THE BEST HOURS

...He has no voice or control in the planning or execution of his job...

...Georges Friedmann, who heads the Sorbonne's Center for Sociological Studies, is a leading spokesman of the European school of thought which is seeking to find and promote a true humanism of industrial work...

...The rational attitude towards our current problems in the world of work is not to sit back complacently and do nothing, consoling ourselves that in the long run the problems of alienated work will be solved as automation absorbs these meaningless jobs...

...Friedmann does not deny that the automation Utopia in which such work will be obsolescent will eventually arrive...

...Reviewed by Ronald Gross It is the fashion now to discuss the advent of automation in the broadest, most far-sighted perspective...

...He points out that the experiments with job enlargement and group self-direction are taking place in atypical firms and are encouraged by unusual economic and social conditions...

...its pace is set by the speed of the assembly line...

...This is probably too optimistic...

...But he insists that in the meantime we have got to face the problem of these semi-skilled workers who constitute the largest group among the manual workers in industry, who in America are still increasing in absolute numbers if not in relative proportion of the work force, and who on a world-wide basis will be increasing in both absolute number and in proportion of the work force during the coming decades as underdeveloped nations industrialize...

...Indeed, the corruption of leisure by work is much more probable, for these poorly educated workers, than the redemption of sub-human work by creative leisure...

...Friedmann shows in his multinational survey that the worker characteristically still' suffers under the terrible curse of being treated as less than human in the activity to which he devotes the most and best hours of his life...

...Friedmann argues that these experiments have brought us to a turning point in the managerial belief that efficiency demands increasing specialization and simplification of work: "The subdivision of jobs, constantly on the increase during the development of the machine age from the end of the Eighteenth Century onwards, will in future appear, not as a one-way process of unlimited duration, but as a transitory form of labor, and often a pathological one, if we consider it in relation to some of our deeper human needs...

...He has no hope of advancement, and even variety through change of job is inhibited by his commitment, especially in the United States, to keeping up the payments on his numerous appurtenances of middle-lass life...

...What is required is an acceleration of the current trend, so ably analyzed by Friedmann, to overcome the dogmas of "scientific management" and begin to consider the worker, rather than merely the mechanical efficiency of the productive process, as an important concern and outcome of our world of work...

...While he recognizes the theoretical significance of this change in attitude, Friedmann does not exaggerate its practical import...

...He examines a number of promising experiments in overcoming the "orthodoxy of scientific management...

...Thus John Kenneth Galbraith argues that it is time to "eliminate toil as a required economic institution...

...But the technology we already have, while insufficient to "eliminate toil as a required economic institution," is adequate to alleviate greatly the plight of today's industrial workers...

...Degrading work may influence leisure activity in quite another way...

...Such firms as International Business Machines and Detroit Edison have recently acted to reverse the division of labor through "job enlargement" —by giving each worker a whole sequence of tasks constituting a complete job providing some sense of achievement, or by letting workers handle their jobs in small groups, rotating themselves among different tasks and setting their own working conditions...

...It may turn men to passive submission to the worst kinds of mass culture, or it may spark aggressively self-destructive activities...

...The results have been good for the workers, and also good for business...

...Friedmann's conclusion is that none of these current reforms could spread fast enough to do away with meaningless jobs or endow them with meaning...

...In short, as novelist Harry Swados recently discovered by going to work in an automobile factory, the semi-skilled work- . er is a man who quite justifiably hates his daily work with an intensity hard for us to imagine...

...The vocational facts of life for the semi-skilled worker have long been known, but we tend to forget them because we know that the American worker today has an unprecedented standard of living and relative security...

...Under the extreme division of labor, which is a chief postulate of "scientific management," the worker performs a minute manual task of brief duration and no intrinsic interest...

...The valtfe o| The Anatomy of Work is that it punctures such soaring extrapolations by showing what the industrial worker's plight is and will continue to be for the foreseeable future...

...Such bold projections give readers a warm feeling of prescience—a lintf of one-up on the future...

...As one of the workers quoted by Friedmann put it: "It's what you spend most of the time doing that counts...

...What he feels about himself and his society as a result is difficult to probe scientifically, but intuitively obvious...

...Gerard Piel, in a recent brochure published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, pictures a forthcoming automated society which simply will not need the services of all citizens to keep itself running, and will therefore be able to excuse large numbers from work altogether, permitting them to devote themselves to other activities...

...Nor can we expect workers to compensate with initiative and creativity in their leisure for the autocracy and boredom which crushes them on the job...

...Friedmann sees significant rays of hope in this bleak landscape...

...He therefore looks to the increasing time away from work—the new "active" leisure prevalent in Europe as well as here—to enable workers to restore their personal dignity and maintain stable personalities...

...Though workers do not perform their more complex and varied tasks with the same robot-like efficiency as when they executed only one minute task, the reduction in absenteeism, in botched work, and in employe turnover has usually more than made up for the relaxed pace of work...