The Tensions of Work

...Both capitalism's and socialism's industrial revolutions have, in fact, been monuments to the inefficient and inhumane uses of labor...

...246 discontent with their inability to keep their wages in line with rising prices and with the wages of other workers to whom they compare themselves...

...The alleviation of work tensions has to be achieved at two levels...

...to the worker, the wage is income and a standard of life, which he tries to insulate as much as possible from the uncertainty that besets the employer's product market...

...Not only has full employment helped blunt the edge of the cost problem to make it compatible with "human relations" and a more tolerant view of trade unionism, it also has abated the competitive struggle within the working class by increasing the volume of jobs and earning opportunities...

...The worker is exchanging life for income...

...For the employer the transaction is significant insofar as it is an exchange of money or liquid assets for the product of the work...

...cit., 34-48...

...Trade unionism and management philosophy imprinted the dominant mark on the Iabor problems for the period from the New Deal to World War II...

...6 Ibid., p. 55...

...the short-term character of his employment (ordinarily a week) and its instability...

...7 Relative scarcity of employment, earnings opportunity, and status concerns pit one work group against another—the classic divisions being those between production workers and skilled craftsmen, manual and white-collar workers...

...Cost discipline is the technique for economizing on scarce resources in order to achieve a favorable net return...

...19 The method of payment, a product of cost discipline, in which "a man's income can be paid to him an hour's worth at a time" 20 is an immediate source of instability, considering the infinite variety of exigencies to which it is subject...

...THE TENSIONS OF WORK theory of work humanization that begins with the utopians—Owen and Fourier— and Marx's ideas about alienation...

...Workers' tensions, as located here, derive from the organization of the work process and the economic environment...

...The basic peculiarity of the purchase and sale of labor is that here we have an exchange in which the exchangeables appear very differently to the two parties...

...But with the exception of Fourier, radical ideologists have largely focused on the question of who makes the work decisions, rather than on the organization and mechanics of the work process itself...

...a Leonard R. Sayles, Behavior of Industrial Work Groups (New York: Wiley, 1958), p. 155...

...p. 121...

...A disciplined labor force means men and women workers who by education, culture, and motivation will be responsive to costdiscipline techniques...

...The extent to which the work process may be humanized seems to be most closely related to the stage of economic development...

...Yet if we truly value the lessening of work tensions and their social consequences, we must be aware that, as in ecology, the price to be paid may be in sacrifices of cost efficiency— if we consider the human cost...

...By comparison, "office routines...

...Their sovereign remedy (which has not worked either) has been withdrawal from industrial society...

...All of these tensions of work induce a strong protective cast in the worker's outlook...

...First of all, full employment is associated with inflation...

...Modern postwar capitalist economies, however, have been able to achieve full employment only at the cost of inflation, which carries with it its own tension-inducing effects...

...26 The most important implication of what amounts to a pluralistic management philosophy is that it views the union or a similar assertion of worker interests as integral to the labor process of the enterprise and not an alien influence...

...JACK BARBASH faced on their jobs...

...Members of these groups seem to be carrying a chip on their shoulders...

...13 As defined here, the feeling of deprivation stems mainly from the minute specialization in the horizontal division of labor that makes the worker literally "an appendage of the machine," to use Marx's well-known phrase...

...scale...

...Full employment and the welfare state have been the paramount influences in shaping the labor problems of the post-1950s...

...uncertainty, the state...

...the transaction involves him in status, prestige, his standing in the eyes of his family and of the community and his whole position as a man...

...THE TENSIONS OF WORK 241 Ordinarily, the worker perceives himself at a considerable disadvantage in bargaining for his income and other objectives against the employer...

...22 Robert F. Hoxie, Trade Unionism in the United States (New York: Appleton, 1923), p. 262...

...Still, a caveat must be entered against utopianism in thinking about work freedom...

...the relatively large number of sellers of labor compared to the relatively small number of buyers...

...The labor transaction represents not only the differences in industrial rank—that between the managers and workers—but these differences in industrial rank also are closely related to those in social rank...

...Tensions of subordination derive from the vertical or hierarchical division of labor...

...There is also a socialist management 26N Ross in Human Relations and Modern Management (The Hague: North-Holland Publishing Co., n.d...

...The evidence is plain, then, that the transfer of power from the capitalists to "the people" is by itself simply not capable of sustaining an idealism powerful enough to overthrow the traditional logic of industrialism...

...The oppressiveness of much of the work performed by blue-collar workers is imbedded in the very structure of industrialism...

...Competition for improvements in working conditions and benefits appears to be most frequent among groups that are more than half-way up the status ladder...

...Technology has done much to ease the drudgery and physical demands of work, although in the worker's mind its beneficial results have frequently been overshadowed by the tension-inducing effects of displacement and skill obsolescence...

...JACK BARBASH The militant temper of the times—what some have called the authority crisis—has shaped the modes in which workers' tensions have been expressed...

...his inability to withhold his effort for a better price because of lack of reserves and the perishability of his labor as commodity...

...Full employment makes such trade-off possible, for it frees workers from the fear of imme diate deprivation if they don't work...

...1 It is in the nature of hierarchical organization that "leaders can shift rewards to themselves and deprivations to non-leaders...

...it has provided in many instances a substitute for unionism...

...As long as men had the greater part of their living in real income produced by themselves, the uncertainties of the money wage could be tolerated...

...The attempt of this disadvantaged class to achieve a measure of social justice has thrust up a new interest group demanding recognition of its claims from both employers and the established working class under pain of disruption, litigation, and withdrawal of federal procurement...

...THE TENSIONS OF WORK dependently...

...68-69 passim...

...s Kenneth E. Boulding, Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (New York: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1962), pp...

...Neither socialism nor workers' participation guarantees the lessening of work tensions, if the underlying systems of subordination, specialization, and cost calculation are left intact in the organization of the work process...

...This, normally, is possible only under full employment and in a relatively free labor market—which is the special problem of socialist systems...

...As for "deprivation," let us use Baldamus's concept of it as the tension which 9 Hare, op...

...An industrial society that has surpassed the subsistence stage is likely to be freer in experiments with work-easing methods, and in advanced societies the utilization of labor is less of a problem...

...organization...

...But student and civil-rights activism can also be read as having set in motion a backlash reaction among workers...

...The "socialist" systems, whose ideologies are based on the destructiveness of the labor process under capitalism, have hardly addressed themselves to its reform...

...a few with high professional or craft motivation find their work intrinsically satisfying and perceive the tensions as a challenge and the necessary cost of producing a product or service in which they can take pride...

...Friedrich Engels, "On Authority," in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Lewis S. Feuer, ed...

...Yet the main purpose of "human relations"— with all its concern for conserving human values at work—is the harnessing of these values in the interests of management efficiency...

...Indeed, even when it promises them substantial benefit, they may still pull, haul and balk...

...11 Tedium is a feeling experienced by manual workers, and it stems from "the repetitiveness of light work"—as distinguished from the "boredom" experienced in professional occupations.12 Weariness is not always easy to distinguish from tedium, but "analytically" it is the distinction between the work realities of repetitiveness (i.e., tedium) on the one hand, and the coercion of prolonged routine work on the other...

...Marx was extraordinarily perceptive in identifying the division of labor, and particularly the division between intellectual and manual labor, as a source of alienation...

...to produce great inequalities in dignity, respect, [and] opportunity...

...25 So the worker acquires a kind of job-fund theory, that there is only a limited supply of work that needs to be prudently rationed...

...In industry . . . it is what occurs at the lowest level, on the factory floor, that matters most to the worker...

...An expanding economy, with its brighter future, encourages relaxation of protective attitudes—and a highly developed industrial economy, i.e., 23 Paul Blumberg, Industrial Democracy: The Sociology of Participation (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 3. 24 Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York: Augustus Kelley, reprint of 1928 ed., 1949), pp...

...20 Neil W. Chamberlain, "Unions and the Managerial Process," in C. R. Walker, Technology, Industry and Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 262...

...We still cannot foresee a time when the tyranny of necessity and scarcity, which underlies the essential oppressiveness of work for most people, will fade away...

...What is tantamount to civil disobedience by public employees may reasonably be interpeted as a demonstration effect of campus and civil-rights activism...

...A survey sponsored by the U.S...

...Trade unionism has eased the harshness of the hierarchical division of labor by introducing through collective bargaining a system of bilateral industrial government, which has established some rights and orderly procedures in the hierarchical relationship between management and workers...

...57-58...

...24 This protectivism is further expressed in the worker's characteristic pessimism, in what Selig Perlman called "scarcity-consciousness...

...These structural features generate tensions of a peculiar force among manual workers, tensions that can be qategorized as: subordination...

...Scale means large concentrations of workers and capital investment...

...18 Frank Tannenbaum, A Philosophy of Labor (New York: Knopf, 1951), p. 147...

...There are no total remedies for necessity and scarcity, and their abatement will most effectively yield to step-by-step methods, which take time...

...Extensive hierarchy is likely...

...Among these disadvantages are: the worker's total dependence on a wage income...

...Moreover, industrialism manifests a powerful tendency to proliferate specializations, which then become professionalized and jurisdiction-minded: Work groups . . . compete among themselves for the available economic rewards...

...Organization is the structured association of people and procedures that is necessary for administering the technology, scale, cost discipline, and labor force...

...210-12 passim...

...8 7 George Strauss and Leonard R. Sayles, Personnel, 2nd ed...

...22 29 Benjamin M. Selekman, Labor Relations and Human Relations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), p. 111...

...The "three main elements, defined as different aspects of the deprivation inherent in industrial work (are...

...My objective here is to identify these structural features and suggest their effects on the organization of work...

...Ibid., pp...

...Ibid., p. 53...

...As part of this tradition and also of trade unionism, movements have arisen for "cooperativism," workers' control, "industrial democracy," and workers' councils...

...The cost is largely in terms of apathy and boredom, as positive satisfactions are engineered out of jobs" 14—how high the cost is a matter of speculation, just as the degree to which workers are affected by boredom and monotony...

...Since inflationary impulses at full-employment level are generated to an important degree by labor scarcities and a poor use of the existing labor supply, the remedies offered by modern manpower measures seem more compatible with free work choices than the new standard anti-inflation remedies of deflation and unemployment...

...Tensions of exploitation—a feeling on the part of the worker that the monetary return for his labor is less than he is worth or deserves— stem from the clash between the employer's cost imperative and the worker's wage consciousness, or between the former's production-orientation and the latter's consumptionorientation...

...This emphasis on the present and the lack of concern for planning ahead are...

...The gradual incorporation of this perception into personnel policy has had its effects: it has sensitized the manager to the needs of the managed through techniques of "human relations...

...242 arises directly out of the effort of work...

...It works with special force on the worker for whom stability of expectations is a major concern...

...The manual worker is convinced by experience that he is living in a world of limited opportunity...

...the] people in the bottom positions develop some resentment against the people who are always originating for them...

...that the change bodes them no good...

...competitiveness...

...21 John H. Goldthorpe, et al., The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 119...

...impairment, tedium and weariness...

...For the unions, the task ahead is to focus more directly on how the worker can be liberated from the tyrannies of the work process without impairing his income and thereby his living standard...

...Uncertainty refers to the unpredictability of economic events, given the forward nature of economic transactions...

...nor is there any indication that, with the possible exception of the Yugoslays, a serious effort has been made in this direction...

...In both situations we see how a growing ethnic awareness cements an atomized mass of low-wage workers into unions, to deal on their own power with the problem of wage exploitation...

...Here again, as in the design of work, there is a body of knowledge and analysis that, though far from constituting a science, can provide a foundation on which to build...

...And be sure to keep a carbon of all manusoripti...

...In his later years Engels understood this very well...

...He was wrong, as it turned out, in associating alienation only with capitalist industrialism...

...it has professionalized "human relations" expertise...

...Martin's Press, 1965), p. 27...

...In addition, divisions within the work force get tied in with differences in color, ethnic origin, and sex, which tend to sharpen existing differences...

...10 Impairment "is the state of mind of a person aware of his physical discomfort caused by strenuous work...

...a disciplined labor force...

...It is not generally understood that freedom on the job will provide not only autonomy at work but also the freedom to change jobs...

...A salaried employee is likely to be more confident than the wage worker, because his fundamental economic needs are already met and he exercises more control over his job circumstances...

...Full employment makes all the more intolerable the existence of a special, disadvantaged class barred by structural handicaps from sharing in the general affluence...

...But the pressure of trade unionism often has forced management to acknowledge the legitimacy of other interests and to recognize that "the firm is a plural society containing many related but separate interests and objectives which must be maintained in some kind of equilibrium...

...cit., p. 43...

...23 Selig Perlman formulated the central interests of workers as "job-control," "jobconsciousness," and "shop rights which to the working men at the bench are identical with `liberty' itself...

...The state signifies the overhead facilitative, regulatory, public-procurement, and planning functions usually provided by government...

...The relatively large labor force at the enterprise level demanded by industrialism requires a vertical or hierarchical division of labor, for there is a limit to the span of control any one supervisor can efficiently exercise—especially if one assumes, as industrial management does, that the "lower order" of workers will malinger if left unsupervised...

...Lenin was, in fact, an admirer of Taylorism, which was of course the ultimate rationalization of labor as a commodity...

...Many employees in the hierarchical division of labor are both order-givers and order-takers, but the largest group at the lowest levels is invariably composed of permanent ordertakers...

...Improvements can take the form of looser standards, a preferred seniority position, more overtime, more sympathetic supervision, correction of inequities, and better equipment e 2 Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom, Politics, Economics, and Welfare (New York: Harper, 1953),p.256...

...15 Blauner reported that "there is remarkable consistency in the findings that the vast majority of workers in virtually all occupations and industries are highly or moderately satisfied rather than dissatisfied with their jobs...

...His protectivism consists, first, of a short-run time horizon, if only because he works under a relatively short-duration contract of employment...

...It also has moderated the abrasiveness of the income-cost interaction, thereby compensating to a degree for the worker's barJACK BARBASH gaining inferiority...

...They are almost the best but not quite...

...5 The organization of the plant provides incentives for the banding together of individual workers into interest groups...

...Competitive tension follows from the horizontal division of labor because no one can know operationally more than a small segment of the range of specializations which the technology and organization of industrialism thrust up...

...17 John H. Goldthorpe et al., The Ai9Zuent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 20...

...But full employment, paradoxically, is also an influence in generating new tensions, for it has raised to prominence a new order of problem as earlier ones have receded...

...New York: Wiley, 1960), p. 353...

...For if we wish to ease the oppressiveness of work, we must find ways to change these structural features, which persist under both capitalism and socialism...

...Regular mail will, al a rule, be adequate and more convenient...

...are less coercive than factory routines...

...they mount guard, as it were, suspicious in advance 15 Neal Q. Herrick and Robert P. Quinn, "TheWorking Conditions Survey as a Source of SocialIndicators," Monthly Labor Review, U.S...

...275, 278...

...Their position is somewhat ambiguous...

...Inflation aggravates workers' Q7 Maxine and Nelson Valdes, "Cuban Workers and the Revolution," New Politics, vol...

...As Fidel Castro instructs us: Perhaps our greatest idealism lies in having believed that a society that had barely begun to live in a world that for thousands of years had lived under the law of an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," the law of the survival of the fittest, of egoism and defeat, the law of exploitation could, all of a sudden, be turned into a society in which everybody believed in an ethical, moral way.27 Each era gives its own imprint to the labor problem...

...These incentives are not only the desire to protect the status quo, work standards, degree of rule enforcement and discipline meted out by supervision, relative earnings and seniority position, but also include the opportunity to improve their relative position...

...In the long run, the development of industrialism has probably brought about a lessening of the tensions incident to work...

...they have found ways of warding off the full impact of work tension...

...Uncertainty has stemmed historically from the worker's dependence, as Frank Tannenbaum has observed, on a money wage...

...On the shop floor, the hierarchical organization and division of labor and the design of work have to be altered to permit greater autonomy and satisfaction in the work itself...

...Only the anarchists diagnosed correctly that a boss is a boss is a boss—but to this day they have not been able to make their antibossism work in an industrial environment...

...Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 93...

...The structural requirements of industrialism are, in shorthand form: technology...

...Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 1971, p. 16...

...encouraged by the view that there is in fact little to be done about the future, that it is not to any major extent under the individual's control.21 Robert Hoxie, generalizing from the American worker's experience, observes, "There is no long run but immediate need...

...There are, however, differences in the degree of satisfaction...

...Viable solutions will have to permit sustained full employment at a considerably lower level of inflation than is now possible...

...Working-class life [a generalization from the British experience which probably holds just as well for the American] puts a premium on the taking of pleasures now, discourages planning for some future good...

...And at the level of the economy, full employment without inflation and greater efficiency in the labor market have to be realized in order to give the worker his ultimate sanction: the effective opportunity to leave an oppressive job and get a better one...

...To Our Contributors In sending manuscripts, letters, and other material, please do not use special delivery unless requested...

...12 Ibid., pp...

...he wrote: "Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel...

...Work organization, as a variable, apparently needs to be dealt with in 2 BLouis E. Davis, "The Design of Jobs," in Industrial Relations, Berkeley, October 1966, p. 42...

...W. F. Whyte, Money and Motivation (New York: Harper, 1955), p. 234...

...By making job security more general, full employment has also narrowed the job-security advantage public employees enjoyed but had to pay for with salaries lower than those of their private counterparts...

...Technology consists of production hardware, skills, science, and technique...

...We must remember, too, that a substantial part of our population still has to conquer subsistence or the quantity of work before it can move on to the problem of the quality of work...

...And participants in the labor transaction meet one another as adversaries, which deepens the feeling of difference...

...The Soviet Union has yet to emerge from the commodity stage of the labor process...

...The appearance of something new whether in the form of a new labor-saving device, a new incentive system, a new kind of supervision, or a new process, seems to sound an alert among men at work...

...Militancy by and on behalf of black workers has stimulated militancy in other ethnic groups, notably the MexicanAmericans...

...Such tensions are related in large part to the subordination and specialization systems imposed by industrialism...

...Inflation forces union leadership, under pain of rank-and-file reprisal, to defy the inevitable public pressures aimed at wage repression...

...The extent of this protectivism varies directly with the worker's place in the job hierarchy, the level of economic activity, and the society's stage of industrial development...

...8, no...

...Concretely, the methods of manpower policy—education, training and retraining, financial inducements to mobility, job counseling, job creation in underemployed areas, and effective institutions in the labor market to facilitate these processes—seem indispensable to a condition of free work choices in modern industrial society...

...Department of Labor reported that only 5 percent of the sample singled out the boredom and routinization of work as the "single biggest problem they 10 W. Baldamus, Efficiency and Effort (London: Social Science Paperbacks, in ass...

...The sources of these alleviating influences are technology, trade unionism, the welfare state, management philosophy, and full employment...

...3 A. E. C. Hare, The First Principles of Industrial Relations (New York: St...

...For the impatient it should be of some comfort to know that this era is possibly the first in history when the question of personal freedom at work has become both relevant and practical...

...This is unlike the manager's experience when bargaining for other factors of production, since in those transactions the adversary confrontation is likely to be mediated by common interests and associations in the noneconomic relationships of church, political party, and neighborhood...

...THE TENSIONS OF WORK Protectivism also takes the form of a kind of sectionalism that constrains the worker's scope of interest according to where he happens to be located in the division of labor...

...Management pays a price for the work simplification, routinization, and ease of supervision inherent in mass production work," a modern commentary observes...

...Having introduced a semblance of due process in work relationships, the unions now ought to explore more systematically how work and work organization as such can be reformed to make them more humanly tolerable...

...This relative worsening of the public employees' position, plus the inflexibility of their wages vis-a-vis changes in consumer prices, has turned firemen, police, teachers, and postal employees to the tactics of militant unionism...

...2 Hierarchy expressed in "the employer's power to exercise arbitrary control over his workers" contributes "one of the chief sources of unrest...

...Managers and higher-rated workers, by contrast, are likely to take a broader, longerrun, more optimistic view—because they are higher up in the organization, exercise a larger degree of autonomy, and usually do not feel that economic security is for them the immediate problem that it is for the worker...

...but the mere establishment of any society—capitalist, socialist, or some amalgam of the two—would not guarantee a solution...

...with Tavistock Publications, 1967), p. 124...

...The relatively modern concern with the human consequences of technological change, including full-employment policies, has also somewhat eased these tensions...

...exploitation...

...The problem that emerges becomes particularly baffling when time and again it appears immaterial whether an innovation affects the workers adversely or not...

...Besides the pressures of trade unionism there is a growing perception in management, derived from both experience and research, that the labor input differs from all other factor inputs in being inseparable from the human being who sells it, and that therefore the management of labor needs to deal not only with labor's characteristics as a commodity but also with at least some of its human needs...

...monotony and drudgery...

...New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), p. 483...

...18 While change is literally a way of life for management, the worker often sees it as a threat...

...it has made "human relations" compatible to a degree with cost consciousness...

...Trade unionism also performs the function of mediating the competitive claims among workers...

...The increasing recourse to wildcats, quit ting, and absenteeism may be interpreted as the workers' willingness to accept reduced earnings in return for some relief from op pressive job monotony and discipline...

...One or another form of society might facilitate or be more concerned with the solution of this problem...

...By now, as a joint determination of the conditions under which the labor is to be performed, the wage bargain also represents a sharing of power in an area over which he previously exercised unilateral control...

...244 "the affluent society," upgrades the worker's level of need as compared to, say, a subsistence agricultural economy...

...3 In the hierarchical industrial system, "management is constantly originating activity for" the workers "at the bottom of the industrial pyramid" with little opportunity for the workers "to originate back...

...4 Strauss and Sayles, op...

...cost discipline...

...his lack of knowledge of alternative opportunities in the market and of his actual worth to the employer, and his low occupational and geographical mobility.9 To all these factors must be added the employer's resistance against wage bargaining, because for him the wage transaction represents not only a traditional kind of price contract...

...While the "socialist" systems produced a "new class" to make the work decisions, they have not found it possible to reconstruct the logic of subordination and cost discipline by which the decisions are made...

...On the one side are those who say that monotony in work is by now one of the lower-order discontents...

...In this view the conspicuous antipatriotism and special "life-style" of campus dissent have aroused the blue-collar worker to a militant defense of the system, suggesting that even with all the tensions he must endure, the American worker still feels a sufficient stake in the system to be outraged by broadside attacks on it and even, on occasion, to be moved to violence in its defense...

...4 (1971), p. 43...

...JACK BARBASH...

...Trade unionism's protective activities have been complemented, with broader scope, by the welfare state's lightening of disabilities that arise from unemployment, old age, ill health, and inadequate education...

...Most workers put up with the tensions of work because: wage or salary employment is the only available method of financing a desired standard of living and a respected place in a community...

...The humanization of work has reached its greatest development under capitalism—but this reflects only Western capitalism's advanced stage of development, not the tendency of private enterprise as such to humanize work...

...and inflation may even be the fundamental force at work in the eruptive discontents among young workers who are likely to suffer disproportionately from its effects...

...25 Ibid., p. 239...

...Although progress has been made in "humanizing" the effects of subordination and specialization, both research and experience suggest that more can be done to develop autonomous "responsible job behavior" 28 without impairing, and perhaps even increasing, cost efficiency...

...To the employer, the worker's wage is a cost...

...17 The tension of uncertainty derives from the general economic uncertainty that, as we know, is a pervasive feature of modern society...

...16 Robert Blauner, "Work Satisfaction and Trendsin Modem Industrial Society," in Labor and Trade Unionism, Walter Galenson and Seymour MartinLipset, eds...

...16 The Goldthorpe research group in Britain found that in their affluent worker group "the performance of work tasks was accompanied by various, and in some groups fairly generalized psychological work stresses...

...economic instability...