Читать книгу Changing Contours of Work - Stephen Sweet - Страница 28

It is generally agreed that economic activity in the old economy centered on the production of manufactured goods (e.g., automobiles, steel, chemicals, appliances) in large quantities for mass markets. The Ford Model T is the classic example of what the American manufacturing economy produced—an affordable and highly standardized car, mass-produced by American workers in a central factory location (Chandler 1990). Coordinating hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of workers at a single location meant that employers such as Henry Ford had to develop bureaucratic management systems, complete with rigid job definitions, rules of conduct, and productivity expectations (Edwards 1979).

The dominant managerial approach of the time was to follow the practices of scientific management, which encouraged the replacement of skilled workers with cheaper, more dispensable low-skill workers, while removing discretion from the shop floor and placing it in the hands of management (Braverman 1974). Finding ways to enhance productivity through job simplification, replacing people with technology, and improving managerial control over what was happening in the workplace were all central to this approach. The assembly line epitomized this philosophy, a combination of technology and organization that harnessed workers to labor at repetitive, simple tasks. To appreciate how this affected the performance of work, consider the difference between making automobiles using highly skilled workers (as many of the first automobiles were made) and the assembly line methods pioneered by Henry Ford. Instead of relying on a skilled (and hard to replace) craft worker who controlled how the work was done, the assembly line created jobs that required very little training, involved relatively simple repetitive operations, and dictated to the worker how the job should be performed. Perhaps most importantly, the worker lost control over the pace of work, as the assembly line pushed work forward at a speed primarily determined by management. The result was the creation of legions of deskilled jobs, the dissolution of many craft skills, and a decline in the worker’s ability to control the conditions and rewards of work.

This approach was enormously successful and formed the basis for the growth of the giant American manufacturing enterprises (e.g., Ford, General Motors, U.S. Steel) that dominated the American economic landscape and symbolized American economic power worldwide. This approach also fostered distrust and hostility between workers and their bosses, who developed an “us versus them” mentality, in which each side saw the other as having interests fundamentally opposed to its own. Thus, as managers tried various tricks to speed up work, those laboring on the front lines developed alternate approaches to try to restrict production (Burawoy 1979, Edwards 1979).

If manufacturing is in decline, is mass production? To address this question, consider work as it is performed in different “megasectors”—broad groupings of different types of economic activity. Each of these sectors makes a distinct contribution to the economy—in extracting resources, in processing resources, in delivering goods, and in providing services.² The trends for employment in these sectors are represented in Exhibit 2.2, which shows the growing importance of service sector work, as well as the proportions of the labor force employed in other industries that seem (on the surface) to have helped society progress beyond mass production. However, consideration of many of the jobs within each of these sectors highlights how the typical strategies for organizing work in the manufacturing-based economy have been exported to other sectors and shape how work is performed outside manufacturing.

For most of human existence, most workers engaged in the extraction of raw materials—working in the areas of farming, fishing, forestry, or mining. But by the early twentieth century, these workers composed only a relatively small segment of the U.S. workforce. Those few who remain on farms today perform work that bears little resemblance to the pastoral ideals of the family farm. Rather, most farming occurs as part of agribusiness, in which the methods of mass production have been applied to the raising of livestock, poultry, and produce (Schlosser 2005). The extension of mass production into farm work has required some farmers to learn to use advanced technologies to manage production. However, it also has contributed to the creation of a divided opportunity structure that limits prospects for workers (such as migrant farm laborers) to grow and advance. Mining remains an intensely physical activity. Underground mining uses single-purpose machinery (such as “continuous miners”) to grind the earth and place ore on conveyors. These technologies operate as assembly lines that run in reverse. Other forms of mining, such as strip mining (or even mountaintop removal, in which whole mountains are demolished and the ore removed in the process), rely on heavy equipment and systematic processing of materials and operate on a scale that could only be characterized as “mass” production. All newer mining technologies require the application of greater skills than the older manual operations, but they also substitute massive equipment and sophisticated technology for human labor. This is one enduring persistent feature of the old economy, the drive to improve productivity by replacing labor through the use of complex technologies and managerial innovations. It also operates on the basis of massive scale implementation, indicating that mass production is not in decline.

Exhibit 2.2 Trends in Employment in Megasectors: United States, 1940–2017

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The processing megasector focuses on the refinement of raw materials into finished goods, the intent of manufacturing and construction enterprises. As Exhibit 2.2 shows, processing work has declined significantly in the United States, which seems to support the “end of mass production” thesis. Yet, if we look at work within these sectors, mass production techniques have not been eliminated. It is true that there have been significant changes in this sector. For example, the traditional giant steel mill of the past has given way to smaller, more flexible “mini-mills” that produce smaller runs of more specialized steel products. But contemporary factories are still mass-producing consumer goods. And in certain parts of this sector, most notably the building trades, modern practices have made production more reliant on the use of standardized materials. Many homes are “prefabricated” in construction factories and simply assembled on site. Even the construction of “custom” homes (the largest of which are pejoratively termed “McMansions”) depends heavily on cookie-cutter approaches to design and assembly. In short, flexible and custom production processes have taken hold in some areas, but they are being introduced in concert with a continued reliance on elements of mass production, not simply replacing them.

The delivery megasector (which includes transportation, wholesale trade, retail trade, and utilities) is one of the most visible and important elements of the new economy, as just-in-time production methods rely on sophisticated systems to ensure that parts and materials arrive just when they are needed and as consumers increasingly demand immediate delivery of products they purchase online. Although associated in most people’s minds with the new economy, this megasector, too, relies heavily on mass production techniques. For example, United Parcel Service (UPS) and Walmart (the world’s largest private employer) use vast conveyor belt systems to sort and funnel parcels for delivery. Their successes are not built on unique products or customized services; rather, they are based on the application of mass production distribution techniques built with high technology and advanced accounting systems. And then there is Amazon, whose “fulfillment centers” now employ huge numbers of workers across the globe ensuring that online orders reach their destinations promptly and accurately. Amazon’s employment practices have been the subject of increasing journalistic scrutiny in the past few years, scrutiny that has revealed a twenty-first-century workplace that has married modern computer technology to very familiar, twentieth-century ways of organizing work. Here’s how one observer described it:

Amazon’s shop-floor processes are an extreme variant of Taylorism that Frederick Winslow Taylor himself, a near century after his death, would have no trouble recognizing. With this twenty-first-century Taylorism, management experts, scientific managers, take the basic workplace tasks at Amazon, such as the movement, shelving, and packaging of goods, and break down these tasks into their subtasks, usually measured in seconds; then rely on time and motion studies to find the fastest way to perform each subtask; and then reassemble the subtasks and make this “one best way” the process that employees must follow. (Head 2014)

Jobs like these are not skilled or challenging tasks that lead to career advancement; they are the type of routine work that one pursues in order to earn a paycheck.

Finally, within the services megasector, which includes a wide array of enterprises—including leisure services, restaurants, hotels, real estate, financial, and public administration—mass production methods also can be found, often in highly developed, innovative forms. This sector includes some enterprises that do not rely on mass production—there are many relatively small enterprises in this part of the economy, such as bed and breakfast establishments, food trucks, and craft breweries. Businesses such as high-end restaurants rely on workers’ skills to produce a “unique” product for the consumer. However, this sector also contains many highly standardized operations that use the techniques of mass production to good effect. Each McDonald’s, for instance, is little more than a small factory, composed of deskilled jobs designed to execute production of a limited array of standardized goods. Every aspect of the process, including the dispensing of condiments, the design of the stores, and the way in which customers are greeted, has been standardized so that the experience of eating (or working) in a McDonald’s is essentially the same wherever it is located. Even housecleaning teams are organized to work according to Taylorized methods, and the goals remain the same—to extract the maximum effort from each individual and minimize their chances of relaxing on the job (Ehrenreich 2001, Ritzer 2011).

In sum, there is a tendency to assume that the declining importance of manufacturing in the U.S. economy means that mass production is on the wane. It is not. Indeed, what has happened is that mass production techniques have been widely integrated into other sectors of the economy, including the rapidly growing service sector. Many of the key elements of traditional mass production, including the use of technology to pace work, careful design of routine work tasks, careful matching of workers to work tasks, and the use of insecurity and performance pressures to motivate workers, now characterize types of work that, in the past, were rarely organized in this way. It can be argued, in fact, that the ideas pioneered by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford have become more, not less, influential in the contemporary “postindustrial” economy.

To be sure, new technologies and production methods have required an expansion in certain worker skills and transformed the ways in which work is performed. However, those same machines and methods also have replaced many workers, both in manufacturing and elsewhere, and the persistence and spread of mass production methods cannot be ignored. As discussed next, the reality is that the new economy relies on both high-skill and low-skill work, and it uses both mass production techniques and new flexibly specialized systems to produce goods and services.