Notes on Work?1

...For example: Two hands should begin and complete their therbligs at the same time...

...Portions of this manuscript have also appeared in Encounter, London politico-cultural monthly...

...4 One might point out the singular psychological fact that Taylor, like all industrial engineers, envisaged "time" only in its impersonal "metric" measurements...

...There was one further step in the inexorable logic of rationalization...

...Productive rate: Filling scoop from pile of staples in tray, pouring one pound into tray on scale, picking up tray and pouring into cardboard box, closing flaps on box, placing aside approximately 24"—5.9 boxes a minute...

...He detached human movement from its bearer and made of it an abstract visualization...

...all other conditions normal...

...Said Adam Smith: "The understanding of the greater part of men is necessarily formed by their ordinary employments, The man whoso lift, is spent in performing a few simple operations...

...in so doing, it would solve the dilemma of Poor Law relief, the maintenance of which, Bentham argued, only increased misery by subsidizing the poor...

...Using this detailed calculus, Bedeaux formulated a complicated but mathematically neat system of wage payments which took into account not only the work done but the varying reactions of non-work or rest required in different operations, and increased or decreased payments correspondingly...

...has no occasion to exert his understanding...

...See "Timing a Fair Day's Work," Fortune, October 1949...

...NOTES ON WORK-1 The Organization of Work By Daniel Bell "Anything that obscures the fundamentally moral nature of the social problem is harmful, no matter whether it proceeds from the side of physical or psychological theory...

...the time in which an operation could be performed could "without bargaining" be established as an impersonal "standard time...

...Thus, classes of jobs are defined, and the conditions of pace and effort stipulated.5 In the wage-rationalization program of U.S...

...As Percival and Paul Goodman have so provocatively put it in their book Communitas: "If the plant were scattered, the workers could live near their jobs, and it would be processed materials that would have to be brought to several places for manufacture and the parts that would have to be collected for assembly...

...motions of the arms should be in opposite and symmetrical directions, etc...

...Bentham got the idea of the panopticon from his ingenious brother, Sir Samuel Bentham, a naval architect, who, while employed by Catherine the Great, had designed a factory along panoptical lines for the purpose of getting more and better work out of the industrialized muzhiks...

...It is a concise catalogue of defined work motions (e.g., reach, move, turn, grasp, position, disengage) and a scale of predetermined time values for each, all boiled down on one handy card...

...and, within the plant, newer work-flow designs avoid the antiquated straight-line shafts and aisles of the old factory lay-outs...

...Where Taylor systematized operations and Gilbreth sought to reduce waste motion, Charles Bedeaux sought to combine these into a unit measurement of human power, called a "B," which would correspond to the "dyn," or the unit of mechanical power in physics...

...Both were united in his mind by the utilitarian conceptions of tidiness and efficiency...

...For a managerial class which at the turn of the century had seen the erosion of its old justification of natural rights, the science of administration per se provided a new foundation for its moral authority...

...150 years before, a similar insight was voiced...

...The image of tens of thousands of workers streaming from the sprawling factories marks indelibly the picture of industrial America, just as the fringed buckskin and rifle marked the nineteenth-century frontier, or the periwig and lace marked Colonial Virginia...

...Which transport is easier to schedule so there is no delay or interruption...

...Yet, it is technology that shapes the process of work...

...The very rhythms and motions of work must respond to the norms of time...

...This dependence extends along the entire process of production...

...So we find such huge megaliths as the sprawling shed at Willow Run covering an area two-thirds of a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, or such roofed-over mile-long pavements as the Boeing plant at Wichita, Kansas...

...assembled cardboard boxes with one end open for filling...

...Each imposes a set of constraints on the worker with which he is forced to wrestle every day...

...And the managers were quick to claim it...

...By systematically varying each factor, Taylor got the optimum amount of barrow load...

...Thousands of workers have to be in the same place at the same time...

...With scientific management as enunciated by Taylor, and with the assembly line as refined by Henry Ford, we pass far beyond the old rough computations of the division of labor...

...Working conditions: Inside, seated...

...Not only could the pattern of machine work be broken down into elements, but motion, too, could be "functionalized," and the naturally rhythmical or haphazard jerky work movements of arms and legs could be ordered into a "one best way" of usage.3 Gilbreth isolated eighteen essential patterns of kinetic units or motions, which he modestly called "therbligs" (or Gilbreth spelled backwards...

...In a simple division of labor, for example, the worker has a large measure of control over his own working conditions, i.e., cleaning and repairing machines (the set-up and make-ready), obtaining his own materials, etc...

...Under a complex division of labor, these pass out of his control and he must rely on management to see that they are properly attended...

...One of the prophets of modern work was Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915), and the stop-watch was his Bible...

...These three logics of size, time and hierarchy converge in that great achievement of industrial technology, the assembly line:6 The long parallel lines require huge shed space...

...2 The logic of Taylorism was obvious: Each man's work could be measured by itself...

...The contract, first negotiated on May 8, 1946, defines a "fair day's work" as "that amount of work that can be produced by a qualified employe when working at a normal pace...

...What the Goodmans propose is production in "bits and pieces" rather than integrated assembly, but the question is rarely considered, for few industries pay directly for travel time...

...Stimulus and response, the rhythm of work, derive from a mechanically imposed sense of time and space, administered from without...

...But the question can be posed: Which is cheaper to transport: living men twice daily, or materials and mechanical parts twice a week...

...With it, say the authors, a standard performance time may be established for every job in industry...

...And in this new hierarchization stands the technical employe, a figure known neither to the handicrafters nor to industry in its infancy...

...No wonder Aldous Huxley can assert: "Today, every efficient office, every up-to-date factory is a panoptical prison in which the worker suffers...

...Much of this thinking about the advantages of size was conditioned by the early problems posed by the limited amount of power available in the use of steam...

...a piece of metal does not mind being compressed like a sardine...

...This article is the first of three which, together with other material, will appear in Harper's forthcoming volume, Manpower in the United States...

...DANIEL BELL, labor editor of Fortune, is a lecturer in sociology at Columbia University...

...3 The relation between the mode of visualization by the engineer and the forms of expression of modern art have been compared vividly by S. Gideon (in Mechanization Takes Command...

...The panopticon, said Bentham, was a "mill for grinding rogues honest and idle men industrious...

...As reasonably might we insist on bargaining about the time and place of the rising and setting sun," he once said...

...It is with those technological assumptions—and the fact that they are unquestioned—that one must start...

...The basic wage contract between U.S...

...6 it is quite remarkable how recent is the assembly line both in its operation and as a linguistic term...

...the morning often begins long before the time he is to be at work...

...The majority of Americans may not work in the factories, as the majority never were on the frontier or in the Georgian homes, but the distinctive ethos of the time lies in these archetypes...

...That this is no stretch of a literary metaphor can be seen from the latest attempt at such a system, "methods-time measurement...

...The indictment, damning if true, makes its gravest charge in the U.S...

...Productive rate: For shoveling sand from pile to box—average weight sand on shovel—15 lbs: 12.5 shovelfuls per minute...

...Once work was scientifically plotted, Taylor felt, there could be no disputes about how hard one should work or the pay one should receive for labor...

...Working conditions: Under roof...

...Yet, only in 1933 did the Oxford English Dictionary legitimize the term when its supplement added the contemporary meaning of the word...

...Although this is the most obvious fact about modern work, few writers have concerned themselves with it or with the underlying assumption that large masses of human labor should be brought to a common place of work...

...In the manner in which it organizes work, the contemporary enterprise sets up three peculiar techno-logies: (1) the logic of size as a function of market costs, (2) the logic of functional efficiency, and (3) the logic of hierarchy...

...industry today, the lives of millions of persons are ordered by production standards which most managers feel are as unarguable as the "time and place of the rising and setting sun...

...Equipment: Materials handling box (steel) effective height above floor—32" shovel—No...

...Below them stands the worker, linked in an exact chain of command, yet detached from production as a whole...

...Throughout U.S...

...from the consciousness of being inside a machine...

...This was the famous panopticon, a circular building so intricately constructed "that every convict would pass his life in perpetual solitude, while remaining perpetually under the surveillance of a warder posted at the center...

...everything is centered in the planning and schedule and design departments...

...Almost compulsively, like the theologian reaching for the perfect metaphysical system to encompass all thought, the engineer reaches out for a simple, comprehensive system to encompass all time and motion, from the correct strokes of the janitor sweeping the floor to the typist drumming rhythmically on the electric keyboard of the typewriter...

...With the increasing growth of large factories and the development of automatic processes, the engineer, the technician and the "semi-skilled engineer" assume an increasingly important role...

...100-110 pounds...

...The charges against Bedeaux of collaboration with Vichy during World War II, plus the bitter hostility of the unions to this method of mechanical wage calculations, brought the system into disuse...

...But philosophers, novelists and ordinary people know time, too, as "durce," or psychological time, which encompasses varying senses of time...

...Every detail of the man's job was specified: the size of the shovel, the bite into the pile, the weight of the scoop, the distance to walk, the arc of the swing, and the rest periods that Schmidt should take...

...There seems to be a law...

...His position in the hierarchy, his group affiliations, formal and informal, his mobility are scrutinized in minute detail...

...As a result, modern industry has had to devise an entire new superstructure which organizes and directs production...

...1 pound per cardboard box...

...Thus, in the manufacturing process the relations between numbers of workers are ordered by the requirements of the differential technological complexities...

...we go into the division of time itself...

...Steel and the CIO Steel Workers can be taken as an example...

...In the modern economy, shading of time is so important—as Benjamin Franklin, Max Weber's prototype of the ethical protestant, once remarked, "time is money"—that a large company like General Motors contracts with its workers on a six-minute basis...

...After consulting Gulliver on the functions of his watch, the Lilliputians came to the belief that it was his God...

...In each instance, the effort is to take the fundamental atoms and, in alchemic fashion, recombine them into almost infinite variations which can yet be encompassed within the two dimensions of a single card...

...This concentration to achieve maximum utility led, too, to the bunching of workers in the layout of work, since the driving of individual machines made it necessary to spot machines along a straight-line shafting without consideration of other problems of work flow...

...Steel, completed only in 1947, descriptions of 1,150 benchmark jobs, within 152 representative occupations, were worked out with similar exactitude...

...a normal pace is equivalent to a man walking, without load, on smooth, level ground at a rate of three miles per hour...

...The time of life of a piece of metal is not consumed while it waits for its truck...

...For purposes of payroll calculation, General Motors divides the hour into ten six-minute periods, and, except for the daily three-hour call-in pay, the GM worker is paid by the number of tenths of an hour he works...

...2 Taylor was not the first to understand such requirements...

...In all, 75,000 workers are covered by such specifications...

...the detailed breakdown of work imposes a set of mechanically paced specified motions...

...Time rules the work economy...

...Calculations in terms of market costs do not force the enterprise to take into account the chief social expenses in large-scale production—the labor time in going to and from work, plus the costs of roads and other accesses to the factory site, which are charged to the enterprise only in part.1 In his travel to and from work, the second consideration is that the worker is chained by time...

...4 The old Puritan morality of Captain John Smith, according to which he who will not work will not eat, becomes translated into the engineering morality of "he who will not work a 'fair day' shall not receive 'fair pay.'" But what does it mean concretely, the establishment of a "fair day's work...

...This identification of factory and prison was, perhaps, quite natural for Bentham...

...The engineer believes that concentration is technologically efficient: Under one roof there can be brought together the source of power, the raw materials, the parts and assembly...

...Just as Gilbreth's cyclographs a worker's movements traced on a photographic plate—caught the abstract curves of motion divorced from the human mover, no Klee's caressing arcs and Kandinsky's Volatile color-bursts detached themselves from recognizable objects and became pure abstract visualization...

...For the man who works an 8-to-5 day...

...And the modern factory, too, is fundamentally a place of order...

...The logic of hierarchy, the third of the logics created by modern industry, is thus not merely the sociological fact of increased supervision which every complex enterprise demands, but is a peculiarly technological imperative...

...One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation," he wrote, "is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles an ox than any other type...

...Often he may have to travel 25 to 30 miles, or spend an hour or more in getting to the plant...

...He generally) becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become...

...metal-covered working surface...

...Scientific management in essence is simply the systematic analysis and breakdown of work into the smallest mechanical component and the rearrangement of these elements into the most efficient combination...

...Throughout American industry, one can find a dozen performance-rating systems, performance-rating films, volumes of "standard data" on specific jobs and other efforts to create "objective," comprehensive yet simplified measuring rods of work...

...Equipment: 3-pound-capacity metal scoop, platform scale...

...Taylor achieved fame in 1899, when he took a Dutchman named Schmidt and taught him to shovel 47 tons instead of 12 1/2 tons of pig iron a day...

...While Taylor analyzed the relations of work and its component lime, another engineer, Frank Gilbreth (1868-1924), carried the process one step further...

...The root of utilitarianism is a passion for order and the elaboration of a calculus of incentives which, if administered to exact measure, would stimulate the individual to the correct degree of rectitude and work...

...as Bertrand Russell has noted, that improvements in locomotion do not cut down travel time but merely increase the area over which people are compelled to travel...

...John Dewey FOR ABOUT TWENTY YEARS of his industrious life, Jeremy Bentham devoted much of his energy to the elaboration in minutest detail of the plans for a perfectly efficient prison...

...the degree of cooperation dictated by a technical specialization and coordination of scheduling creates new social groupings as a function of the physical lay-out...

...For years, Bentham sought money from Parliament to build a "five-storied" panopticon, one half of which would be a prison, the other half a factory...

...two hands should not be idle at the same instant except during rest periods...

...1 As a result of market pressure, a measure of work decentralization is taking place...

...Although Oliver Evans developed a continuous production line for milling grain in 1800, and the packinghouse industry in the 1870s bad adopted the use of overhead conveyors for the processing of slaughtered animals, the assembly line, as a modern achievement, owes its success largely to Henry Ford and the establishment of the auto line at Highland Park in 1914...

...Yet, the size of the factory remains inflexible...

...The introduction of electric power and electric motors allowed a new flexibility...

...In 1813, he finally received ?3,000 from Parliament as compensation for money he had expended in his efforts to construct a model...

...Packaging staples Material: 3/4 x 14 gauge staples...

...So defined, "a B is a fraction of a minute of work plus a fraction of a minute of rest always aggregating unity but varying in proportion according to the nature of the strain...

...Any doctrine that eliminates or even obscures the function of choice of values and [the] enlistment of desire and emotions in behalf of those chosen weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action...

...Successively, in many other operations, notably an assembly line, similar inflexible ratios become established, and the expansion and contraction of work is defined by the multiples of that ratio...

...and, from the analysis of the therblig combination, Gilbreth came to his principles of "motion economy...

...Most discussions of the worker today deal with his attitudes, his ambitions, his anomie...

...Contemporary America is the machine civilization par excellence...

...What, then, is the nature of work in the life of the contemporary American...

...Once in use, it would cure the poor of laziness and end the vice of the slum-dwellers...

...2 furnace...

...But Taylor knew, too, what such a mechanical regimen would do to a man—or, rather, what sort of man could fit into this straitjacket...

...pay could then be computed on the basis of the amount of work done and the time taken to do it...

...But the technology is taken as given...

...At its height, the Bedeaux system was used by 720 corporations, employing 675,000 workers...

...smooth concrete floor...

...This superstructure draws in all possible brain-work from the shop...

...The "penalty" for violating these rules is waste...

...weight per cu...

...By exact calculation, he got the correct response...

...5 For example: Shoveling sand Material: River sand, moisture 5.5 per cent approx...

...After a hasty wash and a quick breakfast, he is off in his car or on the trolley, bus or subway...

...For this reason, the engineer tended to crowd as many productive units as possible on the same shaft or within the range of steam pressure through pipes limited enough to avoid excessive condensation losses...

...This visceratonic definition then becomes a "benchmark" or gauge to define the degree of exertion of jobs in other varied operations...

...But such dependency presupposes coordination, and with increasing atomization the greater complexity of coordination, and with that the multiplication of hierarchies...

...The significance of Taylorism lies in its attempt to enact a social physics...

...Because it is cheaper to assemble cars in California or Texas rather than ship fully assembled ones from Detroit, auto companies increasingly are using Detroit to make parts while final assemblies are made at new and far-flung terminal points...

...Marx cited an example in type manufacture: One founder could cast 2,000 units of type an hour, the breaker break up 4,000 and the polisher finish 8,000 in the same time...

...The fragmentation of work, while atomizing the worker, has also created a dependency and a hierarchy in work, for inherent in the division of labor is what Marx called "the iron law of proportionality...

...In the 39 years since the death of Taylor, the search for magical harmony in industry has intensified...

...as the dull moments and the swift moments, the bleak moments and the bliss moments, the sense of time prolonged and of time eclipsed, of time recalled and time anticipated in short, time not as a function of space, but as a function of subjective experience...

...The logic of efficiency as a mode of life is due, if any such social upheaval can ever be attributed to one man, to him...

...thus, to keep one polisher busy the enterprise needed two breakers and four founders, and units were hired or discharged, therefore, in multiples of seven...