{"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":"238 / 239","pdf_page":132,"physical_index":132,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e1cc7db06e69616d0ece4458778263021227ee74dabda9b4e0392b9a3b3f51a1"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"a process of having word originators (executives, sales correspondents lawyers, and the like) select formula clauses from pre-coded, pre-organized clause books. For example, an administrator who would normally dictate the same kind of reply to a letter several times a day, instead selects the appropriate clauses (by code number) from the clause bookor from memory if he's used them often enough. Once selected, clause codes plus individual names, addresses and other variable inserts (such as dates or prices) are either dictated into recorders or jotted down on “to-be-typed\" forms. This source dictation or form is then used by the typist to prepare a final letter. Automatic typewriters repetitively type the “canned” clauses, and the typist manually keyboards in the new or variable data. . . . Benefits are word originator and typist efficiency, and more work produced from the same number of hours on the job. In addition, less training is required of all the people involved.ª1\n\nThis last \"benefit,\" the reduction of training for \"all,\" indicates the sensitivity of management to the proliferation of correspondents and other such \"word originators,\" each of whom is required to know how to formulate a passable paragraph so that it may be understood by the recipient; under the new system, this requirement disappears, leaving only the ability to select the proper paragraph.\n\nThe other functions of the secretary are taken over by an “administrative support center.\" The superior who formerly had a secretary is known, in relation to this center, not as a “word originator\" but as a “principal,\" and it is considered that a ratio of four to eight principals to each “administrative support secretary\" will prove adequate. This support center handles all the nontyping chores formerly required of the secretary, foremost among them being filing, phone answering, and mail handling. \"Filing,\" we are told, “should be performed in the support center—not in the principal's office.\"The clear objective of such arrangements is to prevent the renewal of the previous situation by imperceptible degrees, and to ensure that all secretarial work is performed under centralized production supervision and not under the supervision of the \"principal.\" Moreover, \"principals should answer their own phone, but the phone should also ring in the center so if the principal doesn't pick it up by the third ring the secretary can get it.\"Like the “word processing center,\" the “administrative support center\" is connected to the various offices by phone 42 and messenger service.\n\nThus, under the new arrangement, the secretarial function is replaced by an integrated system which aims at centralized management, the breakdown of secretarial jobs into detail operations subdivided among production workers, and the reduction of the number of secretarial workers to one-half, one-quarter, or even smaller fractions of their former number. Among the subsidiary benefits management expects to derive from this arrangement is the reduction and thus cheapening of the skills of administrative employees, and, not the least, the squeezing out of the minutes and hours of labor power lost in the personal relations and contacts among secretaries and between secretaries and their “principals\"—which is what they mean when they speak of the “end of the social office.\" The force and seriousness of this campaign, which has begun in this form only in the past few years, can be seen not only from its conception as a total system with its own jargon, technology, and specialists, and from the space now being devoted to it in office management periodicals, but also from the launching of new periodicals and organizations devoted entirely to this subject (for instance, Word Processing Report and the Word Processing Institute). The total system has been installed in a great variety of corporations, including sophisticated publishing offices in New York, where systems analysts have shown themselves to be sturdy of purpose and impervious to the barbed comments of editors who are being deprived of their secretaries.\n\nWe have now described, in its major facets, the conversion of the office routine into a factory-like process in accordance with the precepts of modern management and available technology. The greatest single obstacle to the proper functioning of such an office is the concentration of information and decision-making capacity in the minds of key clerical employees. Just as Frederick Taylor diagnosed the problem of the management of a machine shop as one of removing craft information from the workers, in the same way the office manager views with horror the possibility of dependence upon the historical knowledge of the office past, or of the rapid flow of information in the present, on the part of some of his or her clerical workers. The recording of everything in mechanical form, and the movement of everything in a mechanical way, is thus the ideal of the office manager. But this conversion of the office flow into a high-speed industrial process requires the conversion of the great mass of office workers into more or less helpless attendants of that process. As an inevitable concomitant of this, the ability of the office worker to cope with deviations from the routine, errors, special cases, etc., all of which require information and training, virtually disappears. The number of people who can operate the system, instead of being operated by it, declines precipitously. In this sense, the modern office becomes a machine which at best functions well only within its routine limits, and functions badly when it is called upon to meet special requirements.\\*\n\n238\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nClerical Workers\n\n239","previous_page":131,"next_page":133}