{"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":"26 / 27","pdf_page":26,"physical_index":26,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b88b9cd9741c5e84253df1b57069cddc1f3790e3f4da8cdccf9755c82b1c370f"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"A number of management consulting firms have taken this sort of “humanization\" as their field and are pressing schemes upon managers. Whatever their phraseology, these consulting organizations have only one function: cutting costs, improving “efficiency,\" raising productivity. No other language is useful in conversation with management, unless it be with the public relations department.\\* These consultants possess, at the moment, a valuable stock in trade in the knowledge that the principle of the division of labor, as it has been applied in many large offices, banks, insurance companies, in retailing and in service industries, has been pursued with such fanaticism that various jobs have been broken into fragments of fragments and can be partially reassembled without injury to the present mode of organizing the work process and at a certain saving of labor costs. The hard-headed manner in which this is being done and the simpleminded manner in which these pathetic “enlargements\" from one unvarying routine to two or three are being hailed make an interesting contrast.\n\nSince it focuses attention upon this long-neglected aspect of capitalist society, the current discussion of work cannot help but be useful, no matter how meager its results. But like most such discussions in which a basic characteristic of our society is “discovered,\"accorded a superficial “analysis,\" given a facile “solution,\" and then once more forgotten, this one too has not begun to touch the roots of the matter. We are dealing with one of the fundamentals of capitalist society, and this means that even while slight ameliorations are accepted by corporations, the structure and mode of functioning of capitalism reproduces the present processes of labor a thousandfold more rapidly, more massively, and more widely.\n\nThe reforms that are being proposed today are by no means new ones, and have been popular with certain corporations (IBM, for instance) and certain management theorists for a generation, They represent a style of management rather than a genuine change in the position of the worker. They are characterized by a studied pretense of worker “participation,\" a gracious liberality in allowing the worker to adjust a machine, replace a light bulb, move from one fractional job to another, and to have the illusion of making decisions by choosing among fixed and limited alternatives designed by a management which deliberately leaves insignificant matters open to choice. One can best compare this style of management with the marketing strategy followed by those who, having discovered that housewives resent prepared baking mixes and feel guilty when using them, arrange for the removal of the powdered egg and restore to the consumer the thrill of breaking a fresh egg into the mix, thereby creating an “image\" of skilled baking, wholesome products, etc. Peter F. Drucker, one of the early propagandists for job enlargement, wrote in a critique of scientific management in 1954: \"It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people; a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are being told.\" These are bold words, especially from a management consultant; the proposal for changing the world, however, as it comes to us from Mr. Drucker, is somewhat less bold: “. . . even the lowliest human job should have some planning; only it should be simple planning and there should not be too much of it.\"³' Just so did Adam Smith once recommend education for the people in order to prevent their complete deterioration under the division of labor, but, as Marx comments, “prudently, and in homeopathic doses.\"32\n\nNotes\n\n26\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nIntroduction\n\n27\n\n\\* Academic sociologists dare not forget it either. The Special Task Force report introduces its chapter on the redesign of jobs by saying: “The burden of this chapter is to show that not only can work be redesigned to make it more satisfying but that significant increases in productivity can also be obtained.\"30","previous_page":25,"next_page":27}