{"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":"236 / 237","pdf_page":131,"physical_index":131,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"4a8d7f83bf67c9518d2672d34b78949c940da638c5e38ab26a4ca70e257f1bf3"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Thereafter this system of secretarial assistance spreads to lower ranks as well, as the numbers of managerial and semi-managerial employees increase. Since the Babbage principle operates wherever a mass of work may be subdivided and its “lower\" portions separated out and delegated, it invades all the realms of paper work performed by “executives,\" assistants to executives, heads of small departments sometimes consisting of no more than the “head\" and a secretary, professional and even semi-professional employees. The Babbage principle has here transcended its own limits, especially as social and prestige factors come into play and the personal secretary becomes a perquisite of the privileged job as one of its chief privileges. Top managers watched this multiplication of secretaries with nothing more than amusement, until it grew to dimensions which threatened the balance sheet.\n\nFor management to tackle this monstrosity in order to reduce the drain on the corporate pocketbook is by no means simple. It is not just a matter of attacking a traditional and entrenched privilege, but one which is enjoyed by the lower reaches of the managerial structure itself, those whose loyalty and interest in the corporation is guaranteed by, among other things, these very trappings and pretenses of managerial status. Corporate managements confront the danger, in any such attack, of alienating their own instruments of control over the administrative structure. True, some managements have not allowed such a situation to develop, or have destroyed it at an earlier stage—stenographic pools as a substitute for personal secretaries, for example, are hardly unknown—but many others have shrunk from the task. There is ample evidence, however, that this situation is ending, and that management is now nerving itself for major surgery upon its own lower limbs.\n\nThe reasons for this new attitude are various. The most important has already been mentioned: the extent to which this expensive practice has burgeoned, and the immense amounts of payroll it devours, not just through the multiplication of secretaries but through the effect of this arrangement upon the entire functioning of the office. But there are other factors: the completion of the basic work of rationalization in the factory, so far as it can be carried through, freeing management to turn to the office; the maturation of“systems thinking\" among managers to the point where they have reconceptualized the entire problem; the spread of the methods of close calculation throughout smaller firms that might otherwise escape them for a while longer, through the purchase of such firms by conglomerates whose first step is to send in systems engineers (and here the fact that the blame for the changes can be assigned to distant proprietors makes the installation of new systems by corporate management somewhat easier); the perfection of various cheap systems of centralized communications and recording; even the new attitudes of women, who dispute and scorn the body-servant role and make it more difficult to recruit tractable secretaries—all of these are among the factors which both encourage and facilitate the ending of the secretarial explosion.\n\nOffice managements have thus entered upon a sweeping campaign to destroy what they call the “social office,\" to use a phrase which has recently gained popularity.4º It is only necessary to follow the periodicals published for top office managers, such as Administrative Management, to see that they are attacking on this front not only with a newly systematized armamentarium of ideas and procedures, but with a fresh determination, and that the object of this attack is no longer just the clerk but the comfortable arrangements made by their own lower managers.\n\nThere is of course no disposition on the part of office managements to reject the Babbage principle and to have those functionaries who are now assisted by secretaries begin to do their own typing and other chores. This would contradict the basic tenet of management that each task must be performed at the lowest possible rate of pay. Rather, they feel that the time has come to end a system which makes of each functionary a supervisor over the labor of one assistant, because the labor time of secretaries is used wastefully and inefficiently, is subject only to relaxed and friendly supervision by a superior who is more interested in personal convenience than in office efficiency, and because such functionaries often cannot delegate enough work to fully occupy the time of another person.\n\nSecretarial work is analyzed into two parts: typing and administrative routine (sometimes reception and telephone answering are separated from the latter as a distinct function). The first is being made the business of what has been named the “word processing center.\" This center is a modernized version of the stenographic pool; it does not send stenographers to take dictation from executives, but rather gives each executive a link with the stenographic process through the telephone on his end and recording equipment on the other. These recordings are then “processed\" by typists, and the finished letter, document, brief, contract, script, or any other form requiring typing is brought by messenger for checking and signature. As distinguished from a stenographic pool, which merely held and dispatched labor power to departments as required, this system visualizes the construction of a separate production department whose business it is to manufacture to order all the correspondence and other documentary work required anywhere throughout the offices of the enterprise. Thus this major portion of the secretarial job now becomes the province of production workers, assisted by electronic equipment. Not unexpectedly, this concept and its application have made the furthest strides in Germany, and an article in Administrative Management describes the stress given there to the use of canned texts and automatic typewriters. Word processing is\n\n236\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nClerical Workers\n\n237","previous_page":130,"next_page":132}