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The Class Politics of Office Technology
Windows on the Workplace: computers, jobs and the organization of office
work
By Joan Greenbaum
Monthly Review Press, 2004, £12-00
Reviewed by
Michael Fisher
IN 1911, Frederick Taylor, an American engineer and
management consultant, published his Principles of Scientific Management.
Drawing on his observations and interviews with workers at a number of
manufacturing plants, Taylor argued that the complexity and variety of the
mental and manual tasks that skilled shop-floor workers performed in their work
meant it was difficult for managers to quantify precisely how they were making
use of their paid labour-time, and if they were working to their full capacity.
Furthermore, because such workers typically took years to train, and were
relatively scarce on the external labour market, it was often difficult for
managers to sack militant skilled workers and substitute them quickly with more
compliant new recruits capable of performing work to the required standard.
To maximise management control as a means of increasing the
productivity and substitutability of labour, Taylor proposed that jobs should be
re-designed on the basis of his ‘principles of scientific management’. To make
the work of skilled labour easier for management to discipline and quantify
Taylor proposed that each complex job should be broken up into a number of jobs
comprising simple tasks, and that the conceptual aspects of work should be
removed from the shop-floor and made the exclusive preserve of management and a
specialist planning department. In addition, he argued that these principles of
work organisation should be combined with a system of payment where wage levels
would be determined by individual performance.
Shortly before the outbreak of World War One, some of the
aims and methods of ‘scientific management’ were adopted and developed by Henry
Ford at the Ford Motor Company. While the Taylorist fragmentation of work held
the potential to expose workers to greater discipline and control, sustaining an
increased pace of ‘Taylorised’ work could require expensive and time-consuming
supervision of individual workers by teams of managers. At his new vehicle
production facility in Michigan, Henry Ford extended the logic of Taylor’s
principles by organising fragmented tasks around an assembly line. Not only was
work rendered more ‘simple’ and routine, but the pace at which it was performed
would now be determined by the discipline of working within a highly integrated
and automated production process.
The class content and political implications of Taylorism
and Fordism were clear. Their methods of work organisation were intended to
increase the subordination of relatively powerful groups of workers to capital
by enhancing managerial prerogative, intensifying work, rendering workers more
vulnerable to being replaced, and countering collectivism with competitive
individualism. Furthermore, Taylor argued that by making factory work more
simple and routine, and so less intellectually demanding, the application of his
ideas would contribute to the development of a class of workers "of smaller
calibre and attainments… of the type of the ox". For Taylor, and his fellow
thinkers, what was at stake was not just the productivity of labour, but the
ability of capitalism to undermine the political self-confidence and capacities
of the working class.
For much of the twentieth century it was manufacturing
industry that the managerial and political advocates of Taylorism and Fordism
tended to focus their attention on. However, in recent decades that focus has
widened to include many forms of white-collar work, particularly the work of
those employed in financial services such as banking and insurance and, more
recently, the work of civil and public servants. This raises a number of
important questions. Why, how and to what effect are Taylorist and Fordist
principles being pursued in many office workplaces today? Can the application of
these principles be stopped? What political alternative should those whose work
is threatened struggle for?
These are the questions that Joan Greenbaum attempts to
answer in her book, Windows on the Workplace. Greenbaum has three aims.
Firstly, to report the main trends in the re-organisation of office work in
post-war America, with a particular focus on how corporate management have used
information technology to deskill, devalue and intensify the work of many
thousands of office workers. Secondly, to critique ‘technological determinism’
and ‘technological utopianism’: the views, common across the popular media and
on the political right, that the course of history is determined by technology,
and that new technology will eventually deliver high-skill and high income jobs
for nearly everyone. And thirdly, to argue that it is possible to resist the
degradation of jobs and to struggle for an alternative way of living and
working.
The strongest parts of Greenbaum’s book are those that
detail the uneven and uncertain attempts by corporate managers in the post war
period to find ways of reducing the numbers, cost and workplace autonomy of
their office staff. While management experimented with new ways of dividing and
simplifying office work in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the end of post-war
growth in the 1970s that marked the beginning of more concerted attempts by many
corporations to develop radically new ways of reducing costs and increasing
productivity. And yet, far from being driven by technology, during the 1970s and
early-1980s new computing and communication technologies played a limited role
in these attempts. Many corporate managers were ambivalent about the ability of
such technologies to substantially increase output and profitability. In
particular, many technical systems were incompatible with each other, inhibiting
the dispersal of work within and between companies, and nearly all were too
crude to replicate the complex mental and manual tasks that millions of office
workers continued to perform.
It was not until the late-1980s that computing began to
render elemental changes to the organisation of office work on a significant
scale. The costs of hardware and software fell rapidly. For the first time
individual computer terminals began to appear on nearly every desktop.
Standardised and compatible software systems became more common. More available
and reliable satellite technologies facilitated the further integration of
systems, and the greater flow of money and information across and between
nations and continents. As a consequence, jobs, or pieces of jobs, have become
more mobile. The technical infrastructure now exists for some work to be
relocated across borders and continents to different countries. But, as
Greenbaum points out, the shift to ‘off shoring’ no longer affects only ‘simple’
jobs like processing data from paper onto computers. Recent years have seen
aspects of design, accounting and architectural work relocated from North
America to parts of Latin America and Asia.
For many workers, the impact of such technological changes
over the past two decades has been devastating. Since the early 1990s, thousands
of workers in sectors like banking and insurance have lost their jobs. Where
jobs have remained in place, the threat of being replaced by computers, or of
having their jobs moved to another country, has often been used by managers to
cultivate an atmosphere of insecurity, uncertainty and fear among workers. Some
jobs, like those relating to customer service, have been reorganised into call
centres, with thousands of workers having almost every minute of their working
day measured and monitored by computerised ‘management information systems’.
Many call centres stand as a stark example of how office technologies have been
used to apply Taylorist and Fordist principles to office work. Call centre work
often has its origins in jobs where workers previously dealt with telephone
calls in addition to a range of other tasks. Following Taylor, in order to
increase productivity these jobs are fragmented, and call-related work is
separated out and placed into a call centre. Following Ford, in order to ensure
that workers then perform the maximum amount of work, automated systems feed
them a continuous ‘assembly line’ of calls.
In short, far from delivering a high-skill, high-wage and
high-fulfilment workplace, in many offices new computing and information
technologies have resulted in fewer workers doing more work, often for lower pay
than their predecessors, and in a context where many fear for their future. In
opposition to technological determinist interpretations of change, Greenbaum’s
account of the degradation and intensification of office work in post-war
America makes clear that what has driven these processes has not been
‘technology’, but the imperative in all capitalist economies to increase
profitability by cutting costs and increasing productivity. Developing new
technology is one means of attempting to achieve these aims, but is not the
origin of the imperative to do so. Within capitalism the primary imperative is
to maximise profit, and the source of profit lies not in machinery, but in how
labour power is organised and exploited.
While Greenbaum’s account of workplace change contributes to
the critique of technological determinism, her critique remains underdeveloped.
From a Marxist perspective, there is more to be said about and against
technological determinism than pointing out that technological change is the
product of capitalist accumulation rather than its cause. There remains the
question of why many people, not all of them capitalists and senior
corporate managers, regard technology as the primary source of social and
economic change.
The explanation for the prevalence of technological
determinist ideas under capitalism can be found in Marx’s critique of bourgeois
economics. A defining assumption of capitalist economic theory, then as now, is
that the exchange of wages for labour power is one of equivalence. As Marx put
it: "All labour appears as paid labour". It follows that if labour is fully
rewarded for its contribution to production, then profit must originate not from
workers, but from other people (such as capitalists) or from ‘things’ (such as
technology). However, Marx argued that the exchange of wages for labour power
was far from being an exchange of equivalents. Once employed, the capitalist or
corporate manager, partly by means of applying Taylorist and Fordist methods of
work organisation, seeks to extract value from workers in excess of that
embodied in their wages. Ultimately, this surplus assumes the form of money and
profit, and it is the pursuit and accumulation of both that drives the
reproduction and crises of capitalism. Therefore, the power of capital is
fundamentally nothing more than the productive power of collective labour
abstracted from workers and presented back to them in the form of ‘things’, such
as money, machinery and technology. However, because the relationship between
the productive power of collective labour and that of capital is not an
immediate and obvious one, to many it appears that they are entirely distinct,
and that the latter does or should dominate the former. According to Marx:
"The transposition of the social productivity of labour into
the material attributes of capital is so firmly entrenched in people’s minds
that the advantages of machinery, the use of science, invention, etc are
necessarily conceived in its alienated form, so that all these things
are deemed to be the attributes of capital".
Bourgeois political economy takes the ‘alienated forms’ of
social labour for granted, so assuming that the social power objects exert under
capitalism is founded in their material properties. However, material objects,
such as new technology, only exert power over people when inserted within
historically specific social relations of production. Under capitalism, it is
the separation of workers from the means of production that makes possible the
commodification and exploitation of labour power, and the transference of their
productive power to others and to objects in the form of surplus value.
The view that historical development is ultimately driven by
technology is therefore a specific ideological product of capitalism, founded in
the failure to distinguish between concrete and value-producing labour. However,
once this distinction is made, certain political conclusions logically follow.
If the power of technology to degrade, deskill and devalue work under capitalism
has its foundations in the separation of labour from the means of production and
subsistence, then the struggle against the negative consequences of technology
must necessarily form part of a broader struggle against that separation. Only
by overthrowing capitalism, and then socialising production, does it become
possible to organise production in democratic and socially conscious ways that
reduce the burden of work, allow for the more flexible and fulfilling design and
allocation of jobs, and distribute the aggregate product of labour in accordance
with the democratically expressed wishes of society rather than the dictatorship
of private profit.
For Marx, the need for the overthrow of capitalism and its
replacement with socialism is a need that flows logically and unavoidably from
his analysis of capital. But Greenbaum stops short of drawing such clear
political conclusions. Despite asserting that the processes and trends she
identifies have their foundation in the broader system-wide logic of capitalism,
she avoids any mention of the need to overthrow capitalism, or of the
desirability of socialism. Instead, she calls for "new forms of organisation"
that should operate "within a framework that rebalances the power of workers
against the growing power of employers".
In support of these calls, Greenbaum makes vague references
to already existing ‘alternatives’ in Europe. The implication is that the
post-war traditions of social corporatism and dialogue in parts of Europe should
be a model for the US labour movement. Yet it is telling that she does not
examine recent trends in the restructuring of work and employment across Europe
in any detail. If she had done, then it would have been difficult to present the
situation in Europe as much of an ‘alternative’.
In the UK, for example, recent research has shown that since
the 1980s not only has the work of many become much more intense and stressful,
but the extent of ‘task discretion’ (the degree of initiative that workers can
exercise over their immediate work tasks) has decreased significantly in both
private and public sector workplaces.
The increasing intensification of labour, combined with
decreasing workplace autonomy, suggests that aspects of Taylorist and Fordist
methods of work organisation are becoming increasingly common within UK
workplaces. In Germany, the oft cited home of social partnership, unemployment
is now in excess of five million, with Chancellor Schroder intent on cutting
unemployment benefits, reducing the availability of health services, and
changing the law to make it easier for employers to make workers redundant.
Against this background, Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank, has recently
announced that a total of 6,400 jobs will be cut, with a further 1,200 jobs
relocated to low wage countries. In recent years many more thousands of jobs
have been lost in German banks such as Commerzbank, Dresdner Bank and
Hypovereinsbank. Such attacks on the level, value and location of employment are
becoming increasingly common across Europe.
Greenbaum’s invocation of Europe as a progressive
alternative to the situation confronting millions of US workers is misinformed
and politically misleading. This is a pity. Had she combined her useful account
of how office work is being restructured with a clear vision of a meaningful
political alternative to the forces that are driving this restructuring, her
book may have helped to rally some of the workers and students who will read it
to socialist politics. By failing to do so she is effectively urging workers to
struggle against the negative impacts of technology while leaving the social
relations that endow these technologies with their capitalistic force and logic
intact. That would be a deeply unequal fight. The millions of office workers
around the world currently facing the deskilling, intensification and relocation
of their work deserve better.
Windows on the Workplace is available from
Socialist Books
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