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

UMS uses a number of selected jobs or types of work whose work content is known and divides them into ranges of time. . . . One national organization had by the end of 1960 almost finished establishing universal standard data elements for all plants. Anyone in any plant could use the same standard for the jobs in his department. Fifty-two thousand universal elements had been isolated and studied. The data are placed on punch cards and magnetic tape to utilize a computer with a large memory. Plans will allow each foreman anywhere in the country to call into a central unit, to get a standard time for the job in which he is interested. . . . A foreman can, for example, get a standard time for a job that may only be running a couple of hours. These jobs were not studied previously because it took too long to make the studies.ª1

The picture of mechanization and skill cannot be completed without reference to those industries where mechanization has made the process so automatic that the worker takes virtually no physical part in it whatsoever. This theoretical ideal can be but seldom realized, and most plants considered “automatic" still require a great deal of direct labor of all sorts. But in the chemical industry it very often comes closer to realization than elsewhere, because of the nature of the continuous processes employed and the possibility of moving the entire product-in-preparation within enclosed vessels and piping. Thus the chemical operator is singled out, time and again, as the outstanding beneficiary of “automation," and the praises of this job are sung in countless variations. The work of the chemical operator is generally clean, and it has to do with “reading instruments" and “keeping charts." These characteristics already endear him to all middle-class observers, who readily confuse them with skill, technical knowledge, etc. Yet few have stopped to think whether it is harder to learn to read a dial than to tell time. Even Blauner, who selected this work as his example of the tendency of modern industry to bring the total process of production back within the ken of the worker, admits that chemical operators need know nothing about chemical processes.ª² He cites one oil refinery personnel executive who has placed a limit on the I.Q.'s of workers hired for operating jobs, another who calls them “only watchmen,' and reports this outburst by a chemical operator:

It takes skill to be an operator. Maybe you've heard of this job-evaluation program that's been going on. Well, our supervisor thinks there's not much skill in our work. The way he described our jobs for the job-evaluation program, it's like he thinks you could train a bunch of chimps and they could do the job, He thinks we’re a bunch of idiots. That has caused unhappy feelings.43

Transfers from operations to maintenance are common, Blauner says, but there are virtually no transfers in the other direction. This may also have something to do with pay rates, since, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for June 1971, the highest average pay rate among chemical operators (Class A) is lower than the lowest average classification among maintenance mechanics. Class B chemical operators are paid on the level of stock clerks.ª4

What happens in such an industry is comparable to what happens in other production systems: the automation of processes places them under the control of management engineers and destroys the need for knowledge or training. “In the chemical industry, although the division of labour does not as a rule take the form of the assembly line, the modernization of equipment has considerably lessened the time needed to train ‘experienced' workers. In a factory for distilling coal-tar (Lyons, 1949), the training of a ‘good distiller,' which previously took about six months, to-day takes three weeks. This is due particularly to the process of continuous distillation, resulting from more numerous and more sensitive measuring devices."45

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Those who have tried to see in continuous-process industry (as it is organized in the capitalist mode of production) the method, at last discovered, whereby the worker is restored to his human birthright, but who at the same time are aware of the low pay and undemanding duties in these occupations, wrestle with the dilemma to no avail. Thus Joan Woodward:

The main problem in this type of industry appeared to be establishing the occupational status of the plant operators; these men, although often highly skilled, were not formally recognized as skilled outside their own firm. The traditional differentiation between the skilled and the semi-skilled worker does not allow for a situation in which the manual and motor elements of skill have been taken out of the main production task, while the conceptual and perceptual elements remain.

The skill of a plant operator is of the perceptual and conceptual kind in that over a period of time he has to learn to absorb a great deal of information and to act on it continuously. But, this skill not being recognized formally, the plant operator has to be recruited as a semi-skilled worker at a comparatively low rate of pay. Several firms felt that this created difficulties for them, as in the competitive labour situation of the area it was very difficult to find and keep men of sufficiently high calibre at this low figure. A job in which the emphasis is laid more on the intellectual elements of skill, and which calls for articulation in both speech and writing, can attract only those with the minimum educational 46 qualifications.

Here we are told that the chemical process operator is not formally credited with a high degree of skill because the nature of that skill is chiefly intellectual, conceptual, requires education, etc. But in capitalist society, it is these very elements which are always accorded a higher degree of recognition than manual skills; why not in this case? We are further told that this problem exists only outside the firm; within the firm the skill is presumably recognized and appreciated. But despite this, “the plant operator has to be recruited as a semi-skilled worker at a comparatively low rate of pay." The exact nature of the constraint is not specified, and so we must take leave to doubt it. Is not the matter better understood as being exactly what it seems, without resort to convoluted theorizing? Those who, unlike Joan Woodward, are not even aware of the low pay, the low “occupational status," and the limited training of the chemical operator in their ignorance manage much more smoothly the feat of seeing him as the worker who now controls entire factories, needs much "technical knowledge," and represents a reversal of the trend of modern industry.

Considered only in their physical aspect, machines are nothing but developed instruments of production whereby humankind increases the effectiveness of its labor. Just as in producing a simple tool the worker fashions, preparatory to the direct production process itself, an aid for that process, in the same way the production of modern means of production, no matter how complex or developed, represents the expenditure of labor time not for the direct making of the product but for the making of instruments to help in the making of the product or service. This past labor, incorporated into instruments ofproduction, imparts its value to the product piecemeal, as it is used up in productionsa fact which the capitalist recognizes in the depreciation allowance.

Once labor has been embodied in instruments of production and enters the further processes of labor to play its role there, it may be called, following Marx, dead labor, to distinguish it from the living labor which takes part directly in production. Now, as a material process, production which makes use of tools, instruments, machinery, buildings, etc. is an ordinary and easily comprehensible activity: living labor making use of its own past stored-up labor to carry on production. As such a purely physical process, its terms are as clear as the relation between the first axes or potter's wheels and the men and women who used them.

But within the framework of capitalist social relations, all this is reversed The means of production become the property of the capitalist, and thus past or dead labor takes the form of capital. The purely physical relationship assumes the social form given to it by capitalism and itself begins to be altered. The ideal toward which capitalism strives is the domination of dead labor over living labor. In the beginning this ideal is seldom realized, but as capitalism develops machinery and makes use of its every suitable technical peculiarity for its own ends, it brings into being this system of the domination of living by dead labor not just as an allegorical expression, not just as the domination of wealth over poverty, of employer over employed, or of capital over labor in the sense of financial or power relationships, but as a physical fact. And this is brought about, as we have seen, by the incessant drive to enlarge and perfect machinery on the one hand, and to diminish the worker on the other. The expression Marx gave to this process at a time when it was just beginning cannot be improved upon even from the present vantage point of another century of its further development:

Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the “master.”47

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It is of course this “master," standing behind the machine, who dominates, pumps dry, the living labor power; it is not the productive strength of machinery that weakens the human race, but the manner in which it is employed in capitalist social relations. It has become fashionable, however, to attribute to machinery the powers over humanity which arise in fact from social relations. Society, in this view, is nothing but an extrapolation of science and technology, and the machine itself is the enemy. The machine, the mere product of human labor and ingenuity, designed and constructed by humans and alterable by them at will, is viewed as an independent participant in human social arrangements. It is given life, enters into “relations" with the workers, relations fixed by its own nature, is endowed with the power to shape the life of mankind, and is sometimes even invested with designs upon the human race.\* This is the reification of a social relation; it is, as we have already noted earlier in this chapter, nothing but fetishism, in Marx's sense of the term. "In order . . . to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities."49 This fetishism achieves its greatest force when it attaches to those products of men's hands which, in the form of machinery, become capital. Acting for the master in a way which he plans with inexhaustible care and precision, they seem in human eyes to act for themselves and out of their own inner necessities. These necessities are called “technical needs,"“machine characteristics,""the requirements of efficiency," but by and large they are the exigencies of capital and not of technique. For the machine, they are only the expression of that side of its possibilities which capital tends to develop most energetically: the technical ability to separate control from execution.

In reality, machinery embraces a host of possibilities, many of which are systematically thwarted, rather than developed, by capital. An automatic system of machinery opens up the possibility of the true control over a highly productive factory by a relatively small corps of workers, providing these workers attain the level of mastery over the machinery offered by engineering knowledge, and providing they then share out among themselves the routines of the operation, from the most technically advanced to the most routine. This tendency to socialize labor, and to make of it an engineering enterprise on a high level of technical accomplishment, is, considered abstractly, a far more striking characteristic of machinery in its fully developed state than any other. Yet this promise, which has been repeatedly held out with every technical advance since the Industrial Revolution, is frustrated by the capitalist effort to reconstitute and even deepen the division of labor in all of its worst aspects, despite the fact that this division of labor becomes more archaic with every passing day.\* This observation may easily be verified by the fact that workers in each industry today are far less capable of operating that industry than were the workers of a half-century ago, and even less than those of a hundred years ago. The “progress" of capitalism seems only to deepen the gulf between worker and machine and to subordinate the worker ever more decisively to the yoke of the machine.\*\*

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\* It is characteristic of bourgeois ideologists that although many of them take a positive view of the effects of machinery and some others adopt an attitude of horror at its effects, both attribute the results, whether hopefully or pessimistically interpreted, to "the machine." Thus Jacques Ellul, today a leader of the pessimists, waits no longer than the fifth page of his book on this subject before making his standpoint perfectly clear: “It is useless to rail against capitalism. Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did." A few lines further he says: "The machine took its place in a social milieu that was not made for it, and for that reason created the inhuman society in which we live." But what was that "social milieu" if not capitalism? And was it just by chance that the machine “took its place" in this social milieu? Was it an accidental confluence or was it the whole course of its history which made capitalism create the machine and use it as it does? The arbitrariness of this starting point is of a piece with Ellul's artificial view throughout, which is constructed on every level to exonerate capitalism; perhaps this accounts for its being so fashionable in liberal circles. 48

\* As Georges Friedmann says, for once clearly and unambiguously: “The theory of automation gives hope of the total disappearance of unpleasant work, the relocating of workers driven from industry by technical progress in other skilled occupations, and the transformation of the man at work into a sort of demiurge or creator, making and minding machines. But these are technicians’ abstractions which the actual evolution of capitalist societies since the beginning of this century has cruelly contradicted."50

\*\* One of Marx's comments on this score has so often been subjected to a flat misreading in recent years thtitis necessary to comment on it. The passage: “. . . Modern Industry . . . imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this

If the machine is fetishized, the division of labor in its present form is the subject of a veritable religion. Consider this from the author of a book on modern science and society:

The industrial assembly line, for instance, is an important social invention in the division of labor, and modern machine technology is impossible without it no matter how much scientific knowledge we have. Therefore, since science and technology are now extremely interdependent and fructifying for each other, both are fundamentally dependent upon the maintenance of that great division of labor

The chief advantage of the industrial assembly line is the control it affords over the pace of labor, and as such it is supremely useful to owners and managers whose interests are at loggerheads with those of their workers. From a technological point of view, it is extraordinarily primitive and has little to do with “modern machine technology."Nevertheless, in such barbarous relics is found the seat of“scientific knowledge" and the basis for technology. Apologists for chattel slavery, from Greece to the American South, used to argue that the labors of their fieldhands and domestic slaves were necessary so that they could preserve and develop art, science, and culture. Modern apologists go further and instruct the workers that they must keep to their places on the “industrial assembly line" as a precondition for the development of a science and technology which will then devise for them still better examples of the division of labor. And it is truly in this way that workers, so long as they remain servants of capital instead of freely associated producers who control their own labor and their own destinies, work every day to build for themselves more “modern," more “scientific," more dehumanized prisons of labor.

Notes

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law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, crippled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."51 This, extracted from its context, has been understood to mean that Marx was predicting that with the further development of capitalism an “educated" and “technical" working class would be created by modern industry. In fact, that was not his thought at all, as a reading of the section in question makes clear. He saw capitalism as being in direct contradiction to the tendency of modern industry to call into being a new type of worker, a “fully developed individual," and what he is saying here is that society itself is threatened with extinction unless it rids itself of the capitalist system which, the more modern scientific industry makes it obsolete, the more tenaciously it holds on to and even deepens an outmoded division of labor. "Although then," he says in another place, "technically speaking, the old system of division of labour is thrown overboard by machinery, it hangs on in the factory, as a traditional habit handed down from Manufacture [that is, hand industry] and is afterwards systematically re-moulded and established in far more hideous form by capital, as a means of exploiting labour-power." And at this point he has a footnote assailing Proudhon for interpreting machinery as a synthesis of detail operations for the benefit of the worker.³² Every line Marx wrote on this subject makes it clear that he did not expect from capitalism or from science and machinery as used by capitalism, no matter how complex they become, any general increase in the technical scope, scientific knowledge, or broadening of the competence of the worker, and that in fact he expected the opposite.

Chapter 10

Further Effects of Management and Technology on the Distribution of Labon

Marx has pointed out that unlike generals, who win their wars by recruiting armies, captains of industry win their wars by discharging armies. A necessary consequence of management and technology is a reduction in the demand for labor. The constant raising of the productivity of labor through the organizational and technical means that have been described herein must, in itself, produce this tendency. The application of modern methods of management and machine technology, however, become practical only with the rapid increase in the scale of production. Thus the rapid increase in the productivity of labor tends to be counterbalanced by the growth in production. Chiefly as a consequence of this, employment in those industries concerned with the production of goods has not declined in absolute terms. Statistics which estimate the numbers of workers in those industrial divisions which are directly concerned with the fabrication of goods (including manufacturing, contract construction, mining, lumbering, fishing, and the so-called mechanical industries—the latter being a term used in early censuses) show a constant rise since the earliest occupational census of 1820 (see table, page 164 below). The enormous size of the working population still concentrated in these industries, and the fact that, despite all mechanization, this total has continued to grow until the present, reflects, besides the growth of output, the limits mechanization itself places on the process of labor displacement. The point at which the worker is cheaper than the machinery which replaces him or her is determined by more than a mere technical relationship: it depends as well upon the level of wages, which in turn is affected by the supply of labor as measured against the demand. And the supply of labor, including the size of the reserve army of workers hunting for jobs, depends in part upon the mechanization of industry, which transforms employed workers into surplus workers. Thus the very rapidity of mechanization, insofar as it makes available a supply of cheap labor by discharging workers from some industries or putting an end to the expansion of employment in others, acts as a check upon further mechanization.\*

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\* It has been pointed out that the transfer machines which characterize so-called Detroit automation were first used by Morris Motors in 1927 but were not considered economical, in view of the relative price of labor power at the time.

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If the displacement of labor cannot be seen in the figures for the absolute size of the working population occupied in the making of goods, it can be seen in the measures of its relative size. If we convert the tabulation to the form of percentages of total nonagricultural employment for each census year, the trend emerges with some clarity (see percentage column of table, below).

In view of the untrustworthy nature of nineteenth-century statistics, it would perhaps be wrong to draw from them any other conclusion than that the percentage of those gainfully occupied who were to be found in these goodsproducing industries fluctuated in a fairly narrow range, between 45 and 50 percent of nonagricultural employment. And this situation, strikingly enough, continued until 1920; thereafter, the percentage moved consistently downward to the 33 percent figure of the 1970 census. The balance between the growth of production on the one side and the growth of productivity on the other held for a century and was, it would appear, finally broken in the decade of the 1920s, when employment in these manufacturing, extractive, and construction industries began for the first time to fall off as a proportion of all nonfarm employment.

But the more striking tendency is the marked change in occupational composition within these industries. As has already been pointed out, the separation of conceptualization from execution—the removal of all possible work from the shop floor, the point of execution, to the officeand the further necessity of maintaining a shadow replica of the entire process of production in paper form, brings into being large technical and office staffs. Statistics from all the principal capitalist countries indicate that there has been a rapid rise, starting before the turn of the century, in the proportion of those not employed directly in production. Characteristically, there were in manufacturing industries around the start of this century somewhere between five and ten nonproduction employees for every hundred employed in production, and by the post-World War II period this had risen to more than twenty per hundred. The figures given for United States manufacturing industries are as follows:3 \*

\* This table is constructed in three parts because there is no single continuous series covering the entire 150 years since the first occupational census. Nor is it possible to splice the three series together, since they were each constructed on somnewhat different principles. The first two sections of the table (by, respectively, P. K. Whelpton in 1926 and Alba Edwards in 1943) are attempts at reconstruction of census data; the final portion is from Bureau of Labor Statistics figures as gathered in their monthly payroll surveys. Despite the lack of a continuous series constructed on a single set of principles for the entire period, and despite the unreliability of early occupational statistics, the trends are clear, both as to numbers and percentages.²

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\* The United States Census data for the ratio of nonproduction to production workers in manufacturing shows “a secular trend upward, beginning in 1899, with some variation in slope but unmistakable in direction. This means that if one is looking for causal forces, the place to look is the whole twentieth century." This is the conclusion of George E. Delehanty, who has done one of the most thorough investigations of this subject. Delehanty points out that the series maintained by the Bureau ofLabor Statistics on a different basis gives a different picture, showing a constancy in the ratio up to 1952, and then an upward trend. After reviewing the evidence for both series, Delehanty is forced to conclude that it is impossible to choose between them on the basis of

It is most important to note, however, that not all of this increase is attributable to the tendencies that have concerned us thus far: the reorganization of production and the use of large-scale machine systems. The category of nonproduction employment used in all these figures is a mélange; it is, as Delehanty notes, a residual category, including all those employed in manufacturing apart from production, maintenance, and auxiliary workers. This means it includes not only engineers, technicians, and the clerical workers associated with production tasks, but all administrative, financial, marketing, and other such employment. Available figures do not permit a ready separation of the two types of nonproduction employment into those associated with the production process and those associated with other aspects of the corporation's activity, but there are ample indications that the technical portion of nonproduction employment is the smaller.

For example, Emil Lederer, an early investigator of this subject, noted that in Germany between 1895 and 1907, technical personnel in manufacturing, mining, and construction increased by 153 percent, while commercial personnel increased by 206 percent.5 And Delehanty points out that in 1961, in United States manufacturing, while there were 35 nonproduction workers for every 100 production workers, only 7.9 of these were engineers, scientists, or technicians.6

It is probably better to turn from these industrial statistics to the occupational figures for technical people if we are to attempt to estimate the size of the grouping created by the new industrial revolution to bear responsibility for the conceptualization and planning of production. According to these figures, there were in 1970 some 1.2 million technical engineers in the United States, employed chiefly in the goods-producing industries but also in transportation and communications, as independent consultants, by government, etc. At the same time, there were about a million technicians, including draftsmen, as well as some 365,000 natural scientists of all kinds. Since this total of close to 2.5 million in these occupations may be compared with a total of no more than 80,000 in the same occupations in 1900, it is clear that these are virtually new occupational groupings, produced by the revolution in production of the past century.

But despite this rapid growth, what is remarkable is the concentration of the technical expertise of United States industries in a relatively small grouping. Taken together, the technical engineers, chemists, scientists, architects, draftsmen, designers, and technicians represented not much more than 3 percent of the total labor force in 1970. Of course, this must be enlarged by the addition of some number, impossible to estimate, of managers serving as primarily technical superiors; but it should also be lowered by the large numbers of natural scientists in fields remote from production in any form, and also by the large numbers of draftsmen (including tracers and detailers) and technicians whose jobs are confined to the repetition of simple activities that are rapidly learned and do not encompass any true conceptualization or planning functions. On balance, it is probably proper to say that the technical knowledge required to operate the various industries of the United States is concentrated in a grouping in the neighborhood of only 3 percent of the entire working population—although this percentage is higher in some industries and lower in others.

The profession of technical engineer is at the present time almost completely restricted to those who have taken at least a four-year degree in engineering. Alongside the traditional specialties within this field and such recent arrivals as aeronautical engineering, industrial engineering, which was a small specialty as recently as the 1930s, has grown most rapidly. This is the aspect of engineering concerned most directly with the design of the production process. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the engineering professions scarcely existed; it has been estimated that there were no more than some 30 engineers or quasi-engineers in the United States in 1816. The first census which enumerated the profession separately, that of 1850, showed about 2,000 civil engineers, few of whom had gained their titles through academic training and most of whom were engaged in canal and railroad construction. It was only with the rise of manufacturing industry that the other categories of engineering came into significant existence, and between 1880 and 1920 the number of engineers of all sorts increased by nearly 2000 percent, from 7,000 to 136,000; now the civil engineer was overshadowed by mining, metallurgical, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineers. Where, in 1870, only 866 engineering degrees had been granted in the United States, more than that number were enrolled in engineering colleges in the single year 1890, and by 1910 enrollment had risen to 30,000.7

The enormous and continuous growth in demand for engineers has created a new mass occupation. On the one hand, this has, along with other new professions such as accounting, given a place to those thrust out of the old middle class by the relative decline of the petty entrepreneurial occupations in trade and other erstwhile arenas of small business. But on the other hand, having become a mass occupation engineering has begun to exhibit, even if faintly, some of the characteristics of other mass employments: rationalization and division of labor, simplification of duties, application of mechanization, a downward drift in relative pay, some unemployment, and some unionization.

In a study done for the National Bureau of Economic Research, The Demand and Supply of Scientific Personnel, David M. Blank and George J. Stigler point out that “in the United States since 1890: demand has grown quite rapidly but supply has grown even more rapidly so salaries have drifted downward relative to those for the entire working population." Their index of the ratio of median engineering salaries to those of the full time manufacturing wage earner shows that, if the 1929 ratio is taken as 100, by 1954 the ratio was only 66.6.8

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available statistical evidence.4 But whatever the cause of this statistical quirk, it seems clear enough that the increase in the proportion of nonproduction workers began, in the United States as elsewhere, long before 1952.

The engineer's job is chiefly one of design, but even design, where a project has grown large enough, may be subjected to the traditional rules of the division of labor. An example of how this is done may be seen from the manner in which the A. O. Smith Company went about the engineering of its new automobile frame plant in the 1950s. The design work was broken down into segments, both of the design task to be done and of various technical specialties:

First we developed a rating chart for all the engineers available. Technical specialties, attitudes, type of work were included. For instance, some might be draftsmen, capable designers, or medium designers, etc. This rating was developed by the group leaders who best knew these people.

We even had a psychological evaluation of every man. . . .

Then we brought the engineers together and told them what our objective was. . . . We laid down certain rules of operation. We said that we would brook absolutely no interference with the rules but would follow them religiously. Anyone who did not so operate would have to move aside. We said that eight hours a day they were to follow the rules. We wanted all complaints to come to us formally and we would consider them and amend the rules, but we wanted no one to make changes or alter procedure from the operating pattern we had established.

We asked each of our group leaders to put on blinders and absolutely not to worry about the other fellow's job. That was engineering management's business to handle.

Admittedly, this procedure was adopted under the pressure of time, but many large engineering projects are handled in a similar way, to the point where many engineers are restricted to a design specialty or an engineering routine, while the conception to which they have been subordinated remains “engineering management's business." At the same time, so-called computer-aided design and computer-aided engineering encourage the translation of the traditional graphic language of the engineer into numerical form so that it may be handled by computers and numerical control instrumentation.‘º This opens the way for the transfer of part of the engineer’s function to electronic equipment. Much of the design process, which consists of the recall of standard information, from handbooks, files, etc., together with calculations based upon this information, can then be stored in computer records and the calculations done much more rapidly by the computer.

Some objects, like mechanical cams, can be designed by programmed computations, skipping the use of drawings either as input specifications or as directions for production. The present practice is chiefly to produce numerical tables and text printouts, but the increased use of numerical control of machine tools encourages a trend toward computer outputs of magnetic tapes which then operate production machinery directly.

Small electric motors are examples of much more complicated products which are designed today in a completely automatic way. For a given specification, the computer chooses standardized iron cores for stator and rotor design, as well as rotor axles and casings. It also makes some engineering computations for the wire dimensions and the windings. The input for such an automatic design procedure is simply a table form in which the desired performance data are filled in by an engineer. The computer output is a list of standard parts and data on the wire, the configuration of the windings, and the turns to be wound."

These methods are also being applied to stress analysis for the intricate patterns of flush rivets in aircraft, to bridge design, hospital planning, and other engineering problems. Apart from the labor-saving aspects of the technique, it alters the occupational composition in the same manner as does numerical control. Since such techniques are used in accord with the management-favored division of labor, they replace engineers and draftsmen with data-entry clerks and machine operators, and further intensify the concentration of conceptual and design knowledge. Thus the very process which brought into being a mass engineering profession is being applied to that profession itself when it has grown to a large size, is occupied with duties which may be routinized, and when the advance of solid-state electronic technology makes it feasible to do so.

Outside of the medical and dental fields, there were approximately a million technicians in employment in 1970. Of these, some 310,000 were draftsmen and another 90,000 were surveyors, air traffic controllers, and radio operators, leaving about 600,000 as the total of all others, including engineering and physical science technicians. There is no generally accepted definition of the term, but the distinguishing characteristic of the technician is that he or she functions as “support" for the engineer or scientist; the routine which can be passed to a lower-paid and slightly trained person goes to the technician.\* Most have no special training or education apart from what they learned on their jobs; but with the growth of attendance in higher educational institutions, employers are increasingly using graduates of two-year technical institutes and even holders of four-year degrees. Pay is not much above that received by craftsmen; for example, in early 1971 the average weekly pay of draftsmen was \$170, while the average weekly earnings of all craftsmen and foremen were \$167.13

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\* It should be noted that there is a considerable discrepancy between European and American engineering practices insofar as the use of engineering technicians is concerned. “Overall British industry," says a recent study, “employs 4.7 technicians per professional as against the American ratio of 0.62 technicians per professional." The French and Germán ratios, while not so high as the British, are still very high compared to the American; in the neighborhood of 2.5 technicians per professional engineer. This means that this occupational classification, important in these European countries, is relatively small in the United States. It also means that whatever the importance given to the classification in Europe, that significance cannot be automatically transferred to the United States.12

If in these groups, and particularly among engineers and scientists, is concentrated the technical expertise required by management in modern production processes, this does not exhaust the changes wrought by the revolution in management and technique. A mass of clerical workers has come into existence whose work embraces all that was formerly handled on an informal basis in the shop itself, or on a minimal basis in the small shop offices of the past. Since management now carries on the production process from its desktops, conducting on paper a parallel process that follows and anticipates everything that happens in production itself, an enormous mass of recordkeeping and calculation comes into being. Materials, work in progress, finished inventory, labor, machinery, are subjected to meticulous time and cost accounting. Each step is detailed, recorded, and controlled from afar, and worked up into reports that offer a cross-sectional picture at a given moment, often on a daily basis, of the physical processes of production, maintenance, shipment, storage, etc. This work is attended by armies of clerks, data-processing equipment, and an office management dedicated to its accomplishment. Since there is no way to separate this work from the other administrative work of the corporation—both because work auxiliary to production is not classified and enumerated separately, and also because it is in fact so intermingled with the rest of the administrative work that it probably cannot be subjected to separate statistical accountingwork of this sort must be left for later discussion. It must await the description of other forces in monopoly capitalism, apart from the technical ones we have been discussing, which have caused shifts in the occupations of the working population.

Notes

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Labor and Monopoly Capital

Effects of Management and Technology

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Part III

Monopoly Capital