Lately I've been reading The Fall of the House of Labor, a history of trade unionism and labor conditions in America from 1865 to 1925, and was struck by something relevant to this discussion, particularly regarding modern corporate life.
One of the accounts the author gives in the first pages of the book is of a small union of iron workers during a recession who were holding a meeting to discuss a contract with an iron mill (the minutes taken of the meeting provided the basis for the historian's account). The union had been offered a rate of pay by a mill owner per ton of iron rolled, and the purpose of the meeting was to discuss how this rate of pay per ton would be divided among the workers according to their differing positions. They started by each naming their price, and ultimately some positions were assigned a rate nearly four times what others were to earn, but in the end they worked out their disputes and agreed to accept the contract (and took special care that everybody did agree so that the vote should be unanimous).
Immediately on reading this, I was practically dumbstruck by the contrast between this way of doing things compared to employment today. This specific sort of arrangement wasn't particularly common, and the book goes on to detail the many different arrangements that existed across industries for the employment of skilled labor, but the idea of having a working life of this character in which issues were worked out among your co-workers (held together by common interest and solidarity) seems like a romantic fantasy compared to how all aspects of work today are just imposed by the employer.
Later in the book the author begins to discuss the development of a current among industrialists called "scientific management", which I think offers the clearest break between the first phase of industrial capitalism and the modern working conditions we labor under in modern corporate capitalism. Skilled workers of the type described above would usually work with sometimes great autonomy in a group, performing a variety of tasks and coordinating together to produce a commodity through the use of the owner's capital. The "skill" was not only experience and physical competence, but also knowledge of the production process and the ability to effectively exercise their own judgement independently of oversight. This skill and group coordination remained indispensable to many production processes through the early industrial revolution (even as labor-reducing machines had displaced the traditional mode of production by independent craftsmen) and with it came a greater ability for those workers to bargain for wages and the conditions of their employment. "Scientific management" was developed as a way of essentially appropriating that knowledge and experience of the workers, through the introduction of a new division of labor and organization that broke previously skilled complex tasks with overlapping participants into much simpler repetitive tasks that were directed instead by a management themselves familiar with the process (this sometimes required the creation of new machines, but oftentimes not).
While more skilled and autonomously coordinated groups of workers were more likely to successfully resist attempts by employers to cut pay or impose harsher working conditions (whether they belonged to a union or not), replacing them with unskilled labor that could not only be paid less but could be controlled by a management class aligned with the owners offered obvious potential benefits in cutting costs and worker assertiveness (tendency to strike and demand better working conditions). However, one of the new costs (or rather an existing cost that was exacerbated) that emerged as owners reorganized according to this model was that of turnover. Destroying worker autonomy and creating positions where workers perform the same repetitive task hour after hour day after day resulted in a much greater propensity for workers to skip work or quit. In manufacturing this irregularity creating an assortment of costs, not just including the costs of finding and hiring new workers, but also diminished quantity and quality of work that came from continuously replacing and training inexperienced workers and the additional difficulties caused when workers fail to show up and gaps are created in the "line". These costs were not only more frequently incurred per person, they were actually greater per person, as a skilled worker could usually be easily replaced by another skilled worker (as a class their available employment was constantly being whittled down and the traditional barriers to reaching that status eroded).
One of the ways employers who employed "scientific management" had to lower turnover was to offer higher pay and a shorter workday; Ford famously offered "profit sharing" (relevantly only to workers who stayed at least 6 months) and an eight hour work day before it was commonplace. The drivel one can expect to hear when Ford's praises are sung in a typical school classroom is that he did this so that his workers could afford to buy the cars that he was making, or out of some prototypical "enlightened self-interest", but naturally it is never mentioned that he had a 416% turnover rate from October 1912-13 and a chronically high rate of worker truancy. The work was so mind-numbing, soul-crushing, physically fatiguing, and just generally unpleasant not just in famous cases like Ford's factories but in general under this new form of "scientific management" (where a worker may have 4-8 bosses breathing down their neck, have their actions timed and productivity constantly accessed, and be reduced to something called by Henry George as "less than animal") that these wage increases above the going rate and reduction in the workday were one of the only means available of countering the mounting turnover and truancy costs.
So the improvement in the general material condition of the (unskilled) working class that accompanied the transformation into modern corporate capitalism was at least in part due to the inability for employers to entice workers to such a miserable mode of production without greater compensation above subsistence and the old prevailing rates.
This form of management of course went on conquer nearly every industry, and not just those of an explicitly corporate character. In the course of time, employers have gotten better at lowering turnover and mitigating its effects (i.e. through managing "human resources") while expanding the management structure and further compartmentalizing tasks at all levels. Even non-menial tasks still performed by skilled or educated workers (or the lower managers themselves) are by rule today mindless drudgery, and even though few escapes from this system exist a level of turnover is created simply by people seeking a change of scenery from one form of toil to another. Where possible, employers have also gotten better at shifting the costs of turnover, retraining, and unemployment on either the workers or society at large. Consider for example how the troublesome behaviors of a habitually drunken European ex-peasant freshly arrived in America would conflict with the regime of an assembly line, or how useful our school system proves in breaking children of independent tendencies before their future lives of perpetual subordination.
But what I think is particularly relevant today, what I think helps partially explain that convergence of factors that is keeping wages low and misery high in our modern apogee of corporate capitalism, is that our "advancement" into a service economy has reduced the effect turnover has on our prevailing industries and the prevailing wage rate. Generally in a service gig, someone failing to show up (or the perpetual staff shortages most shops operate under) doesn't directly impinge profits to such a degree that employers find it necessary to offer higher compensation; the quality of service enjoyed by the customer might suffer to some minor degree, which has some intangible indirect effect on profits, but generally a labor shortage in the workplace is only paid for by inflicting even greater misery on those who remain (and without unions, a worker's misery isn't worth much). Whereas in manufacturing, there are all sorts of immediate complications that make the absence of truant workers or a shortage of labor a serious problem, and so tolerable hours and a decent wage have their own rewards.
It's not a comprehensive explanation of our modern condition and trends, certainly, but it's an interesting angle that I had not considered previously and seems understated (despite how often we hear about high turnover, low wages, and low job satisfaction today).
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Topic: MSH Mantles Karl Marx -OR- The Crisis Discussion And Essay Thread (Read 7907 times)