{"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":"230 / 231","pdf_page":128,"physical_index":128,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2320cda1c22ab5c2acb78df97ea8b37d56912f3539d3dd222f25c520d6a11ed2"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Mrs. Duncan described all key-punch girls as \"nervous wrecks.\" “If you happen to speak to an operator while she is working, she will jump a mile. You can't help being tense. The machine makes you that way. Even though the supervisor does not keep an official production count on our work, she certainly knows how much each of us is turning out—by the number of boxes of cards we do.\" Mrs. Calvin, a former operator for a different company, reported the same kind of tension: “If you just tap one of them on the shoulder when she is working, she'll fly through the ceiling.\"\n\nBoth women reported that absenteeism was very high among their group. Mrs. Duncan remarked, \"Someone is always saying, 'I don't think I'll come in tomorrow. I just can't stand this any longer.' \" Although the girls do not quit, they stay home frequently and keep supplies of tranquilizers and aspirin at their desks. The key-punchers felt that they were really doing a factory job and that 29 they were “frozen\" to their desk as though it were a spot on the assembly-line.\n\nAs in the factory, the machine-pacing of work becomes increasingly available to office management as a weapon of control. The reduction of office information to standardized “bits\" and their processing by computer systems and other office equipment provides management with an automatic accounting of the size of the work load and the amount done by each operator, section, or division:\n\nPrecise measurement of clerical output is one of the aspects of the production room approach heightened by if not exclusively new to automated offices. Simplification and routinization of office tasks by automation makes the work much more amenable to objective count and measurement. The American Management Association has published numerous studies reporting the experience of various large firms in developing clerical cost programs by means of time measurement of office operations. These articles refer only indirectly to employee irritation and resistance. In the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, for example, a special name was coined to avoid such terms as “work measurement,\" which was considered to be “irritating to the employees and made it difficult to secure their participation.\"\n\nThe Seventh Annual Conference on Systems and Procedures in 1958 stressed that the systems profession is devoted to methods improvement or “working smarter.\"Implicit in this was the job of motivating the office worker to greater productivity. Henry Gunders, associate director, Management Advisory Services, Price Waterhouse and Company, Houston, Texas, maintained that in the unmeasured office the rate of clerical output is low. He estimates that such an office is operating on 50 to 60% efficiency, and that with clerical output measured, even unaccompanied by incentives, there would be a 20 to 30% increase in output. It is stated that incentives are most applicable to already mechanized jobs. When an office machine is used, various devices such as stroke counters, automatic sequential númbering, and the like simplify counting. Similarly, prenumbered documents, processed in sequence, facilitate production counting.\n\nMost of the firms included in this study quantify the operations associated with data-processing. Key-punching, in particular, lends itself to objective count. Government agencies and private business firms reported that this type of work measurement was standard procedure. In some instances, the girls fill out a daily tally form indicating how many inches they have punched, and the verifiers keep count of the errors. An executive of one large insurance company commented that, although it is not generally mentioned, an objective record of productivity is kept, and the operator whose output lags is fired. Many firms rely on the supervisor to keep a visual check which can be objective because she would know the total number of trays of cards processed during any period. One official explained that the careful tally of key-punch output in his firm was made necessary because all service functions must be allocated as to cost, and that check on operators' speed was a secondary consideration. Serial checking on other types of office equipment is the method used by many firms, and is applicable to calculators, check sorters and various machines besides keypunches. “Industrialization\" of clerical work is evident not only in the work count, but also in the use of a moving belt to carry the work from one station to the next. Several companies studied use this method of carrying orders from the point of origin through the various stages of processing to the computer.\n\nThe factory atmosphere is unmistakably present. Not only are the office machine operators often required to punch a time clock, but they are not permitted to converse while at work. They are subject to dismissal with as little notice as a week or at most a month. There are few distinguishing marks between the employee in the electronic office and the factory worker in light manufacturing.30\n\nAs work has been simplified, routinized, and measured, the drive for speed has come to the fore. “Everything is speed in the work now,\" said a woman who found herself near a nervous breakdown, and the pace is “terrific.\" And with the economies furnished by the computer system and the forcing of the intensity of labor come layoffs which selectively increase the tendency toward factory-like work: “With each reduction in force, the remaining workers are told to increase their output. Automation has reduced the staff in that office by more than one-third, and more mechanization is in prospect. The union spokesman said that the categories of jobs which have disappeared are those which require some skill and judgment. Those remaining are the tabulating and key-punch operations, which become even simpler, less varied, and more routinized as work is geared to the computer.\" The vice-president of an insurance company, pointing to a room filled with key punch operators, remarked: “All they lack is a chain,\" and explained himself by adding that the machines kept the “girls\" at their desks, punching monotonously and without cease.\\* And the workers themselves are under no illusions about their “whitecollar\" jobs: “This job is no different from a factory job except that I don't get paid as much,\" one operator in a large farm-equipment office said.³\n\n230\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nClerical Workers\n\n231","previous_page":127,"next_page":129}