Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

The introduction of piecework systems in their various forms—straight piece rates, incentives, or the Taylor differential system—followed naturally on the heels of the other innovations. “One of the great changes which forced business men to revise their opinions about the wages system was the enormous growth of the operating side of business. It became necessary to employ hundreds of clerks, typists, and bookkeepers instead of a half-dozen or so. The management was confronted with a new condition in which it was impossible to determine whether or not the employees were living up to the standard of a fair day's work."18

The early “scientific" office managers were primarily concerned with the theory of existing procedures rather than with the mechanization of the office; like Taylor, they took the existing level of technical development as given. Although the basic instrument of office labor, the typewriter, was in universal use, and the instruments for adding, dictating, and ledger posting by mechanical means had already been devised, the mechanization of the office still lay far in the future. Insofar as office managers dealt with the tools and materials of office labor, they concerned themselves chiefly with the trivia of arranging, and selecting among, existing possibilities. Office layout was given an inordinate amount of attention, and the use of pneumatic tubes for communication between desks and offices, and of endless conveyor belts for the movement of work in process, became quite fashionable. The economies sought in the organization of masses of labor can be seen, to take a single instance, from the following: Leffingwell calculated that the placement of water fountains so that each clerk walked, on the average, a mere hundred feet for a drink would cause the clerical workers in one office to walk an aggregate of fifty thousand miles each year just to drink an adequate amount of water, with a corresponding loss of time for the employer. (This represents the walking time of a thousand clerks, each of whom walked only a few hundred yards a day.) The care with which arrangements are made to avoid this “waste" gives birth to the sedentary tradition which shackles the clerical worker as the factory worker is shackledby placing everything within easy reach so that the clerk not only need not, but dare not, be too long away from the desk.\*

“If the paper upon which the writing is done is of good hard quality and a fine pen is used instead of a stub pen, the use of a blotter, and the thousands of useless motions caused by it, may be dispensed with. It is a saving far exceeding the pen supply for years. The size and shape of the penholder should also be carefully studied and standardized." One manager made a “time study" of the evaporation of inks and found that nonevaporating inkwells would save a dollar a year on each inkwell. This is reported in all seriousness, along with the observation that the “rate of evaporation, of course, varies with the humidity, and the results would not be constant." A time study of the removal of pins or paper clips from correspondence before filing or destroying “showed that it required ten minutes to remove one pound of clips and pins. . . . It is true that the pins have to be put in the pin cushion, but this work can be done by the office messenger between trips. A thousand pins can be put in a pin cushion,"Leffingwell adds, with uncharacteristic inexactitude, “in fifteen to twenty minutes." He concludes this discussion on a hortatory note:

This brief outline ofhow the physical office may be standardized will give you an idea of the amount of detail to be considered. Under scientific management, however, the work of standardization is never quite complete. New and improved methods are constantly being evolved and tried out in order to keep up to date. The standards of today may be entirely revolutionized tomorrow. This is no excuse for not standardizing but is an argument for it. Some managers of steel companies, for example, were willing to let well enough alone, thinking that the investment they had in equipment was sufficient for all purposes and that it was folly to be continually remodeling. Carnegie, on the other hand, junked all his old equipment and installed modern machinery and methods. The result is well known. The office manager who has the courage of a Carnegie will win just as surely as the ironmaster did.20

By later standards, the equipment and methods of the early Carnegies of office management were crude, and represented merely the first response to the problem of the large-scale office. As in the factory, the solution to the problem was found first in the technical division of labor and second in mechanization. Although these are today aspects of the same process, historically they came about in stages, and it is preferable to separate them and deal first with the division of labor in office processes.

214

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

215

\* “Save ten steps a day for each of 12,000 employees," said Henry Ford of his system of having stock-chasers bring materials to the worker instead of having the worker move around freely, “and you will have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy."19 All motions or energies not directed to the increase of capital are

of course “wasted" or “misspent." That every individual needs a variety of movements and changes of routine in order to maintain a state of physical health and mental freshness, and that from this point of view such motion is not wasted, does not enter into the case. The solicitude that brings everything to the worker's hand is of a piece with the fattening arrangements of a cattle feed-lot or poultry plant, in that the end sought is the same in each case: the fattening of the corporate balance sheet. The accompanying degenerative effects on the physique and well-being of the worker are not counted at all.

The work processes of most offices are readily recognizable, in industrial terms, as continuous flow processes. In the main they consist of the flow of documents required to effect and record commercial transactions, contractual arrangements, etc. While the processes are punctuated by personal interviews and correspondence, these serve merely to facilitate the flow of documentation. We may take as our example the most common form of transaction, the sale of commodities; it will be understood that everything that takes place in this process has as its mirror image a corresponding process on the part of the firms on the other side, with the signs reversed.

The customer order is the cell of the process. It moves through a stream of records and calculations which begin with its appearance in the salesman's order book, or in the mail, or over the telephone, until it reaches its final resting place as an infinitesimal portion of the corporation's statement of financial condition. The order must be opened and examined. The customer must be clearly identified as to firm name, address for billing, separate address, if any, for shipping, and, most important, credit standing. (If the order comes with payment already attached, it becomes part of a tributary which subsequently rejoins the main stream.) The items ordered must be clearly and properly interpreted as to type and quantity. The correct discount must be chosen for each order in accordance with corporate sales policy, which is more or less complex and is stratified according to quantities ordered, type of customer, special arrangements, etc. An invoice or bill must be prepared listing the merchandise for shipment and extending quantities by unit price; this invoice must be totaled, discounted, and supplementary charges such as shipping or tax added. Now the invoice moves on to another stage: On the one side, some of its copies provide shipping documents for the shipping division and packing slips for the customer. On the other side, further copies provide the raw materials of the accounting procedure. In the latter process, the invoice totals are posted to accounts for sales on the one side and the customer's account (or cash) on the other. Customer accounts are further posted, in controlled batch totals, to an overall accounts-receivable account. At the same time, tabulations must be made from the invoice to record the depletion of inventory, to keep sales records on each stock item, as well as sales records by salesman and territory for the calculation of sales commission due, for charting sales trends, etc. Finally, the summaries of these various accounts, tested for internal consistency and balance with each other, form the raw materials for the monthly summary accounts and the statements of financial condition of the division or corporation.

In traditional form, this entire process was the province of the bookkeeper, with the assistance of other clerical help such as the order biller, junior clerk for posting, etc. But as soon as the flow of work becomes large enough, and the methods of office management are applied, the process is subdivided into minute operations. Characteristically, separate clerks open the mail, date and route the orders, interpret customer information, clear credit, check the items ordered for clarity and to see if they are in inventory, type an invoice, add prices to it, extend, discount, calculate shipping charges, post to the customer account, etc., etc. just as in manufacturing processes—in fact, even more easily than in manufacturing processes—the work of the office is analyzed and parcelled out among a great many detail workers, who now lose all comprehension of the process as a whole and the policies which underlie it. The special privilege of the clerk of old, that of being witness to the operation of the enterprise as a whole and gaining a view of its progress toward its ends and its condition at any given moment, disappears. Each of the activities requiring interpretation of policy or contact beyond the department or section becomes the province of a higher functionary.

Needless to say, this conception is all the more readily applicable to those transactions which reflect no movement of physical commodities, such as banking and other financial transactions, the payment of insurance premiums and claims, and so on. But even those processes which, in an outsider's view, would appear to be difficult to subdivide in this way become, with sufficient volume, susceptible to the same treatment. Correspondence, for example, may be sorted into a variety of standard inquiries and problems and then answered with preformulated responseseither duplicated by machine or repetitiously typed (nowadays on automatic, tape-controlled typewriters). That smaller portion which requires individual treatment can be set aside for the attention of a higher grade of correspondence clerk while all the rest is classified, batched, and counted. On the basis of batch totals, the higher echelons of the office will then be able to see the type of inquiry or error which has caused the correspondence and use this as a check against other departments, or weigh these figures against past experience and against the experience of the trade as a whole. At the same time, the batch totals can be correlated with the time taken for dealing with correspondence of a particular sort, so that the expenditure of labor time may be kept under constant scrutiny and control.

In general, the rationalization of most office work and the replacement of the all-around clerical worker by the subdivided detail worker proceeds easily because of the nature of the process itself. In the first place, clerical operations are conducted almost entirely on paper, and paper is far easier than industrial products to rearrange, move from station to station, combine and recombine according to the needs of the process, etc. Second and more important, much of the “raw material" of clerical work is numerical in form, and so the process may itself be structured according to the rules of mathematics, an advantage which the managers of physical production processes often strive after but can seldom achieve. As flows subject to mathematical rules, clerical processes can be checked at various points by mathematical controls. Thus, contrary to the past opinion of many that office work was unlike factory work in that its complexities rendered it more difficult to rationalize, it proved easier to do so once the volume of work grew large enough and once a search for methods of rationalization was seriously undertaken.

216

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

217

Mental and Manual Labor

In the beginning, the office was the site of mental labor and the shop the site of manual labor. This was even true, as we have seen, after Taylor and in part because of Taylor: scientific management gave the office a monopoly over conception, planning, judgment, and the appraisal of results, while in the shop nothing was to take place other than the physical execution of all that was thought up in the office. Insofar as this was true, the identification of office work with thinking and educated labor, and of the production process proper with unthinking and uneducated labor, retained some validity. But once the office was itself subjected to the rationalization process, this contrast lost its force. The functions of thought and planning became concentrated in an ever smaller group within the office, and for the mass of those employed there the office became just as much a site of manual labor as the factory floor.\* With the transformation of management into an administrative labor process, manual work spreads to the office and soon becomes characteristic of the tasks of the mass of clerical workers.

Labor in general is a process whose determinate forms are shaped by the end result, the product. The materials and instruments used by the shoemaker, tailor, butcher, carpenter, machinist, or farmer may vary with the state of technology, but they must be adapted to the production of footwear, apparel, meat, wooden structures, metal shapes, or grain. The typical, although not exclusive, product of mental labor consists of markings on paper. Mental labor is carried on in the brain, but since it takes form in an external product—symbols in linguistic, numeric, or other representational forms—it involves manual operations such as writing, drawing, operating writing machines, etc.——for the purpose of bringing this product into being. It is therefore possible to separate the functions of conception and execution: all that is required is that the scale of the work be large enough to make this subdivision economical for the corporation.

Among the first to recognize this was Charles Babbage. Babbage was not only responsible for the design of one of the first calculating engines (“computers"), but in his On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, written in the 1830s, he included a prophetic chapter called “On the Division of Mental Labour," in which he subjected the matter to one of its earliest and most trenchant analyses."We have already mentioned," he begins, “what may, perhaps, appear paradoxical to some of our readers,—that the division of labour can be applied with equal success to mental as to mechanical operations, and that it ensures in both the same economy of time."22 This he demonstrates by the following example.

During the French Revolution, the adoption of the decimal system made it necessary that mathematical tables adapted to that system be produced. This task was given to a certain M. Prony, who soon found that even with the help of several associates he could not expect to complete the job during his lifetime. While pondering the problem, he happened to pass a bookseller's shop where Adam Smith's recently published Wealth ofNations was displayed, and opened it to the first chapter. He decided to put his logarithms and trigonometric functions into manufacture, like pins, and set up two separate workshops—the product of each to serve as verification for that of the other—for this purpose.

He divided the task among three sections. The first section, consisting of five or six eminent French mathematicians, was charged with the work of devising the formulas best adapted for use by the other sections. The second group, made up of seven or eight persons with a good knowledge of mathematics, undertook the problem of converting these formulas into numerical values and devising means of checking the calculations. The third section, varying in number from sixty to eighty persons, used nothing more than simple addition or subtraction and returned the results to the second section for checking. Babbage describes the process and its requirements as follows:

When it is stated that the tables thus completed occupy seventeen large folio volumes, some idea may perhaps be formed of the labour. From that part executed by the third class, which may almost be termed mechanical, requiring the least knowledge and by far the greatest exertions, the first class were entirely exempt. Such labour can always be purchased at an easy rate. The duties of the second class, although requiring considerable skill in arithmetical operations, were yet in some measure relieved by the higher interest naturally felt in those more difficult operations. 23

Of the third section, Babbage says: “It is remarkable that nine-tenths of this class had no knowledge of arithmetic beyond the first two rules which they were thus called upon to exercise, and that these persons were usually found more correct in their calculations, than those who possessed a more extensive knowledge of the subject." The way is thereby opened for two conclusions which capitalism finds irresistible, regardless oftheir consequences for humanity. The first is that the labor of educated or better-paid persons should never be “wasted" on matters that can be accomplished for them by others of lesser training. The second is that those of little or no special training are superior for the performance of routine work, in the first place because they “can always be purchased at an easy rate," and in the second place because, undistracted by too much in their brains, they will perform routine work more correctly and faithfully. It remains only to add to this story that Babbage foresaw the time when the “completion of a calculating engine" would eliminate the necessity for the operations of addition and subtraction performed by the third section, and that thereafter it would prove possible to find ways to simplify the work of the second section. In Babbage's vision we can see the conversion of the entire process into a mechanical routine supervised by the “first section" which, at that point, would be the only group required to understand either mathematical science or the process itself The work of all others would be converted into the “preparation of data" and the operation of machinery.

218 Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

219

\* In Lockwood's words: “One of the main changes in the division of labour has been the appearance of the specialized, semi-skilled office employee who is responsible for the processing' of data, The actual division of tasks very often preceded mechanization, but machinery has speeded up the trend by which a small group of executives, who make decisions about the selection and analysis of data, are separated from a mass of subordinates whose functions less and less justify their classification as brain workers."21

The progressive elimination of thought from the work of the office worker thus takes the form, at first, of reducing mental labor to a repetitious performance of the same small set of functions. The work is still performed in the brain, but the brain is used as the equivalent of the hand of the detail worker in production, grasping and releasing a single piece of“data" over and over again. The next step is the elimination of the thought process completelyor at least insofar as it is ever removed from human labor——and the increase of clerical categories in which nothing but manual labor is performed.

Office Work as Manual Labor

The management experts of the second and third generation after Taylor erased the distinction between work in factories and work in offices, and analyzed work into simple motion components. This reduction of work to abstract labor, to finite motions of hands, feet, eyes, etc., along with the absorption of sense impressions by the brain, all of which is measured and analyzed without regard to the form of the product or process, naturally has the effect of bringing together as a single field of management study the work in offices and in factories. The modern “science" of motion study treats office and factory work according to the same rules of analysis, as aspects of the unvarying motions of human “operators." A typical handbook by a management engineer thus begins with a section headed “The Concept of the Universal Process," and in discussing work “in a shop, warehouse, store, office, or any other area," first takes pains to establish the general applicability of work measurement and production control systems to work of every kind: “Each situation presents a different surface appearance, and so the work which is performed in each of these diverse areas is ordinarily assumed to be very different. But a very marked similarity of basic purpose exists in all of these areas. . . . The universality of the process may be seen by analyzing that which goes to make up the process. To say that wherever humans labor they are performing the same types of work certainly seems to be a ridiculous statement. This seems to be even more inaccurate when it is remembered that much work is mental in nature, and not physical. But the statement is true."24 “Universal standard data," the collection of which began with an eye principally toward factory work, are now applied at least as frequently to work in the office.

In addition, standard data have been collected specifically for office purposes, in the form of studies of particularly common office motions that are offered as interchangeable parts from which office managers may assemble their own complete operations. The Systems and Procedures Association of America, for instance, has assembled in compact form such a manual, entitled A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards: A Compilation of Standard Data Used by Large American Companies (Detroit, 1960). The organizations which contributed their materials to this handbook are the General Electric Company, Stanford University, the General Tire and Rubber Company, Kerr-McGee Oil Industries, Inc., Owens-Illinois, Harris Trust and Savings Bank of Chicago, and the Chicago Chapter of the Systems and Procedures Association.\*

The clerical standards maintained by these organizations begin with unit time values for the various elements of motion, as we have described above in Chapter 8, but they go on to agglomerate elemental motions into office tasks, and to offer the office manager the standards by which labor processes may be organized and calibrated. For example:

\* The tables in the Guide are published without direct identification of the source corporation, but the information given makes identification clear in most cases. Thus “Company A," from whose data most of the examples used here are taken, is identified only as a“large manufacturer of electrical appliances and allied products," but of the cooperating parties, the only organization that fits this description is General Electric, which contributed the office standards used in its Distribution Transformer Department, manufacturer of heavy power-processing equipment. In what follows, we manage to catch a glimpse of the office standards and analyses under which modern office workers are actually supervised, whether they know it or not, and this is superior to looking at textbook standards.

220

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

221

222 Labor and Monopoly Capital

Walking time is tabulated for distances from one foot to a thousand feet, but since walking within the office requires many turns, “Walking (confined)" adds .01 minute for each turn. The reading of a one- to three-digit number is presumed to take .005 minutes, and of a seven- to nine-digit number, .015 minutes. To make comparison checks, going from one paper to another, is rated at .0026 minutes per character. To read typed copy, per inch: .008 minutes. And to write, not including “get" or “release” of pencil or pen:

For some reason, the operation called “jogging" is a favorite of office management experts, and is charted, analyzed, and timed in scores of studies. In this instance, the time for “jog" (“basic times, paper in hand") is given as follows:

In this table, the time for jogs from one to ten is given, and we are told to “add .01 for each jog over 10."

The time value for “Cut with scissors” is given as .44 minute, with “.30 for each additional snip."\* “A snip," we are told, “includes opening, moving forward and closing the scissors." Tabulations are given for unit time values for rubber stamping, including the time for getting the stamp, checking the date setting, and putting it aside, and for stamping a series of sheets and putting them aside, with allowance for inking the stamp at every fourth impression. Also for the time required to collate, gather, lay aside, handle, punch, staple (or remove staples), rubber band (or remove), move material between stations, count, fold or unfold, open mail container (envelope) and remove contents, insert mail in container. Unit times are given for locating a single item in a drawer file, Kardex file, Linedex file, Speed-O-Matic file, binder or folder, log sheet, planning card, or at a specific position on a form. Times are given to file random items, to start a new file, to do numerical and miscellaneous filing, to enter or write, and at this point, still another chart for jogging.

Typing times are subjected to a stringent analysis. The conventional standards for words per minute are charted against minutes per inch; but beyond this, time values are assigned to the steps of handling the paper, inserting it in the typewriter, aligning (for various numbers of sheets and carbons), erasing, making strike-over corrections, and “handling material after." We are given such intelligence as the “fact" that back spacing (per space) requires .0060 minutes on a manual machine and .0025 on an electric model. Further tables cover the time required for various duplicating processes, by offset, spirit, and mimeograph. A tabulation covering the operation of a key-driven calculator includes time values for clearing the machine and turning over each sheet between calculations (.0120 minute).\*

The charts used by Company B, which is described as a large manufacturer of rubber products, plastics, etc.—and is therefore presumably the General Tire and Rubber Company—offer a similar array of detailed tabulations. In addition to charts which duplicate, in other forms, the kinds of materials we have already described, there are charts for pinning, clipping, counting cash, operating Pitney Bowes postage meters, matching papers, xeroxing, working bookkeeping machines, and an extraordinary table as follows:

For the rest, tabulations supplied by other companies include, in addition to more of the same, time information for the operation of a great many office machines, including key punch and billing machines, and also for such bookkeeping functions as posting entries to ledgers by pen.

With the growing use of keyboard machines in offices, the analysis of the time requirements of operating them has become ever more intensive. For an example of this type of analysis, we turn to a 1963 volume called Work Measurement in Machine Accounting, two of the three authors of which were at the time of writing associated with the AEtna Life Insurance Co. In their

Clerical Workers

223

\* Why it is that, when one is “jogging" or rapping a stack of papers to align them, the second jog takes longer than the first is not made clear. Nor is it clear why it should take almost half a minute to make the first snip with a scissors, and almost a third of a minute for each additional snip, unless these are misprints.

\* All the charts taken from the standards of Company A bear the legend: "Bare standards—no allowances included for rest or personal needs." These are to be added, since modern capital is nothing if not meticulous and considerate.

Since a TMU is defined as one one-hundred-thousandth (.00001) of an hour, and there are thus 28 TMUs in each second, this means that a key punch machine is to be operated at the rate of 53/5 strokes per second when purely numeric punching is being done. For the punching of alphabetical characters, however, one additional TMU per stroke is allowed for “mental time." In this way, the AEtna specialists calculated that to punch numeric values in 26 columns, and alphabetic characters in 24, skipping over the other 30 columns, allowing for automatic duplication and allowing 20 TMUs (3 of a second), for consulting the information source, as well as 17.2 TMUs for additional handling, it should take .2295 minutes to punch the card and .2017 minutes for another operator to verify it on a second machine. Under 15 seconds per card is allowed, in other words, for key punching or for verification, including a 5 percent allowance for error. But since key punch operators have to handle work before and after punching, a further set of calculations is made in order to account for all the operator's time: a tabulation of 31 motions, including time for “stand," “sit," “get pencil," “initial cards," “open and close card clip," “open and close drawer," “get rubber band," “band cards,” etc.25

In the clerical routine of offices, the use of the brain is never entirely done away withany more than it is entirely done away with in any form of manual work. The mental processes are rendered repetitious and routine, or they are reduced to so small a factor in the work process that the speed and dexterity with which the manual portion of the operation can be performed dominates the labor process as a whole. More than this cannot be said of any manual labor process, and once it is true of clerical labor, labor in that form is placed on an equal footing with the simpler forms of so-called blue-collar manual labor. For this reason, the traditional distinctions between “manual" and “white-collar" labor, which are so thoughtlessly and widely used in the literature on this subject, represent echoes of a past situation which has virtually ceased to have meaning in the modern world of work. And with the rapid progress of mechanization in offices it becomes all the more important to grasp this.

The Mechanization of the Office

Machinery that is used to multiply the useful effects of labor in production may be classified, as we have seen, according to the degree of its control over motion. Insofar as control over motion rests with the operator, the machine falls short of automatic operation; insofar as it is rendered automatic, direct control has been transferred to the machine itself. In office machinery, however, the control over motion is generally incidental to the purpose of the machine. Thus the rapidity and precision of the high-speed printer are not required in order to print rapidlythere are other and faster ways to ink characters onto paper—but in order to record a controlled flow of information as it is processed in the computer. It is one part of a machine system designed to control not motion but information.

Information exists, in the main, in the form of a record of symbolic characters: the alphabet, numbers, and other conventional symbols. Until recently, the processing of these characters—that is to say, assembling and reassembling them in required forms and combining or analyzing them according to the rules of mathematics—was directly dependent upon the human brain. While various mechanical means for recording or combining them were in daily office use, such as the typewriter, the adding or calculating machine, and the bookkeeping machine, each of these machines could only carry or process information through a very short part of its total cycle before it again had to involve the human brain to move it into its next position. In this sense, the office process resembled a pipeline that required a great many pumping stations at very close intervals. The difficulty lay in the form in which information was recorded: so long as it took the form of a notation which could be apprehended only by the human senses, humans were required to seize it and move or manipulate it. Thus every key-driven mechanical adding or calculating machine depended on the line-by-line keyboard work of the operator, and its storage and processing facilities were limited to the capacities of a few mechanical registers. While this situation continued, every office machine remained on the primitive level of the hand tool, or power-assisted hand tool.

224

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

225

\* It is worth noting that this simple list of three unit times, with their total, is made into a "table" by the addition of two useless lines and two useless columns. This is typical of the manner in which management “experts" dress their presentations in the trappings of mathematics in order to give them the appearance of “science"; whether the sociologists have learned this from the schools of business administration or the other way around would make a nice study.

The change began with the machine for counting punched cards invented by Dr. Herman Hollerith in 1885 and used to tabulate the United States census of 1890. The importance of this invention lay not in any technical advance, but entirely in the concept it embodied. In recording bits of data, each on its own card, by means of a system that gave to each column and rank of the card a specific meaning, the punched-card system made available a means of“reading" and “interpreting” simple data without direct human participation. Now, through one means or another of sensing the holes, machines could sort and classify, combine and tabulate, the bits of data on the cards. The significance of the method lay in the recasting of the form of the information so that it could be picked up by a machine.

This revolutionary conception passed through a series of purely technical improvements in the years that followed, first electromechanical, in which electrical impulses were made to control mechanical registers, and then electronic, in which information is handled and stored by means of the electrical impulses themselves and the mechanical elements virtually disappear. The effect upon the storage and handling capacities of computing systems has been enormous. In contrast to the punched card, which in its standard form stores eighty characters on a surface slightly larger than two playing cards, the common type of magnetic disk pack, which consists of eleven fourteen-inch disks mounted a half-inch apart, will hold up to 29 million characters. And these can be transferred at the rate of 156,000 characters per second to or from the computer processing unit, within which they may be manipulated in operations that are measured in millionths or even billionths of a second each. Thus once the information is recorded, bit by bit, by means of key-driven machines, it may be summoned, brought together from diverse sources, arranged, combined mathematically, etc., in very short periods of time, and the results displayed on a screen, or more commonly recorded by the high-speed printer which is itself a typewriter that puts to shame the combined efforts of scores of typists.

The computer system working on these principles is the chief, though not the only, instrument of mechanization of the office. Its first applications were for large-scale routine and repetitive operations which to some extent were already performed mechanically: payrolls, billing, accounts payable and accounts receivable, mortgage accounting, inventory control, actuarial and dividend calculations, etc. But it was soon applied in new tasks, such as for elaborate sales reports, production-cost accounting, market research information, sales commissions, and so forth, all the way up to general accounting, at which point the corporation's books of record are put into computerized form.

This automatic system for data-processing resembles automatic systems of production machinery in that it re-unifies the labor process, eliminating the many steps that had previously been assigned to detail workers. But, as in manufacturing, the office computer does not become, in the capitalist mode of production, the giant step that it could be toward the dismantling and scaling down of the technical division of labor. Instead, capitalism goes against the grain of the technological trend and stubbornly reproduces the outmoded division of labor in a new and more pernicious form. The development of computer work has been so recent and so swift that here we can see reproduced in compressed form the evolution of labor processes in accord with this tendency.

For a short time in the 1940s and early 1950s, the data-processing occupations displayed the characteristics of a craft. This was during the period when tabulating equipment based on the punched card dominated the industry. Installations were small and the tabulating craftsman worked on all machines: the sorter, collator, tabulator, calculator, etc.\* These machines were programmed by wiring a panel board for each machine, and this operation was learned as the worker gained a general familiarity with all the machines. Thus the equivalent of an apprenticeship was a period of learning the use of all the equipment, and the programming done at that time was simply the highest skill of an all-around trade.

The development of a data-processing craft was abortive, however, since along with the computer a new division of labor was introduced and the destruction of the craft greatly hastened. Each aspect of computer operations was graded to a different level of pay frozen into a hierarchy: systems managers, systems analysts, programmers, computer console operators, key punch operators, tape librarians, stock room attendants, etc. It soon became characteristic that entry into the higher jobs was at the higher level of the hierarchy, rather than through an all-around training. And the concentration of knowledge and control in a very small portion of the hierarchy became the key here, as with automatic machines in the factory, to control over the process.

The upper level of the computer hierarchy is occupied by the systems analyst and the programmer. The systems analyst is the office equivalent of the industrial engineer, and it is his or her job to develop a comprehensive view of the processing of data in the office and to work out a machine system which will satisfy the processing requirements. The programmer converts this system into a set of instructions for the computer. In early computer installations, the programmer was generally a systems analyst as well, and combined the two functions of devising and writing the system. But with the encroachment of the division of labor, these functions were increasingly separated as it became clear that a great deal of the work of programming was routine and could be delegated to cheaper employees. Thus the designation of “programmer" has by this time become somewhat ambiguous, and can be applied to expert program analysts who grasp the rationale of the systems they work on, as well as to program coders who take as their materials the pre-digested instructions for the system or subsystem and simply translate them mechanically into specialized terminology. The training for this latter work occupies no more than a few months, and peak performance is realized within a one- to two-year period. In accordance with the logic of the capitalist division of labor, most programmers have been reduced to this level of work.

226 Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

227

\* Except for the key punch machine; being a keyboard machine, this was immediately recognized as a job for “girls."

Below this level, computer work leaves the arena of specialized or technical skills and enters the realm of working-class occupations. The computer operator runs the computer in accordance with a set of rigid and specific instructions set down for each routine. The training and education required for this job may perhaps best be estimated from the pay scales, which in the case of a Class A operator are on about the level of the craftsman in the factory, and for Class C operators on about the level of the factory operative.

The largest single occupation created by computerization is that of the key punch operator. Since it in many ways typifies the direction being taken by office work, it is worth examining in some detail.

The extraordinary swiftness with which computers process information depends in the first instance upon the careful preparation of a data base for the computer's use. While all other office functions dwindle in the face of the computer, this one tends to grow. First, everything which the computer digests must be translated into uniform codes. Second, the pre-calculated operation of the entire system depends upon the provision of adequate coding to cover every requirement at the time of entering the original data; nothing can be left for later recognition, apprehension, and action by the human brain if it is to be done by the computer in the course of its operations. Third, every preassigned code must be prepared for the computer in accordance with a strict and undeviating form so that it can have the desired effect. And fourth, this must be done in a relatively error-free way, since the computer does not recognize errors (except insofar as they transcend the parameters set in the program) but acts upon all the information it is given.

This requires the preparation of data according to rigid forms because no matter how ingeniously the matter is approached, the computer cannot interpret any symbols but those that derive their meaning from their form and position. The computer card, punched as desired by a key-driven machine and verified by a repetition on another such machine, is still the most common such form. It is not the only one, however, and a variety of other devices that record data on a magnetic tape, or print out symbols that can be “read" by an optical scanner, are now in use. Their advantage is not that they “eliminate key punching," as some hasty publicists have rushed to announce, but that they simplify the operation still further so that it may be performed on keyboards similar to that of the typewriter, and so divest the coding operation of even the very limited amount of training it now requires. Although the manner of coding may be varied, it cannot be eliminated; and while there are some ways in which the volume of coding may be held in check, in general it tends to grow with the growth of computerization. To describe key punching, therefore, is to describe the sort of work which, in this form or another, is growing rapidly in offices.

The training required for this sort of work has been described in one sociological study as follows:

Card punching can be a rather monotonous job when it involves large masses of homogeneous data, pre-sorted and prepared in ready-to-copy columnar format. The job can be learned in a matter of a week or two, and satisfactory production skills can be attained within some six months. Despite most employers’ stated preference, a high-school diploma is not essential for satisfactory performance. Some training officials estimated that a ninth-grade reading level and equivalent proficiency in arithmetic provide a good starting base.

For all these reasons, a highly knowledgeable personnel man, in the course of one interview, described keypunch operating as a “semi-blue-collar" job. He considered the term descriptive not only of the nature of the job, but also of the entry requirements, both formal and informal. In many instances girls who lack formal education or the “social graces of the office" can be placed in keypunching, whereas they would probably be rejected for other purely white-collar work.²6

The authors of this study, who like most of their colleagues in the social sciences prefer to look on the bright side, profess themselves “intrigued" by the view expressed by this personnel manager. They are quick to theorize that key punching can become a handy substitute for unskilled manufacturing jobs which in the past “served as the first step on the ladder." But within a page they themselves are forced to characterize key punching as a “dead-end" occupation: “Whereas messengers are frequently promoted to file clerks, file clerks to typists, and typists to secretaries, keypunch operators tend to remain keypunch operators."27

The work itself is described by key punch department managers themselves as “extremely boring” with “"no intelligence looked for”’ and a very high turnover rate.28 Here is a description, reported on the occasion of the changeover from a pre-computer tabulating machine system (which also required punched cards) to a computer system:

One key-puncher reported that before the installation of the computer, her work had been somewhat varied and had occasionally called for the exercise of judgment. This had made it bearable. Every three or four weeks, as the conversion to automation proceeds, several of her associates are transferred from the original group of key-punchers and assigned to the new work, which is more monotonous and repetitious. Since there is no variation in job content, the pace is continuous, steady, and “pressured." The most frequent comment among the girls is, “We are working for the machine now."

228

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

229

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."

Both 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.

As 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:

Precise 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."

The 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.

Most 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.

The 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

As 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

230

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

231

The educational requirements for this new kind of office work are subject to confusion, some of it deliberate, between the needs of the work itself and other considerations. Thus the authors of a recent study of electronic data-processing in New York write:

We have already noted the general tendency of employers to specify a highschool diploma as a prerequisite to employment for keypunch operators. It is also true, however, that many successful\*\* operators are hired without the diploma, particularly in a period when the labor market is tight. Our interviews convinced us that a high-school diploma is viewed as something other than a certification of academic or intellectual proficiency.

Some firms, admittedly, relish their ability to state that “all our employees are high-school graduates," as an indication of status or prestige. The great majority, however, view the diploma as a certification of responsibility, motivation, and reliability. . . . "Sure, we can find out quickly if a girl can really punch cards. But will she come in every Monday? Will she stay after 5 o'clock when we're pushed for overtime? Will she drift to another job after three weeks?" These are the kinds of questions that were repeatedly raised by employers.32

Earlier in the computer era, various managements not yet oriented in the field and perhaps somewhat deceived by their own glowing estimates of the mass “upgrading of the labor force" that would take place, hired the “wrong kind of labor." This was particularly true in banking, where the snobbish tradition of “superior" employees had not yet been overcome by managers. Thus in one study of bank computerization it was decided that personnel managers were “recruiting girls of too high an intellectual calibre for the new simple machine jobs." 33 Experience soon showed, in the words of another

study of technological change in banking, that “it would be misleading to assume that a massive upgrading will take place, for a large proportion of jobs created up to this point are relatively low rated. Encoders are a case in point: Encoding is a low-grade job which is easily and quickly learned, requiring only the ability to operate a 10-key keyboard.' At one bank, Due to the simplicity of operator training for single pocket proof encoders, the job, as related to our job evaluation scale, has been downgraded three grades and reduced from an average base of \$68 to \$53 per week.'\* An EDP clerk is only a slightly higher grade position than that of encoder. . . .' At the large branch bank referred to above, approximately 70 percent of the jobs created were low rated, while at the small branch bank they comprised around 50 percent of the new jobs."35 And it is in the nature of the organization of work around the computer system that, like factory work, it does not have the advancement ladder characteristic of the bank and office of several generations ago. This was recognized early in the computer era by the American Management Association, which, in a special report designed to help employers set up data-processing operations, said: "To be honest—we don't want people to take data-processing jobs as stepping stones to other jobs. We want permanent employees capable of doing good work and satisfied to stay and do it. To promise rapid advancement is to falsify the facts. The only rapid advancement for the bulk of nonsupervisory data-processing staff is out of data-processing!"36

So far as the traditional grades of office labor are concerned, the computerization of office accounting procedures further weakens the position of those skilled in the system as a whole, particularly bookkeepers. The decline of the bookkeeper, which had begun, as we have seen, with the rise of the office manager, was helped along by the rise of the bookkeeping or posting machine, which converted a certain amount of skilled ledger work into a mechanical operation. The decline was continued, especially in banking, by the development of electronic bookkeeping machines, which complete the conversion of bookkeepers into machine operators and at the same time reduce the demand for them sharply. Thus one multi-branch bank reported that within eighteen months after installing electronic bookkeeping machines, the bookkeeping staff of 600 had been reduced to 150, and the data-processing staff had grown to 122. This is in line with the experience of most banks, which achieve a reduction in overall labor requirements of 40 to 50 percent for the same volume of work, and in the process cut down the bookkeeping people sharply and replace them with machine operators.37

Not only bookkeepers, but even the lower grades of management, feel the effects in a similar way. The computer presents management with an enormous temptation to save management time as well as labor time by “mechanizing" many choices and decisions. It is probably for this reason that Howard C. Carlson, a psychologist employed by General Motors, has said: “The computer may be to middle management what the assembly line is to the hourly worker."38

232

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Clerical Workers

233

\* This vice-president gives us a clear illustration of the fetishism which puts the blame for the situation on the “machines" rather than on the social relations within which they are employed. He knew when he made this remark that it was not the "machines" but he himself who chained the workers to their desks, for in his next breath he pointed out that a count of production was kept for the workers in that machine room.

\*\* This term in itself is quite remarkable, and can only be understood if taken to mean key punch operators who turn out to be “successful" hiring strokes for the personnel manager.

\* These pay figures refer to 1963. Elsewhere, the job of coder is characterized thus by a data-processing executive: "The only gal who will stick with this work has to have a husband with two broken legs and five hungry kids. No one else could stand it."34