrolls, billing, accounts payable and accounts receivable, mortgage accounting, inventory control, actuarial and dividend calculations, etc. But it was soon applied in new tasks, such as for elaborate sales reports, production-cost accounting, market research information, sales commissions, and so forth, all the way up to general accounting, at which point the corporation's books of record are put into computerized form.\n\nThis automatic system for data-processing resembles automatic systems of production machinery in that it re-unifies the labor process, eliminating the many steps that had previously been assigned to detail workers. But, as in manufacturing, the office computer does not become, in the capitalist mode of production, the giant step that it could be toward the dismantling and scaling down of the technical division of labor. Instead, capitalism goes against the grain of the technological trend and stubbornly reproduces the outmoded division of labor in a new and more pernicious form. The development of computer work has been so recent and so swift that here we can see reproduced in compressed form the evolution of labor processes in accord with this tendency.\n\nFor a short time in the 1940s and early 1950s, the data-processing occupations displayed the characteristics of a craft. This was during the period when tabulating equipment based on the punched card dominated the industry. Installations were small and the tabulating craftsman worked on all machines: the sorter, collator, tabulator, calculator, etc.\\* These machines were programmed by wiring a panel board for each machine, and this operation was learned as the worker gained a general familiarity with all the machines. Thus the equivalent of an apprenticeship was a period of learning the use of all the equipment, and the programming done at that time was simply the highest skill of an all-around trade.\n\nThe development of a data-processing craft was abortive, however, since along with the computer a new division of labor was introduced and the destruction of the craft greatly hastened. Each aspect of computer operations was graded to a different level of pay frozen into a hierarchy: systems managers, systems analysts, programmers, computer console operators, key punch operators, tape librarians, stock room attendants, etc. It soon became characteristic that entry into the higher jobs was at the higher level of the hierarchy, rather than through an all-around training. And the concentration of knowledge and control in a very small portion of the hierarchy became the key here, as with automatic machines in the factory, to control over the process.\n\nThe upper level of the computer hierarchy is occupied by the systems analyst and the programmer. The systems analyst is the office equivalent of the industrial engineer, and it is his or her job to develop a comprehensive view of the processing of data in the office and to work out a machine system which will satisfy the processing requirements. The programmer converts this system into a set of instructions for the computer. In early computer installations, the programmer was generally a systems analyst as well, and combined the two functions of devising and writing the system. But with the encroachment of the division of labor, these functions were increasingly separated as it became clear that a great deal of the work of programming was routine and could be delegated to cheaper employees. Thus the designation of “programmer\" has by this time become somewhat ambiguous, and can be applied to expert program analysts who grasp the rationale of the systems they work on, as well as to program coders who take as their materials the pre-digested instructions for the system or subsystem and simply translate them mechanically into specialized terminology. The training for this latter work occupies no more than a few months, and peak performance is realized within a one- to two-year period. In accordance with the logic of the capitalist division of labor, most programmers have been reduced to this level of work.\n\n226 Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nClerical Workers\n\n227\n\n\\* Except for the key punch machine; being a keyboard machine, this was immediately recognized as a job for “girls.\"","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}