{"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":"24 / 25","pdf_page":25,"physical_index":25,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3391aa1e63ba6a61fc63a3fb890cadcaacfcece13344b01fc8831b44adc9f700"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Traditionally, lower-level white-collar jobs in both government and industry were held by high school graduates. Today, an increasing number of these jobs go to those who have attended college. But the demand for higher academic credentials has not increased the prestige, status, pay, or difficulty of the job. For example, the average weekly pay for clerical workers in 1969 was \\$105.00 per week, while blue-collar production workers were taking home an average of \\$130.00 per week. It is not surprising, then, that the Survey of Working Conditions found much of the greatest work dissatisfaction in the country among young, well-educated workers who were in low paying, dull, routine and fractionated clerical positions. Other signs of discontent among this group include turnover rates as high as 30% annually and a 46% increase in whitecollar union membership between 1958 and 1968. . . . These changing attitudes . . . may be affecting the productivity of these workers: a survey conducted by a group of management consultants of a cross section of office employees found that they were producing at only 55% of their potential. Among the 25 reasons cited for this was borédom with repetitive jobs.\n\nThe apparent increase in active dissatisfaction has been attributed to a number of causes, some having to do with the characteristics of the workers younger, more years of schooling, “infected\" by the new-generational restlessness—and others having to do with the changing nature of the work itself. One reporter cites the belief that “American industry in some instances may have pushed technology too far by taking the last few bits of skill out of jobs, and that a point of human resistance has been reached.\" He quotes a job design consultant at Case Western Reserve University, who said with disarming candor: \"We may have created too many dumb jobs for the number of dumb people to fill them.26\n\nVarious remedies and reforms have been proposed, and some have been tested among small groups of workers by corporations with particularly pressing problems. Among these are job enlargement, enrichment, or rotation, work groups or teams, consultation or workers' “participation,\" group bonuses and profit-sharing, the abandonment of assembly line techniques, the removal of time clocks, and an \"I Am\" plan (short for \"I Am Manager of My Job\").\n\nBehind the characteristic faddishness of these approaches it is possible to sense a deep concern, the reason for which is readily apparent. The ruling establishments of Western Europe and the United States, having just passed through a period when they were alarmed and even shaken by an incandescent revolt of student youth and third world nationalism within their own borders, were bound to ask themselves what would happen if to this were added a rebellion against the conditions of labor in the workplace. The fright occasioned by such a prospect gave rise to a discussion over the “quality of work,\"\n\nthe purpose of which was in part to determine whether discontent among workers was at the usual level, endemic to life under capitalism, or whether it was rising threateningly; and in part to encourage reforms in the hope of forestalling such a rise in discontent. But as in almost all discussions of major issues of public policy, this one too has a certain air of hollow unreality, reflecting the gulf between the capitalist as statesman and the capitalist in command of corporate enterprise.\n\nThe problem as it presents itself to those managing industry, trade, and finance is very different from the problem as it appears in the academic or journalistic worlds. Management is habituated to carrying on labor processes in a setting of social antagonism and, in fact, has never known it to be otherwise. Corporate managers have neither the hope nor the expectation of altering this situation by a single stroke; rather, they are concerned to ameliorate it only when it interferes with the orderly functioning of their plants, offices, warehouses, and stores. For corporate management this is a problem in costs and controls, not in the “humanization of work.\" It compels their attention because it manifests itself in absentee, turnover, and productivity levels that do not conform to their calculations and expectations. The solutions they will accept are only those which provide improvements in their labor costs and in their competitive positions domestically and in the world market.\n\nIt is interesting to note that although the discussion ofjob enrichment, job enlargement, and the like began in connection with factory work, most actual applications have taken place in offices (three-quarters of them, according to an estimate by Roy H. Walters, a management consultant and pioneer of “job enrichment\").27 Industrial installations represent heavy investments in fixed equipment, and industrial processes as they now exist are the product of a long development aimed at reducing labor costs to their minimum. In office and service processes, by contrast, the recently swollen mass of employment has not as yet been subjected to the same extremes of rationalization and mechanization as in the factories, although this is under way. For these reasons management decisions to reorganize work processes are made more readily and voluntarily in the office and are made in the factory only in situations that offer little choice. Corporate management is convinced that it is chiefly outside the factory that payrolls are “fat,\" productivity is low, and there is most need for reorganization.\n\nOffice rationalization has in part been taking place, in the most recent period, under the banner of job enlargement and the humanization of work. One need only look at reports such as one in the Wall Street Journal in the summer of 1972 to get the flavor of this duplicitous campaign: the article is headed “The Quality of Work,\" but consists almost entirely of a discussion of cost cutting, productivity drives, and staff reductions in banks, insurance companies, and brokerage houses.28 In a typical case, a bank teller who is idle when the load at the counter is light will be pressed into service handling other routine duties, such as sorting returned checks. The First National Bank of Richmond, Indiana, put such a plan into operation under the guidance of a consulting firm called Science Management Associates, and its “first-year savings alone exceeded the fee by almost 40%.\" The bank's staff was reduced from 123 to 104, and a number of the remaining workers were cut back to part-time work. The “humanization\" aspect was handled by quoting one worker as saying: \"There's never a dull moment. It makes the job more interesting.\"29\n\n24\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nIntroduction\n\n25","previous_page":24,"next_page":26}