Uncovering the Hidden History of the American Workplace

by Jeremy Brecher, originally published in Review of Radical Political Economics, 1978, vol. 10, issue 4, 1-23.

ABSTRACT: The first part of this report outlines our framework for developing a model of work relations activity. Part II traces an important part of work rela­ tions history, showing the destruction of the 19th century pattern of c!aft worker control of industrial production, and its replacement by managerial control_, thereby setting the stage for the study of more current forms of workplace organi­ zation. Part III examines how management has used its power over the structure of the work process as a means for controlling both the workplace and workers. It outlines the strategies management has developed to increase its control over this process. Part IV deals, conversely, with the formal and informal ways that workers have exercised counter-power over their lives at the workplace. It shows worker strategies for establishing and retaining control over their activities on the job. Part V presents a few concluding reflections on the political significance of work relations research.
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INTRODUCTION

Traditionally, the analysis of work in American society has been divided into two quite separate sub­ jects. On the one hand, there has been the study of work as a process of production; this has been exam­ ined primarily as a question of changes in technology and methods for achieving productive efficiency. On the other hand, there has been the study of “industrial

*The Work Relations Group is a group of individuals who meet several times a year to discuss each other’s research, ideas, and acti­ vities, as well as other material bearing on work relations.
The W.R.G. developed from a series of workshops at the Institute
for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. which brought together an as­ sortment of labor educators, economists, historians, and activists. As participants developed a sense of shared interests, esprit, self-and­ mutual-discipline, and commitment to each other, they decided to re­ organize as a self-constituted group for exchange of ideas and help on each other’s research and political activities.
While the primary activity of the W.R.G. has been research, its pri­ mary purpose is not academic. Rather, the activity of the group is based on a shared commitment to the effort of working people to in­ crease their power over their conditions of life.
The W.R.G. has attempted a continuous synthesizing process, as­ similating materials on work relations from a variety of sources, free from pressures to formulate or adhere to a “line,” yet attempting to provide mutual support and bring out common elements and implica­ tions in each other’s work. A wide range of materials have been pres­ ented to the group, both by members and by outside speakers.
Over time, the group has evolved toward a shared understanding of the issues of work relations and their implications. While each sen­ tence of this survey does not represent complete consensus, the docu­ ment as a whole reflects the views of the group.
The current members of the W.R.G. are Rick Engler, Joan Green­ baum, Laird Cummings, Keith Dix, Kathy Stone, Stan Weir, David Noble, Peter Rachleff, Jim Weeks, Susan Reverby, Jeremy Brecher.

relations,” “labor relations,” or the “sociology of oc­ cupations,” which has focused on the interaction of individuals, groups and organizations in the work­ place, rather than on work itself. During the first half of the 1970’s, the barrier between the two has been crashed; the result has been the birth of a new ap­ proach to the history of work.*

Rick Simon, and Robb Burlage. Former members include Stanley Aronowitz, Len Rodberg, and Ellen Hall.
We would like to thank those who have read and commented on previous drafts of this paper, including David Montgomery, Susan Benson, Ronald Schatz, Maurine Greenwald, and the RRPE re­ viewers. They are in no way responsible for any faults of fact or inter­ pretation. Jill Cutler helped edit the manuscript and prepare the foot­ notes.
Much of the material synthesized in this paper is drawn directly from other work. Thus, a larger than usual debt should be acknow­ ledged to those whose work is cited in the footnotes.
This paper was completed in 1977 and does not attempt to cover material written since that time.
*Harry Braverman, one of the major influences on the new approach, deals with this question somewhat differently. He makes a sharp distinction between the redesign of work processes by scientific management and the labor policies instituted by personnel manage­ ment. This distinction, and his emphasis on the former, is logical, given his emphasis on the labor process itself and his isolation of it from workers’ action. If, however, it is allowed that workers’ own acti­ vity is one of the elements affecting management policy, including its design of work, the distinction becomes less clear. The issue becomes less one of “job degradation” alone than one of power, of which “de­ gradation” is one aspect. All the tactics used by management to pre­ vent worker organization which might interfere with “management’s right to manage” become less easily sorted into “production process” and “non-production process” categories; nor can the latter be con­ sidered relatively unimportant.

Framework
A new approach or area of research is unlikely to possess a fully developed theoretical model. The new approach to work relations is so far limited to a general approach or paradigm, an accumulating body of em­ pirical studies, and a body of so-far fruitful hunches. The absence of an explicit and accepted theoretical model opens the door to investigation of a large number of potentially significant aspects of the sub­ ject. But it also means that each empirical study is likely to ask different questions and look for different kinds of answers. This has indeed been the case with this new approach to work relations; the result has been a series of studies dealing with similar subject matter within a shared framework, but often addressed to different questions.
Over time, we can hope that the most fruitful of these approaches can be molded into a consistent theory and a more comprehensive and complete para­ digm. At present, however, this overview report re­ flects the research as it has developed, presenting the different kinds of work being done, without at­ tempting the not-yet possible task of integrating it into an adequate theory.
Most of this research has been done within the generai”framework of a Marxian view of labor. Labor is

even more labor-power, produce more surplus-value, and so on. Capitalist production means the reproduc­ tion of capitalist social relations on an expanded scale.
This basic goal guides all aspects of the produc­ tion process under capitalism. On the one hand, effi­ ciency in providing use-values is an essential means to increasing the rate of labor productivity and thereby the rate of surplus-value. On the other hand, manage­ ment control of the actual activity of workers – how and how much they work – is equally essential for the purpose of producing surplus-value and reproducing the conditions necessary for its continuing produc­ tion.*
There are two levels at which the dynamics of capital accumulation shape the concrete structure of work. The first level is the totality of social relations among producers, reflected in fetishized form in the exchange of money and commodities in the market. These relationships obviously impinge on the work­ place itself, in particular through a) the nature of the social consumption for which production takes place,
b) the competitive relations among different capital­ ists, c) the drive for and limitations to accumulation within the total economy, and d) the conditions and availability of labor-power. An individual firm experi­ ences these as “conditions of the market,” though in fact they reflect the totality of existing social relation­
ships as manifested in the market.

seen as the means by which human beings in any so­

ciety produce use-values, products which meet indi­ vidual and social needs and wants. In market societies, however, a great proportion of work is conducted not to meet the immediate needs of the producers but for exchange in the market. In capitalist societies, further­ more, the products of labor are owned and exchanged not by the workers who produce them, but rather by the owners of wealth (commodities and money) who employed these workers. The basis of capitalist pro­ duction, then, is the control of the time and productive capacities of workers by possessors of capital.
When employers are able to make workers pro­ duce more than they are paid for their labor-power, a surplus-value is produced which belongs to the em­ ployers. This may be realized in the market as one or another employer’s profit. Such profit can be accumu­ lated to allow expansion of the production which is under the capitalist’s control. Such accumulation is the goal of production under capitalism, and without it no firm can long survive the competition of the market. In its essence, this accumulation is the accumulation of the means for controlling the productive activity of workers.
Within such a framework, “efficiency” in pro­
ducing use values is clearly not the fundamental goal of capitalist production. Rather, its goal is the produc­ tion and realization of surplus-value, thereby the ac­ cumulation of capital, and thereby its ability to control

*We have emphasized the unity of the goal of capitalist production in order to avoid some of the difficulties that arise from attempting to distinguish “technical efficiency” and “control” either theoretically or empirically. These are not autonomous goals of capitalist production, but rather means (which may or may not conflict) to a common goal. (See David Gordon “Capitalist Efficiency and Socialist Efficiency” Monthly Review, July-August, 1976 Vol. 28, No. 3 for a somewhat different formulation of this problem.)
A good deal of confusion has arisen among those studying work relations as a result of failing to distinguish two different ways in which the word “control” has been used. One meaning – let us refer to it as “control one” is similar to the concept of power. Person A has more “control” over person B to the extent that A is able to make B act in accord with A’s wishes, regardless of B’s wishes.
The other meaning – let us designate it “control two” means some­ thing like “close supervision” or “absence of autonomy”. A exercises more “control” over B to the extent that A makes more decisions about the particular actions of B.
“Control one” and “control two” often coincide, but they need not always do so. The so-called “autonomous craftsman” typical of early capitalist industry, for example, exercized a considerable amount of “control two” over the details of his work, and the employer exercized little “control two” over him. However, the craftsman still worked under the “control one” of the employer, i.e. he fulfilled the em­ ployer’s wish to have surplus-value produced for him by the effort of others. In this sense, capitalism is the “control one” of workers by capitalists.
The difference between the two forms of control corresponds to Marx’s distinction between the formal and the real domination of labor by capital. The point made in this note is that the two terms are distinct. “Formal” domination can exist without “real” domination, and “real” domination, while generally introduced to strengthen “for­ mal” domination, need not necessarily do so.

The second level has to do with the actual produc­ tion process within the firm. Here we find a technical organization of human activity which appears to be for the purpose of producing use-values, but which is actually organized for the purpose of producing sur­ plus-value. Marx traces the development of the modern workplace in terms of the effort to increase “relative surplus-value” by speeding, reorganizing, and mech­ anizing production in order to increase labor produc­ tivity. Both these levels must be explored to fully un­ derstand the impact of the capitalist system on the nat­ ure of work.*

Implications of Worker Resistance
Workers may appear to management to be, but are not in fact, just a commodity which can be purchased by employers and used like any other. Workers remain human beings who are able to pursue their own needs, interests, and desires. What appears to employers as the maximization of surplus-value is, to workers, the maximization of their exploitation. Therefore, there is a conflict of interest at the heart of capitalist pro­ duction. Historically, workers have acted in a variety of ways designed to reduce the control exercised over them by employers and establish some degree of counter-power of their own. Employers have replied with a series of moves designed to weaken this re­ sistence and reassert their own dominion. The organi­ zation of modern work simply cannot be understood without reference to the role of worker resistance and employer efforts to counter it; as Daniel Nelson has written, “labor unrest and union activity were more likely to provoke sweeping changes in factory manage­ ment than almost anything else.,..,.. The interaction between the purposes and activities of workers and employers shapes the actual structure of work and con­ stitutes the hidden history of the workplace.

• A large proportion of work in modern society takes place in the non-profit sector of the economy, both governmental and non­ governmental. While the dynamics operating in these sectors may in many instances vary from those in capitalist enterprises, they are still shaped by their relationship to the totality of social relationships in a capitalist economy, and particularly by the fact that they must be paid for out of the common pool of surplus-value.
**Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), p. 88. In his study, subtitled “Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880-1920,” however, Nel­ son largely ignores the role of worker response, stating that, “though factories were often scenes of strikes and labor turmoil in the late nine­ teenth century, the ‘labor problem’ was more closely associated with the railroad and mining industries and therefore is not treated in detail here.” pp. 184-5. He maintains that, in the face of scientific manage­ ment, “the workers were relatively docile.” p. 76. The result is a study which effectively demonstrates that modern management established not just technical control over production but also social control over workers; and yet which portrays this process as generally smooth and unobstructed by workers, rather than one of massive social conflict.

This framework goes against the grain of two of the dominant orthodoxies in the study of work. These are what might be called “technological determinism” and”ideological determinism”.
The most common contemporary view of work may well be a “technological determinism” which views the labor process as determined by the nature of “machine technology” or “industrial society”. This as­ sumption has marked both the academic and the Marx­ ist traditions. Within the Marxist tradition some inter­ pret this to mean that the forces of production – which this view narrowly defines as humanity’s technical capacity to control nature* – determine the social re­ lations of production. When technology changes, such social patterns as the class structure are bound to follow suit. This approach was summed up in the aphorism that “The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord, the steam mill society with the indus­ trial capitalist.”1
Our approach, in stressing the impact of social relations on the production process itself, is, we be­ lieve, much closer to Marx’ analysis of machine pro­ duction within capitalism, given in Volume I of Capital, where, as Stanley Aronowitz has suggested,
At first reading, Marx’ relentless description of the way in which machinery begins to dominate the workers and replace them as the core of the production process seems to rely on technolog­ ical forces. But on closer inspection, it is clear that Marx understands the introduction of machinery in terms of the degradation and the suppression of labor by the capitalist.2
The theory of technological determinism has always been open to serious question for the reason that particular human beings have to introduce the technology. Many technologies throughout history have languished unused because those with the power to introduce them have not considered it desirable to do so. Over the past hundred years, theories of technolog­ ical determinism have become dubious for an addi­ tional reason. Most new technology today emerges from deliberate research guided by deliberately set objectives. The arrival of a new technology is primar­ ily the result of a decision to develop it, rather than of chance discoveries. Thus, specific decisions made by

*For Marx, the “forces of production” are by no means limited to instruments of production, tools, machines, and other inventions of various sorts. On the contrary, as Marx states in The German Ideol­ ogy, “A certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of cooperation, or social stage, and this mode of cooperation is itself a productive force … the multitude of productive forces … determines the nature of society … ” (“German Ideology”, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964, p. 41.) For a further discussion of this point, see Karl Marx by Karl Korsch. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963.

specific social groups make technology even less of an independent variable in shaping the work process than it was in the past.
Work relations research establishes not only that machine and other technologies often shape work, but also that they are deliberately designed to do so. They are themselves a means by which some people exercise power over the labor of others.
A second orthodoxy might be called ideological determinism. One version of this view, rooted in the work of Max Weber, treats the “rationalization” of work as part of the general development of history leading toward even greater “bureaucratization” or “formal rationality” in all spheres of life. A variant, stemming in part from Durkheim, views ever-greater differentiation of social function as the general ten­ dency of modern life, of which the subdivision of jobs is simply an expression. Among historians, a related tendency sees the transformation of work in the early 20th century as a result of ideologies of “scientific management”, “rationalization”, or “efficiency” which were primarily aspects of the general drive for social reform and reorganization of society of the era. This approach has tried to explain corporate labor pol­ icies on the basis of such general ideas or philosophies. However, as Ronald Schatz has emphasized on the basis of his study of the electrical industry:
It is not sufficient to look… only at the ideas of corporate leaders and at the corporation side of the worker-company relationship. One must also look at the activities of workers and at the eco­ nomic situation in which corporate managers find themselves. Otherwise, it is not possible to explain why a company adopts a particular labor policy or why companies change their policies with alacrity.3

While ideological factors have unquestionably played a role in the evolution of work structures, they cannot be understood apart from the historical con­ texts in which they arise.
At the core of work relations studies has been a re­ search methodology which has examined in detail the actual evolution of both the technical and social as­ pects of work. Much of the evidence for these studies has come from management journals and other man­ agement literature. It is not always evident how much these sources describe the reality of work, how much one or another management ideology or public rela­ tions objective. While the latter are of some interest in their own right, the main thrust of the new approach has been to try to uncover what actually went on at work. For this purpose, management literature has to be interpreted critically, and combined with observers’ descriptions, interviews and accounts by workers in

the industry, union literature, government and aca­ demic studies, statistical data, and reports on actual events, to construct valid accounts of the moves and countermoves of various social groups, as well as the motives that lay behind them.

Limitations of This Report
This report represents a preliminary attempt to present an overview of the new approach. As such, it is subject to several limitations.
1. Scope: The scope of this report is limited in a number of ways. First, it is limited to the United States. Second, it is limited to recent research, with only occas­ ional reference to classic studies of the past. Third, it concentrates on material produced by, presented to, or discussed or circulated in The Work Relations Work­ shops. While participants in the Workshops attempted to spread a wide net in searching for material relevant to their concerns, no doubt much published and especi­ ally unpublished material has escaped our attention. Finally, much material included in earlier drafts, in particular discussions differentiating the experience of different racial, sexual, and other groups, has been ex­ cized due to limitations of space.
2. Generalization: One of the major problems ir… any new area of research is to identify the most impor­ tant generalizations, discover their limits, and isolate the distinctions among different realms to which dif­ ferent sets of generalizations apply. The researnh problem is to discover and explain regularities and dif­ ferences among jobs and work events. In the study of work relations, this process is still in its early stages. The task is made more difficult by the uneven develop­ ment of the capitalist workplace, whose social irration­ ality nearly defies rational description. We know, for example, that the greatest uniformity among work­ places is likely to occur where corporate consolidation has been more extensive. In the telephone industry, for example, the Bell System sets fairly uniform policies for hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the country. At the opposite extreme, at least until re­ cently, were hospitals, which were usually fairly small, quite independent, and not generally disciplined by market forces. Unfortunately, however, such models of the range of uniformity for particular phenomena are all too few. In most cases in this report, we have simply suggested categories and then given examples, without being able to define how generally any given pattern applies. A crucial task for future research is to discover where each pattern prevails.
3. Lack of Chronological Structure: An historical account of an industry allows a portrayal of the back and forth between workers and employers over a per-

iod of time.”” A study of a given period can capture the elements which uniquely characterize that time. A comparative report like this one lacks both these vir-

tues of chronological organization. What it does allow is the identification of certain repeated patterns in dif­ ferent industries and periods.

II. ESTABLISHING EMPLOYER CONTROL OVER PRODUCTION

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a mas­ sive transformation of the organization of American business. A process of centralization and concentra­ tion on a vast scale left most industries dominated by a handful of large corporations. These firms, with their large markets and capital resources, were marked by production on a rapidly-growing scale. Over a few decades, the concept of a “large factory” changed from one employing twenty workers to one employing twenty thousand.
Corporate production initially proceded on the basis of the craft system; but eventually employers came to view craft workers’ power as an impediment to their objectives, while the expanded scale of the new corporations gave employers the power to defeat them.

Craft Control of Production
Until the late 19th century, employers in most industries did not direct the actual work process. In general, it was controlled by skilled workers….,.. Only they possessed the skills and knowledge necessary for production. They controlled the transmission of these skills through their control of the apprenticeship sys­ tem. That control was perpetuated and made effective by their refusal to let work be sub-divided into smaller components that did not require “all-round crafts­ men.” By regulating the use of helpers and laborers, they were able to limit the labor market, maintain skill requirements, and keep up pay scales.4 The skilled workers set “stints” which determined the amount of work to be done, and established their own rules about the methods and equipment with which it was to be done. The employer could not tell them how to do a job; indeed, the craftsmen generally supervised the unskilled majority of the workforce themselves. These powers were vigorously fought for in the face of em­ ployer efforts to sub-divide jobs and eliminate craft control.

*While Parts III and IV of this report separate “management strat­ egy” and “worker action”, when it deals with concrete cases within each part it tries to show them in the context of what the other party was doing. Each action is viewed as part of a sequence which includes the prior action of the other side. For a discussion of the problems of punctuating such sequences, see “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication,” in Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.
**The principal exception appears to be the textile industry, where managerial control dominated from the introduction of the factory system. See Daniel Nelson, pp. 3-4.

This power was rooted in the “functional auton­ omy” of the craftsmen. This autonomy in turn was based on the skilled workers’ control of knowledge about the work, but it also depended on the crafts­ men’s mutualistic ethical code. According to David Montgomery, that code has three principles: 1) The “stint” or output quota set by the workers, with or without unions; 2) “manly bearing” toward the boss, which might require that a worker quit if conditions were improper; and 3) proper behavior toward fellow­ workers – no behavior that might threaten another’s job or force him to work beyond the approved rate, no “undermining” or “conniving”. As Montgomery points out, the technology of the day, without the pres­ ence of a mutualistic code, would have allowed a far different approach, aiming for individualistic ad­ vancement. The”all-round” character of the craftsmen was not simply a technological necessity, but rather a product of their own organization and resistance to all breaking down of the work.
An example of worker control of production in the late 19th century is provided by coal mining. Each miner worked permanently in his “room”; hired and paid his helper; did his own maintenance; decided how to perform the work; and set his own pace and hours of work. He was, in effect, an individual contractor, paid by the number of tons he produced. Supervisors repre­ sented only·1.5% of the underground workforce. A miner typically saw the foreman once a day. In union mines, an elected pit committee oversaw the flow of pit props, coal cars, and the like.5
Employers tried a variety of techniques for reduc­ ing the hold of the skilled workers. Some involved try­ ing to introduce less skilled workers. Since craftsmen’s power was largely based on their control of training through a formal apprenticeship, employers attempted to weaken this process by replacing apprenticeship with a helper system controlled by the employers.6 Another management strategy in response to craft power was to utilize the possibility for competition in­ herent in the contracting system by encouraging sub­ contracting by skilled workers. In numerous late 19th century industries, including iron puddling and roll­ ing, iron molding, mid-western coal mining, urban car­ pentry, and tailoring, employers encouraged crafts­ men to hire helpers and become small bosses.7
The spread of subcontracting led the craftsmen to move to a second stage of worker control, the enact­ ment of formal union work rules. These essentially

codified the functional autonomy established by earli­ er craft work cultures, and imposed them on the em­ ployer through union “legislation”, backed by indi­ vidual quitting and strikes. A committee in each shop enforced the union work rules and wage scales. Union legislation against subcontracting pitted group solidar­ ity against individualism and sharpened the line be­ tween employers and workers. A further stage came after 1886 when craftsmen responded to management attacks with strikes to preserve union rules and sympa­ thetic strikes among diverse trades.8
Research has established that craft control of the
type described existed in many industries. The precise limits of its realm remain to be delineated.
The world of craft product.ion should not be romanticized. The control exercised by craftsmen al­ ways remained within the framework established by the market; it did not give workers control over the broader processes of society. Craft organization of production generally benefitted only the minority of skilled workers; indeed, craftsmen’s activities were often aimed against women, blacks, immigrants, and other unskilled workers, and at times the craftsmen di­ rectly exploited them as sub-contractors. Helpers were often underpaid and overworked. (The destruction of craft production, which brought “degradation” to the skilled workers, may well have led to the upgrading of many unskilled workers to semi-skilled status.) The social attitudes of the craftsmen were sometimes rad­ ical, often conservative. But it is not necessary to glori­ fy the 19th century craft system of production to see that it provided a serious obstacle to capitalist manage­ ment’s drive for accumulation, and that the destruction of craft production as a social system was the starting point – and the prerequisite – for full capitalist con­ trol of production.

Breaking the Skilled Workers
In general, the relatively small firms which domi­ nated 19th century capitalism were not able to defeat what Montgomery and Gutman have described as the “aggressive move for power” within industry of the late 19th century craftsmen. The main power shift which weakened craft workers fatally was the rise of the large industrial corporations. Their huge financial resources, ability to withstand long strikes, shift work from one plant to another, employ machinery which reduced their dependence on craft skills, and mobilize the forces of the state against workers, created a new power balance the craft workers were unable to shift more than temporarily and occasionally. After the turn of the century, craft unionism was able to maintain it­ self primarily only in small business. The skilled groups which remained within large scale industry were usually too small and diverse for any one of them

to dominate the plant or even control their own work. The conservative role of the A.F.L. after 1900 was in part a result of the attempt to preserve the obsolete form of craft unionism at all costs; it shifted its goal to binding trade agreements, eschewed sympathy strikes, and became generally “well-tamed.”79 But before this occurred, the corporate employers had to break the hold of the craftsmen in industry.
In the case of the steel industry, the defeat of the skilled workers was a deliberate affair, using straight­ forward if brutal techniques of union-breaking. In the late 19th century, the international market for steel was expanding rapidly. Heightened competition developed as firms attempted to win new markets by
increasing output and cutting costs.1°Craft power pro­
vided an obstacle to this process. To eliminate it, Car­ negie Co., the dominant steel company, turned the strongest union mill, Homestead, into a fortress, ordered 300 Pinkerton guards, closed the mill, and an­ nounced that henceforth it would operate non-union. After four months of bitter conflict in which dozens were killed, intervention of state and federal govern­ ments finally led to the workers’ defeat. Over the next few years, the union was broken in mill after mill until it was virtually driven out of the industry. The after­ math was a rapid introduction of labor-saving equip­ ment into the industry, made possible by the control employers had won over the production proce!’s.11
Introduction of new technology itself often served as a technique for breaking skilled workers’ power. A dramatic case was the introduction of mechanical undercutting into bituminous coal mining. In 1891, only 6.6% of U.S. coal was undercut by machine, des­ pite the fact that in some regions most coal was mechanically undercut by 1888. A minor factor im­ peding its introduction was that narrow and crooked passageways of older mines sometimes made the equip­ ment difficult to utilize. According to Amsden and Brier, however, the main factor was the resistance of the miners.
Mine management soon grasped that despite the limited savings it promised, machine undercutting could be a powerful weapon against worker organiza­ tion. According to one contemporary engineer, mech­ anical undercutting was introduced in the 1880’s for its “moral effect” in weakening the pick miners more than for its value as an” expense reducer.” And w:1 prominent coal operator in the mid ’90’s stated that machine mining was introduced:

not so much for its saving in direct cost as for the indirect economy in having to control a fewer number of men for the same output. It is a weapon with which to meet organized skilled labor and their unreasonable demands … As the machine does the mining, the proportion of

skilled labor is largely reduced, and the result is found in less belligerence and conflict; a suffi­ cient inducement though the direct costs be the same.12
Another classic case was metal working. Skilled machinists had held virtually complete power over how their work was done, taking the shop drawing and turning out from it the finished product. The work in­ volved a large number of technical decisions as well as manual skill.
Elaborate studies by Frederick Taylor and others
systemized this knowledge, so that a semi-skilled worker could be instructed in the “one best way” to do a job that had previously required a highly-skilled machinist. Such systems were imposed in the early de­ cades of the 20th century wherever employers could defeat the opposition of the craftsmen.

Implications Resulting from Employer Control
The employers’ struggle to break craft workers’ power and the system of production of which it was part demonstrates why the structure of work must be seen as a social, and not simply a technical matter. It

was the story, not just of a struggle between more or less efficient techniques for producing use-values, but rather a power struggle between two social groups, em­ ployers and skilled workers, over how much the or­ ganization of production would reflect the interests of each.
In most instances, breaking the power over pro­ duction of the skilled workers cleared the way for management reorganization of all aspects of work. Henceforth management possessed the formal author­ ity to decide how work would be performed; divide jobs and hire any workers it chose to fill them; deter­ mine output levels; introduce whatever techniques and equipment it chose; and force workers to compete with each other for jobs and income. How it used that power is the subject of next section.
The establishment of formal management control in the industries described so far has come to be taken as something of a paradigm case, which has been re­ peated with greater or lesser variation in other indus­ tries at various times. How general the model of craft control and its destruction via social struggles really is constitutes one of the most important issues now being explored.

Ill. MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES FOR CONTROLLING WORKERS

If labor-power were like any other productive re­ source, it could be utilized by employers however they liked. Unfortunately for employers, labor-power is em­ bodied in living human beings, workers, who retain their ability to think, act, organize, and pursue their own interests, even after they have sold the title to their labor-power. As we shall see in Part IV, workers have a variety of ways of expressing this capacity on the job. Some, like the· methods of the 19th century craftsmen, are based on explicit control by publicly proclaimed union rules or agreements. Others are based on covert resistance by informal groups of workers. Manage­ ment policies, and the organization of work they create, are profoundly affected by the kind of worker activity and organization they face.
While the basic goal of capitalist production, the accumulation of capital, is unitary, the various means used to achieve this goal can easily come into conflict.* Low wages may make it difficult to attract competent workers, for instance; or high production rates may encourage sabotage and poor product quality.

*Neither “efficiency” nor “control” is an autonomous goal of capital; capitalists are interested in either only insofar as it contributes to the basic goal of accumulation. There is not, as some have argued, an independent drive for control; nor is the objective of capital “effi­ ciency” rather than “control”, as others have countered. Much of the debate around the work of Stephen Marglin has been confused by this kind of dichotomization, as Laird Cummings points out. (Thesis p. 96).

A number of management objectives vis-a-vis workers can be identified as results of the basic requi­ sites of accumulation. Employers must maintain a steady supply of workers with the appropriate skills. They must see that a reasonable proportion of these workers stay on the job, rather than contributing to “labor turnover.” They must see that workers show up for work (attendance) and do what they are told (disci­ pline). They must see that workers actually produce at a sufficiently high level. They must prevent outright challenge to management power. They must limit wages, benefits, hiring, training, and other employ­ ment costs. They must maintain flexibility in products and methods, so that production can be fitted to the opportunities for realization in the market. All these objectives require control over both the work process and the workers.
This control is a twin problem. On the one hand, employers must motivate workers to work as manage­ ment desires. On the other, they must prevent workers from uniting against them. Both involve controlling workers’ perceptions of their self-interest. The means to do so often boil down to the carrot and the stick, a set of rewards and punishments designed to condition worker thought and behavior. Management strategy, to meet its needs, must aim to break down the basis for unity of interest among workers and to give them an individual interest in line with the employer’s.13

Employer strategies for such control have been marked by a highly uneven development; each work­ place, company, and industry develops it own meth­ ods. Management strategies have varied from industry to industry based on such factors as: kind of tech­ nology used or appropriate; skills retained by workers; and concentration of capital. Worker organization, it­ self varying as a result of many factors, helped deter­ mine which management policies could in fact be im­ plemented. Market conditions affected what parti­ cular firms found it feasible and desirable to do. And the traditions developed over time in a given produc­ tion unit, firm, or industry helped determine how these various factors would be responded to.
The following does not attempt to determine the conditions under which particular patterns have been established, or even to present a complete catalog of employer strategies; it is simply a first attempt to clas­ sify them. If such a classification helps guide future re­ search, we can hope eventually to be able to compare different workplaces, companies, industries and oc­ cupations in a more systematic way, learning what is general and what is particular to each, and what factors have determined their character.
A. The Rationalization of Production
Faced with increasing size and a vanishing craft system, employers had to create new systems for or­ ganizing production. This generally involved such ap­ proaches as cost accounting systems which allowed production to be regulated more closely by the market conditions for the realization of surplus-value; pro­ duction and inventory control plans to improve the co­ ordination of production; and new systems of wage payment (discussed below). Time cards, centralization of purchasing and storage, and centralized planning departments were all widely introduced in this period.14
Such systems, often described by the term “rationalization”, are presented by management as a natural, inevitable, and socially neutral response to the growing size and complexity of production. The ob­ jective of such systems, however, was” to enhance the manager’s control over the operation of the factory, in­ cluding the foremen and the production workers”; it would be achieved “at the expense of the foremen’s – and ultimately the workers’ – autonomy.”15 The process of “rationalization,”* of creating formal man­ agement structures and specified procedures, was not a socially neutral process; it was the creation of a

*This is only one of the ways that the term is used. Here we are applying it to an historically specific period in time. The term “ra­ tionalization” also refers to “breaking down operations into a larger number of smaller and simpler steps” (Braverman p. 21 I). As it is ap­ plied today, it includes a wide range of management strategies from time clocks to on-the-job performance evaluation.

power apparatus through which a small group of people at the top could make effective their power over those they employed.
B. The Redivision of Labor
The defeat of craft power and the massive introduction of machinery it allowed led in many industries to a general leveling of the workforce. The skilled workers became less important and less highly skilled as their skills were deliberately built into the new machines; the remaining skilled tasks became in­ creasingly ones of maintenance and supervision. At the other end of the scale, the simple labor of pushing, lift­ ing, and hauling was similarly mechanized. The result was a great increase in the proportion of semi-skilled machine operators whose work required attention and some knack, but no general knowledge of production or rounded skills. A study in 1903 in the steel industry, for example, found that the tendency was “to reduce by every possible means the number of highly-skilled men employed and more and more to establish the general wage as the basis of common unskilled labor.” By 1902, Charles Schwab maintained that he could train a green hand to be a melter, the most highly skilled job in the open hearth department, in six to eight weeks.16 Such breaking down of skilled into less skilled jobs is often described as the “degradation” of work. Harry Braverman has shown that it constitutes a basic tendency of modern capitalist labor.17
To compensate for “degradation,” a redivision of manual and mental labor was established by altering the definition of jobs and the line between workers and management. This involved truncating the training process of skilled workers, retraining foremen, and creating a new educational system for managers.18 An expanded managerial hierarchy was the result.
The destruction of old skilled crafts eliminated the
means by which skilled workers were trained. Industry still needed skilled workers for maintenance, repair, and tasks not yet mechanized. As shortages of skilled workers became endemic in the early decades of the 20th century, employers created a new class of skilled workers who, unlike the all-round craftsmen of the past, were given only a few weeks or months train­ ing for one specific job. They lacked both the general knowledge of the old skilled workers and their ability to transfer their skills from one plant to another. This tied them to their employer: As Iron Age put it, “The mechanics that you will teach … will stay with you, as they are not sure they could hold jobs outside.”19
The redivision likewise involved training super­ visors and managers. In most early industry, managers were drawn from the ranks of skilled workers. With the decline of the all-round craftsmen, employers began hiring college graduates, giving them experience in a wide variety of departments and jobs, and using these

trainees for management positions. In the steel industry, this approach was begun by 1900 and was nearly universal by the 1920’s20 Different grades of managers were often selected from recruits with differ­ ent levels of formal education. The “job ladder” there­ fore broke between workers and managers, and often within the managerial hierarchy as well. The educa­ tional system could thereby become an important means for maintaining the class structure. A very similar shift occurred half a century later in the bank­ ing industry, when such skilled jobs as bookkeeping were degraded by computerization, and colleges replaced skilled workforce as the source for recruiting managers.21
The subdivision of jobs had several advantages for employers. It allowed them to hire workers with no skills and train them in a few weeks or even a few hours. This made the erilployers independent of skilled labor; workers performing simple tasks could be easily replaced, and did not have to go through the intense socialization to group values that often accompanied craft apprenticeship. At the same time, by reducing jobs to one constantly repeated operation, it was possible to speed up the work to an extreme extent. Finally, it was possible to reduce labor costs by hiring unskilled labor, following the so-called Babbage Principle. At least in steel, the redivision of labor was by no means dictated by the new technology that was introduced, but rather by employers’ desire to establish work discipline and control.22 The result of redivision of labor strategies is what has been called the “transfer of skill” from workers to management, what Taylor described as “the deliberate gathering in on the part of those on management’s side of all the great mass of tra­ ditional knowledge, which in the past has been in the hands of the workman… “23

C. The Technology of Production
One of the most basic forms of management control is that exercised through the technology itself. Far from being “neutral”, technology can be designed so as to strengthen employers’ power.
At times, the introduction of new technology can be a direct method of breaking the power of a group of workers:
“When mule skinners at one Fall River mill in the 1880’s demanded higher pay, they were easily replaced. ‘On Saturday afternoon after they had gone home,’ the superintendent chuckled, ‘we started right in and smashed up a room full of mules with sledge hammers . . . On Monday morning they were astonished to find that there

was no work for them. The room is now full of ring frames run by girls.”24*
The rise of production engineering in modern industry led to the planning of the entire work process so as to use labor as intensively as possible and to regu­ late its expenditure.** On an auto assembly line, for example, the pace of the line itself regulates the pace of work. Such regulation appears to be easier with con­ tinuous flow processes than with those which operate on a job or batch basis.t
Complex technology also helped make work appear uncontrollable to workers. David Montgomery, discussing immigrant workers, suggests such an impact, which no doubt affected many other workers as well, as the “intricate flow of operations needed to produce the final product confronted the immigrant as a self-motivating technological monster into which he might fit himself as best he could.”25
D. Time Study
A major obstacle to employers’ ability to maximize the labor performed by their workers lay in the difficul­ ty of knowing how long any particular piece of work actually required. Workers’ ability to keep this know­ ledge from employers formed the heart of the system of workers’ regulation of output described in Part IV below, a system employers described as “soldiering”

*Work in progress by David Noble suggests that a desire on the part of engineers and managers to reduce shop floor control over small batch production (and thus the socio-political power of job shop workers), by undermining the critical position of skilled machinists in the machine and metal working industries, was an important motiva­ tion – among others – behind the development and deployment of automatically controlled machine tools after World War II. Research by Joan Greenbaum indicates that the development of “operating sys­ tems” for computers was designed to reduce the power of computer operators.
••one area where research has only begun is in the relation between the work process and the architectural design of the workplace. Susan Reverby has suggested that reorganization of hospital work in the early 20th century was based less on the introduction of new mach­ inery than on new patterns in the physical structure of the hospital. In the 1860-1890 period, most hospitals were constructed according to a one-story pavilion plan, with separate wards or even separate build­ ings with connecting corridors or covered walkways. Each ward was nearly independent, providing most of its own services from heating to nursing, under the direction of its own head nurse. After 1910, new hospitals began to be planned as “an integrated unit” with services provided on a centralized basis, rather than ward by ward, with multi­ story construction both to save on land costs and to allow movement of staff and material by elevator. Such centralization eliminated some labor and allowed unskilled workers to take on many specialized tasks that had previously been part of the general work of the ward nursing staff. On factory architecture, c.f. Nelson, op. cit., pp. 11-25.
tNelson, p. 25, indicates that machine-paced work was exceptional outside of the auto industry in the early decades of the 20th century.

In order to establish work standards, definitions of the time allowed to perform a piece of work, Frederick Taylor and his associates developed the techniques of time study, using stop-watches and mathematical formulas to establish the time required for any given job. Time study results were then used as a basis for setting incentive pay rates or production standards.
There has been a good deal of debate concerning the actual impact of Taylor’s system of “scientific man­ agement,” of which time study was one element. Many of Taylor’s principles, such as central planning depart­ ments, systematic work flows, and incentive pay systems, were widely introduced throughout industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often quite independent of any direct influence of Taylor himself; they formed the general tendency of capitalist man­ agement at that time, what has been described as “scientific management” in a general sense. On the other hand, some elements of Taylor’s system, such as “functional foremanship”, were hardly ever tried and still less frequently retained in use; Taylor’s own system of “scientific management” as a whole was regarded by most managers as impractical, despite many useful elements. The one innovation of Taylor which spread throughout industry apace was system­ atic time study. As Taylor constantly pointed out, its great virtue was that it allowed employers to make an independent judgement of how long a job should take, and thereby allowed them to overcome workers’ resis­ tance to working at a faster rate.

E. Supervision
In many industries, supervisory work had originally been done largely by the skilled workers. With the assertion of more pervasive management control, supervision had to be taken over by the fore­ men.
One of the basic ways management asserted its authority over workers was simply to increase the number of foremen. In industry as a whole in 1900 there was one foreman to every 45 workers; by 1920 there was one to every 24.26 Not only did the propor­ tion of foremen increase, their role likewise changed. From merely supervising the pools of unskilled labor, foremen became the directors of production on the shop floor. Management tried to draw a sharp line be­ tween supervisors and workers by insisting that foremen not do any manual work. Foremen were given special training courses designed to teach them tech­ niques for maintaining discipline.27
In some cases, direct supervision was backed by further surveillance. In the telephone industry, for example, operators were subject to three levels of surveillance: the supervisors behind them, monitors

who listened in on their calls, and “service testers” who placed calls with them from outside.28
Supervision by foremen remains the pattern in industries which developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. In occupations of more recent origin, partic­ ularly in the service sector, professionals or techni­ cians may direct the workforce. In hospitals, the lower grades of workers are generally bossed by the doctors and nurses.* In chemical and other plants with ad­ vanced technologies, chemists and technicians often supervise the blue collar workforce. In offices, workers are often given management titles and supervisory responsibility over other workers as well as having their own jobs to do; the sharp line between supervis­ ion and regular workers common in blue collar workplaces is not so rigorously observed.29

F. Hierarchy and Job Ladders
Homogeneity in workplace conditions often favors resistance. According to Montgomery, striking by the unskilled is most common where a large group within an industry faces homogeneous conditions. In the textile industry, for example, which generally ac­ counted for a large proportion of non-union strikes, initiative most often came from the weavers, who constituted such a group.
In many industries, a management counter to this tendency was the development of job advancement ladders. Katherine Stone has shown that stratification plans were being advocated in the steel industry by 1900 and were in general use by 1908. The advance­ ment theme occurred not only for individuals but for ethnic groups, as one group after another gradually climbed the ladder. As Stone concludes, the develop­ ment of minutely graded job hierarchies, far from being a technological necessity, contradicted the technological development toward the equalization of skills; rather, the divisions were introduced “to avoid the consequences of a uniform and homogeneous workforce” of the kind the technology was promoting.30

*This creates the complicating factor of a dual authority structure of the hospital administration and the medical personnel. A non­ professional hospital worker, for example, might take orders from R.N.’s and doctors when working directly with patients, from hospital management when not (“Women in Health,” The Women’s Work Project, RRPE pamphlet, n.d.). Workers are caught between conflic­ ting positions of different sets of bosses, but at the same time they have some power to play them off against each other and appeal from one to the other (Reverby, “Borrowing a Volume from Industry,” op. cit., p. 30). This is somewhat similar to descriptions of what happened under the “functional foremanship” programs of Taylor. In a sense, hospital administrators, unlike those in industry, were never able to subordinate the “skilled craftsman” and expropriate their knowledge; consequently, they have never succeeded in taking control of “produc­ tion.”

The pattern in some non-industrial work is fairly similar. Promotion ladders were well in evidence in department stores from the 1860’s on. The usual career went from cash girl to wrapper to saleswoman, with possible advancement to head of stock, and occa­ sionally, to buyer. By the 1920’s, management began to stress internal promotion as an antidote to high turn­ over by hiring junior workers on the basis of their “long-term potential” and sponsoring evening classes for workers, the graduates of which had a substantial chance for promotion. The emphasis was also great during the Depression, when workers’ average age in­ creased and they became more demanding of advance­ ment.31 By 1910 there was a considerable job ladder within the traffic department of the Bell telephone company, with an opportunity to move up to such positions as chief operator, supervisor, service opera­ tor, monitor observer, or information operators; most workers left before advancing however.32
The picture on job ladders is somewhat different in the modern hospital than most other industries. Hospital work is highly stratified, with carefully delim­ ited differences in status, power, privilege, pay, auton­
omy, symbolized by pins, titles, hats, and uniform col­ ors, perhaps separate lounges, marking off the differ­ ent strata of registered, diploma, and associate nurses, or physical therapists, x-ray technicians, medical technologists, lab technicians, and the like. Yet, according to the Ehrenreichs, there is virtually a com­ plete lack of job mobility. The lack of mobility creates what the Ehrenreichs call “an occupational hierarchy which seems to have been almost designed to promote conflict”, especially given the close proximity in which different classes of workers work.33
G. Forms of Payment
In the steel industry, among others, the defeat of craft unionism was followed by the rooting out of the contract system and sliding scale as a vestige of work­ ers’ power. A major issue was how to pay the increas­ ing number of machine operators. At first the steel companies paid them day wages as they had the unskilled. In order to increase output, managers soon shifted them to piecework. Piecework tended to give unanticipated power to workers, however. Frequently workers put on piecework were able to increase their output sharply and thereby raise their wages far above the going rate. Employers generally responded by cut­ ting the rates to bring the wages back into line – mak­ ing the piecerate system nothing but a way to raise output without raising wages. Workers normally responded by setting their own output ceilings, replac­ ing the “stints” of the old skilled crafts. They thus defeated management’s original objective of increasing production.34
Management’s next move was to try a variety of

“premium” or “bonus” systems, mostly modelled after the Halsey Premium Plan of 1891. They generally in­ volved setting a bonus which gave the worker only part of the money he saved through extra production, thus raising wages less for each unit of production. Taylor’s Differential Piece Rate was a variant of this mode: Taylor’s innovation lay in combining it with systematic time study, which let management measure individual productivity.35
At the heart of management efforts to tie payment to an individual’s output lay the attempt to play workers off against each other. In those places where scientific management techniques were successfully introduced before World War I – mostly non-union machine shops in open shop towns – the usual man­ agement technique was to start by approaching one worker, much in the manner Taylor himself had de­ scribed in the famous case of “Schmidt”.36 Output in­ centives, at least in theory, simultaneously increased worker output, divided workers into different groups with no common interest, and created a social divide between more and less”efficient” workers.
Piecerate continued in many industries. Man­ agement considered it particularly appropriate for immigrants, especially women, and it was used wherever measurement was possible.37
As we will see in Part IV, workers developed numerous methods to turn incentive plans to their own advantage. As a result, management has increasii-igly turned to “measured daywork,” which replaces pay incentives with hourly pay, while relying on machine­ pacing, close supervision, and production standards to regulate output.38
H. Hiring
Control of who gets hired is one obvious way of trying to establish a docile workforce. At its crudest, this has involved use of blacklists to ban from employ­ ment known militants or troublemakers. By the end of World War I, some industries attempted to develop sophisticated techniques for selecting workers via “employment departments” and “personnel man­ agers”.39 Telephone operators, for example, were screened with extreme care for age, size, voice, race, appearance, and education, and were required to have recommendations.40 Macy’s and other department stores, banks, and other white collar employers re­ quired applicants to take whole batteries of I.Q., personality, and other tests designed to keep out those who would not fit into the job as defined.
Employers have also carefully selected the social groups from which hiring was done. It was common practice for industrial employers to hire from a wide range of ethnic groups in order to have a divided labor force that would have difficulty orgamzmg. Discrimination against certain groups, notably women

and blacks, has been central to much employment policy. Specific techniques of recruitment, such as encouraging current employees to bring in new work­ ers,”” advertising in selected media, and importing labor from other regions, have been adapted to each employer’s particular needs.
An interesting case is the unskilled workforce of the pre-World War II hospitals. Orderlies, attendants, maintenance, kitchen and household workers were recruited from “down-and-outers: ex-convicts, alcoholics, and the mentally retarded.” Providing employment for these groups was seen as an additional charity function of the hospital. They formed a labor pool whose members floated from hospital to hospital and from town to town. Hiring from this pool meant that hospitals had to pay them little beyond room and board, since few other employers were competing for their labor.41
A very different way to utilize hiring to control the workforce occurred in the longshore industry. Because ships are constantly coming into port on irregular schedules in need of rapid loading and unloading, the process of hiring or assignment to jobs has always been crucial to longshoring. Through the long history of the industry, the dominant form of hir­ ing has been the “shape-up,” in which workers gather at the entrance of the pier and a hiring boss selects as many as the employer considers necessary. Workers are hired for a very short term – the unloading of one ship, one day, or even (in New York before the early 1950’s) for half a day, after which they would have to “shape-up” again. Such a pattern allowed extremes of speed-up and permitted employers to promote extreme competition among workers; “the fastest and most ser­ vile workers got picked again at the next shape-up.” At times, workers paid kick-backs or performed other services to get hired. On New York docks, where the hiring bosses were union men, workers hired were expected to vote for the proper candidates in union elections. The shape-up was an extremely dehumaniz­ ing institution, known appropriately to the San Francisco longshoremen as” the slave market.”42
The shape-up was by no means limited to the longshore industry. In meat-packing, for example, it was widespread, with the same effects of humiliation, insecurity, and competition.43 Other forms of casual hiring remain, both for unskilled labor and for such newer groups as casual clerical workers.

*The common employer policy of hiring workers who are re­ cruited by the existing workforce may itself import pre-existing net­ works. Maurine Greenwald in her presentation to the Work Relations Workshop, March 27, 1976, suggested, for example, that telephone company policy of paying bonuses for recruiting during World War I contributed to creating networks for the strikes of 1919.

I. Training
On a large proportion of jobs, the skills needed to do the job are learned from other workers. When workers teach other workers they often tend to pass on shop floor knowledge that conflicts with management interests. In order to shape worker attitudes and behav­ ior – as well as to teach necessary skills – employers often make use of management-run training programs.
A striking example was the central role played by training in the rationalization of telephone operatiI’.g around the turn of the century. As Maurine Greenwald has pointed out, training programs designed to drill any initiative out of the candidate operator were central to the rationalization of telephone work and control of the operator. Above all, the candidates were trained to obedience, and to operate according to procedures which defined every word and tone of voice.44
Training became particularly important in ration­ alizing work in situations where work could not be controlled by machines. Susan Benson shows that department store managers have tried to standardize many aspects of selling. Susan Reverby has made simi­ lar findings for hospital workers. However, in both these cases standardization reached a limit in that the focus of work was on a non-standardized object, the customer or patient. In this situation, management turned to two expedients. First, as Susan Benson has put it, they tried to “standardize the worker rather than standardize the work.” Second, they tried to cre­ ate conditions that would control and standardize the responses of the customer or patient.””
]. Corporate Welfare
Another major employer strategy before the 1930’s was “corporate welfare programs”. One of the earliest such plans was the New York Life Insurance Company’s NYLIC Club, set up by George Perkins to reduce employee turnover. All employees who would promise never to go to work for another company received monthly bonuses and a pension after twenty years’ service. The plan succeeded in reducing turn­ over, and Perkins was made head of labor relations for all J.P. Morgan controlled companies, including Inter­ national Harvester, numerous railroads, and U.S. Steel.45 The welfare programs at U.S. Steel included stock plans, old-age pensions, accident insurance, a

• A special problem arose where a service institution with a working-class workforce served a middle-class clientele. Much of the training and discipline of department store clerks was directed toward making them socially acceptable to the customer. Similarly, in hospi­ tals, as middle class patients began to make their appearance, man­ agers became concerned that working class employees could under­ mine the image and even threaten the flow of contributions to the institution. Thus, training became directly largely toward inculcating middle class etiquette and styles of speech.

safety campaign, sanitation, housing, education, and recreation – in short, most of the activities of today’s “welfare state”.46 These plans had several objectives. They were designed to change employees’ work habits, social attitudes, and life styles, and to aid in the cultural assimilation of immigrants, many of them from pre­ industrial backgrounds, via “Americanization” pro­ grams.47 Since most had clauses specifying in one way or another that benefits depended on “good behavior” as determined by the employer, they served as another means of keeping workers in line. The safety programs were often oriented towards shifting the blame for acci­ dents from the employer to the workers. Welfare pro­ grams were intented to reduce turnover. They aimed to encourage workers to identify their personal interest with those of the employer. Finally, they aimed to break down working-class identification and solidarity by reducing inter-firm mobility. Welfare policies were seen as a way to strengthen workers’ ties to their employer and weaken those to their class.48
K. Union Policy
Employer policies toward unions have varied greatly. We have seen instances where employers used every available tactic to destroy unions which impeded their control of production. On the other hand, some employers have been perfectly willing to utilize unions as a means to control both the workforce and other fac­ tors.
The most common and important aspect of this process is the use of union authority and the union con­ tract to maintain labor discipline. This includes union­ management cooperation in eliminating militants and “troublemakers” and union enforcement of contract “no strike” clauses.49
In the West Coast longshore industry, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union has been the basic means by which employers have reestablished control over work that they had lost to the longshoremen after 1934. The industry strategy in longshore from the late 1950’s on took the form of proposing a series of “Mechanization and Moderniza­ tion” (M&M) agreements. The first, in 1959, estab­ lished an employer fund to retrain workers eliminated by new machines, plus a study to measure productiv­ ity.50 In 1960, the employers essentially proposed to buy the union work rules. For example, the 2100 pounds sling-load limit was abandoned, and the basic gang in the hold was reduced to four, with the addi­ tional workers classified “swing men” subject to indi­ vidual firing.51 The union leadership agreed, and won membership support through a combination of suppressing opposition and negotiation of a bonus of
$13,600 for every soon to be pensioned-off longshore­ man.52
While on some occasions employers have cooper-

ated with unions, at others they have moved strongly against union actions that have threatened their control of production. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, General Elec­ tric and Westinghouse, the industry giants, were strongly opposed to eraft unionism, whose “essence … in metal working industries was control of the work process by skilled workers”.53 These companies created company unions and extensive welfare programs to counter the successes of craft unionism during and after World War 1.54 However, the companies were not unwilling to have the industry unionized on a different basis. Gerard Swope, head of G.E., went so far in 1926 as to ask William Green, head of the A.F .L., to organize a new union of electrical workers, stipulating that the organization be on an industrail rather than a craft basis. When the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (CIO) did begin organizing on an industrial basis in the 1930’s, the large electrical companies, in sharp contrast to steel, auto and other large corpora­ tions, permitted labor board elections and willingly negotiated with the unions. G.E. and other large employers hoped that unionization of the industry would raise the wage rates of their smaller competitors and thereby standardize labor costs across the industry, improving the giants’ competitive position. This was important to the large electrical companies because, in contrast to steel or auto giants, they produced a wide variety of special product lines, in many of which they faced competition from smaller companies. The U.E., in fact, used the base it was permitted within G.E. to finance its organizing campaign among smaller com­ petitors.55
The years following World War II saw a sharp
reversal of employer policy. Schatz traces this shift to the management view that union power had seriously undermined management control over such matters as discipline, layoffs, rehiring, allocation of workers, and promotion, and threatened to extend to types of machinery and methods of production. The U.E., relatively weak when recognized, had become “capable of conducting a national strike; of reducing wage differentials between workers of different regions, skill levels and sexes; and of limiting the power of man­ agement to direct in-plant operations” and was begin­ ning to succeed in organizing white collar workers. Management’s goal was to reestablish control. After the bitter and violent strike of 1946, G.E. turned to the famous tactics of “Bulwarism”, “hearing out the demands of union representatives … then announcing the company’s contract proposals in a massive public­ ity campaign aimed at the towns where G.E. workers lived,” and, by refusing further give-and-take with the union, attempting to undermine worker belief that it
could win them any gains. They also took advantage of political conflict within the labor movement to force recertification elections that led to the division of elec-

trical workers among more than five major unions, greatly weakening their power.56

L. External Institutions of Control
Employers have often used their power over institutions outside the workplace as an additional structure of control over the workforce. Amsden and Brier, for example, suggest that company stores in coal mining towns were an operator response to the organ­ ized miners’ refusal of wage cuts. In a more general sense, company stores, housing and towns were all institutions of control external to the workplace. Henry Ford’s Service Department, with its attempt to police the entire off-work life of Ford employees, provides another example. So does the employer sponsorship of churches and social and nationality associations. An important case was the support provided the Urban League and YMCA in the Black community by employ­ ers in Chicago, Detroit, and elsewhere. The educational system and the communications media can play such a role. Employer influence over local, state, and national political institutions made them, too, in a sense, exter­ nal institutions of control of the workplace.
M. Workplace Location
Workplace location often plays an important part in management strategy. Large workplaces are nearly always situated with the need for an abundant labor supply with appropriate skills in mind. Before the rise of flexible transportation systems, this often meant large urban areas. More recently, it has often meant the suburban rim. Employers often attempt to locate plants in areas where wages are low and working class tradi­ tions weak. Thomas Edison reputedly first moved his operations to Schenectady to escape the “labor troubles” of the New York metropolitan area. The building of auto plants in rural cornfields has become notorious.
The transfer of work to plants in low wage areas such as the South and, more recently, overseas – the phenomenon of the runaway shop – has long served as a powerful management weapon. It has been made more potent, notably in the case of large electrical companies, by the deliberate construction of more than one plant’ able to turn out the same products, so that closing one plant need not disrupt the total firm’s production. The threat of plant closings provides employers with a means of blackmailing not only the workers directly involved, but also the entire com­ munity dependent on the plant.

N. Ideologies at the Workplace
One issue whose exploration has just begun is the way ideologies are used in struggles around the

workplace. David Montgomery has shown the role that a whole cultural code of “manliness” played in regula­ ting conditions of work for late-19th century crafts­ men. The moral code of the machinists and other skilled workers was one of the greatest obstacles to management, one that was attacked ferociously. Taylor labeled it “soldiering”, and much of the research on “restriction of output” was done as part of the attempt to weaken workers by defaming craftsmen’s values.57 Bryan Palmer has suggested that one of the important effects of scientific management as an ideology was to undermine the widespread view of labor as the source of all value, which was one of the underlying props of the craftsmen’s power.* The modern offspring of scientific management, “Management Science,” like­ wise provides an ideological rationalization for the management drive to control and exploit workers.58
Stanley Weir has pointed out that the ideology of inevitable technological “progress” has been one of the great weaknesses of workers who might otherwise resist technological changes which are the opposite of progress for them. The absence of a philosophy from which to oppose the destruction of valued work prac­ tices leads to resigned acceptance of that destruction.
Susan Reverby and the Ehrenreichs have shown the attempt, by both employees and management in hospitals, to make use of the ideology of commitment to patient care. According to the Ehrenreichs, “Hospital workers at all skill levels commonly express a degree of commitment to service, to doing one’s best, that would be beyond the wildest dreams of an indus­ trial personnel manager.”59 This attitude cu ts two ways, however. On the one hand, it makes workers accept unreasonable demands from management about issues such as long and erratic hours and shifts in duties. On the other hand, it leads to worker resentment of non-patient-oriented behavior on the part of management, and provides a justification for worker resistance to management policies which appear to contradict the interests of the patient.
Management strategies have attempted to enhance managerial control of the work process, worker behav­ ior, the shape of the management organization, and of course, the design of the technology. In all of these at­ tempts management plans have been continually re­ defined and changed by worker actions at the work­ place. There appear to be few, if any, specific man­ agement practices that work at all times in all indus-

*Bryan Palmer, “Class, Conception and Conflict: The Thrust for Efficiency, Managerial Views of Labor and the Working Class Rebel­ lion, 1903-1922,” RRPE, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer 1975. The rise of scientific management-type ideologies and the sharpening of the line between workers and employers may also have contributed to the decline of the populistic conception of “the productive classes,” so widespread in the 19th century and so absent in the 20th.

tries. In his study of management change Maarten deKadt states that: “The control of labor has been a process that management has had to learn and to en­ force anew in each period of newly expanded produc-

tion”. Management strategies are forced to change as they encounter changes in patterns of accumulation and as they encounter worker actions and reactions.

IV. WORKER ACTION

If, in a broad sense, the objective of capitalist production is the accumulation of the means to control workers’ productive activity, then workers’ action for their own ends must ultimately constitute a struggle to control their own activity. In this general sense, the his­ tory of work is shaped by a power struggle between employers and workers over the ways and extent to which the former shall control the latter.
Management, of course, requires different kinds of control under different conditions. Where work can be made repetitive and routinized, management gen­ erally strives to direct the workers’ every move; where each piece of work is unique and requires a creative contribution from the worker, management generally recognizes that it must allow a degree of worker auton­ omy. And while in general control of workers is a pre­ requisite for capitalist production, in many cases man­ agement policy does not aim at total control precisely to avoid the reactions from workers which would predic­ tably follow. Nonetheless, in many cases the drive of employers to control workers is sufficient to produce irrepressible conflict.
The specific goals workers seek can contradict each other in a given context, as can the goals of different groups of workers. The specific features of work life over which workers aim to exercise control vary in response to different social conditions, employer poli­ cies, working class traditions, and workers’ estimates of what is attainable. Worker actions have included ef­ forts to counter many features common to working class life under capitalism: economic insecurity; poverty and inadequacy of income; subjection to the arbitrary authority of the employer; forced participa­ tion in dull, stultifying, fatiguing, deforming and demeaning tasks; work in dangerous and unhealthy conditions; lack of time and opportunity to pursue one’s own goals and interests; and the general lack of freedom and subjection to the will of others that “sale of one’s labor power” implies. At any given time, work­ ers may or may not aim to establish control over any particular aspect of work life.
Worker activity has contributed to shaping the structure of work in two ways: directly, to the extent that workers have been able to establish formal or informal counter-power at work; indirectly, to the extent that management policies are a response to worker action. In this section, we will recount a number of examples which illustrate different ways

workers have attempted to shape the production process and the social relations of work. The discussion is meant to indicate some kinds of topics that have proved fruitful for investigation, not to give a defini­ tive view of worker action or even of the categories in which it should be examined. This selection tries to suggest some of the kinds of effects that worker action has had in shaping the workplace. For the workplace is neither the result of technological forces nor of man­ agement policies per se, but of their interaction with workers.

Worker-Imposed Job Structures
In a variety of ways, workers have tried to super­ impose job structures of their own devising on the workplace. These commonly have the basic goals of controlling work processes and reducing competition among workers.
One of the most common such structures has been the demand for recognized shop committees, usually combined with the demand for union recognition. The significance of this issue has been somewhat obscured by the subsequent rise of highly-structured “quasi­ judicial” grievance and contract bargaining procedures since the 1930’s. However, prior to that time the demand for recognition generally meant a demand for direct organized workers’ counter-power at work, and such committees in fact exercised such power in many of the situations where they existed.
Another example has been the great number of at­ tempts by workers to control job classifications. The demand for standard classifications was widespread in strikes against scientific management in the years be­ fore, during, and after World War I. Standard job classifications counter the idea that pay should be indi­ vidualized and management the only judge. They dif­ fer from both scientific management’s idea of indi­ vidualized pay and the traditional craft idea of stand­ ard pay for all in the craft. Bridgeport munitions work­ ers, for example, demanded seven classifications to rationalize pay and take the power to distribute re­ wards away from employers. The classifications were for different jobs and did not constitute a ladder. This demand was almost universally defeated in the World War I period, since neither the employers nor the War Labor Board would accept it.60 The demand for job classifications became a standard item of union policy

in the 1930’s and ’40’s, notably in the electrical indus­ try.61 During World War II, unions demanded that the government rationalize pay structures, and in many cases it did so.
In general, classification became a way both to re­ tain differences between different groups of workers, to negotiate them, and to make it harder for manage­ ment to play upon them. Classification, combined with detailed job description, has also come to serve as a de­ fensive technique for workers to limit the kinds of work they have to do, and, in particular, to resist downgrading. As such, it tends to generate an elitist attitude among the more skilled workers, but on the other hand, helps protect the jobs of less skilled.
A related structure demanded by industrial unions in the 1930’s was advancement on the basis of senior­ ity rather than favoritism. Seniority systems were one of their major achievements.62 As Katherine Stone points out for the steel industry, seniority limited favoritism but “it did not question the hierarchical existence of job ladders which made that promotion system possible. The minutely-graded job ladders developed around seventy years ago have survived in­ tact.”63 Promotion ladders still have little to do with ability necessary to do the job; workers wait years to fill jobs that take a few weeks or months to learn. The system still provokes competition for jobs among indi­ viduals and groups, particularly along race and sex lines.
One of the most extensive and democratic of all
experiments with worker control of work relations came in the longshore industry. The primary workers’ response to the shape-up and other employer-con­ trolled forms of hiring was the demand for a union­ controlled hiring hall.
The hiring system established via the 1934 general strike in San Francisco had as its main objective the equalization of work opportunities among registered longshoremen.* The union strove for a large registra­ tion list to include all those who had participated in the strike and militants who had previously been driven out of the industry.64 To get longshore labor, an em­ ployer had to call the hall.** Workers from the regis-

*Weir, “Informal Workers’ Control,” op. cit., p. 61. Workers’ control of hiring by no means assures equality of opportunity, as Stanley Weir has pointed out, however. In many instances, for example, where unions control hiring in longshore, they have estab­ lished half-a-dozen or more categories – A/B/C/D men, star men, etc. – which benefit those with the most seniority.
**As Stan Weir points out, union control can serve·as a weapon of the union leadership against sections of the membership. In the cur­ rent New York hiring halls, for example, “Speak up on the job as a union militant and you suddenly have trouble getting other than ‘crap’ jobs out of the hall.” In the West Coast in the 1950’s, union and man­ agement officials cooperated to transfer much control over recruit­ ment and discipline from union locals to a Joint Coast Labor Rela­ tions Committee of top union and company officials. Further, the dispatching system itself was subject to abuses. Union officials can

tered longshoreman list were assigned by the dispatch­ er under the “low man out” principle: the first workers dispatched would always be those who had been of­ fered the fewest hours of work so far that quarter. This system totally eliminated the competition for jobs that characterized employer-controlled hiring. It simul­ taneously de-casualized the work, making longshoring a steady job with an annual income comparable to other industrial labor. It established automatic work­ sharing in times of reduced demand for labor, making unemployment unknown.*
Within this general framework the system al­ lowed individuals and groups an extraordinary flexibil­ ity. A worker could work either as part of a regular gang or take his job assignments as an individual. A worker could express a preference for a cargo or locale, which would be fulfilled if possible, and he could turn down any job assigned to him for any reason – such as dislike for the cargo or the gang boss – without losing anything except that day’s work. Men were free to choose their own work partners, and the regular gangs were likewise self-selected.65
A number of hiring rules further strengthened the workers’ position on the job. An employer could not fire one worker; he could only fire an entire gang and then wait for replacements from the hall. When a gang was assigned to a hatch, they had “hatch seniority” – the right to work that hatch for their shift every day until the job was done. So did any individual assigned to that gang for that particular job.
Such security gave workers an unusually strong position on the job. If they found conditions unsatis­ factory, they could refuse to work until changes were made; the worst an employer could do was to fire the gang; he would lose valuable time waiting for replace­ ments, while all the workers lost was a day’s work.
Workers instituted a number of work rules, such as the 2100-lb. limit on a sling-load, work crews large enough to allow hold workers to take turns resting, and the rule that no work started until water was brought in.66
Response to Management Innovations
One of the most common contexts in which work­ er action around work organization arises is where
make workers’ inadvertent errors appear to be deliberate chiseling; framing them for chiseling requires nothing more than changing a few numbers. Such changes have, in fact, been used quite frequently by union officialdom against those who challenged their leadership.
*The West Coast longshoremen present an interesting exception to the general commitment to seniority. As a result of the union hiring hall and the low-man-out system, the idea of sharing the available work is deeply ingrained. The idea of “laying ofr’ longshoremen – dropping them from registration in the hiring hall – is quite foreign. It has only happened once since 1934; some workers who had been registered a short time were dropped from the swollen rolls right after World War II. Otherwise, the hiring hall has provided a kind of auto­ matic work sharing. This tradition has finally been undermined by the rise of steadymen.

management itself attempts to impose large changes in the work process.
One of the clearest cases was the response of skilled machinists to the reorganization of metalwork­ ing. We have discussed in Part II David Montgomery’s account of the moral code of the skilled machinists, which denounced working more than one machine, ex­ ceeding output stints, and the like, as immoral. Employers introduced incentive pay and time and mo­ tion studies as a way to eliminate such forms of control exercised by the craftsmen. Open resistance usually re­ sulted from the first appearance of time study in a shop. In some cases, when the time study men ap­ peared, everyone refused to work. In others, the time study men were physically attacked and beaten up. In some cases, workers walked out when time study was tried. In at least one case, machinists all threw away their bonus pay env lopes unopened to show their contempt for the incentive system.67
Many of the great strikes in the period before and during World War I were in direct response to manage­ ment reorganizations of work. The wave of textile workers’ strikes which spread through New England and New Jersey in 1912 and 1913 usually involved re­ sistance to new stretch-out and premium pay plans,68 as well as efforts for shorter hours and higher pay. The Illinois Central-Harriman strike of 1911-16 started in opposition to the introduction of time study and in­ centive plans in railroad shops. Craft unionists of many grades joined together to demand the abolition of premium pay plans, time study, personnel records and dilution of skills, leading to an extremely bitter four year strike.69 In 1910, 5,000 of the 7,000 workers at Bethlehem Works struck against the bonus system. When departments and groups of workers drew up separate strike demands, every one turned out to de­ mand uniform rates of pay, some specifying an end to piecework and a return to day-work.70
The same kinds of reactions have been evident more recently as well. The 1959 steel strike, which lasted 120 days, was provoked when management de­ manded sanctions against wildcat strikes and clear ac­ ceptance of management’s right to develop incentives and schedule production. After management’s de­ mands were published, worker opinion crystalized in a commitment to strike.71 Such responses are far from uncommon, and the threat of them is one of the real constraints on management power.

Informal Action
Even where workers are unable to impose formal controls over the work process, they are often able to exercise power informally. This informal resistance takes a great variety of forms.72 The most widespread may well be what employers call “output restriction.”

Where craftsmen had controlled production, they set stints in open meeting and enforced them through of­ ficial union action. With the imposition of time study, incentive pay, and managerial control, such activity essentially went underground. By the end of the 1920’s, studies by Matthewson and others discovered that restriction was widespread, even under incentive plans. Covert rate-setting had become a general work strategy. In situations where unions existed, the craft rules were often smashed, and the struggle around shop issues became informal, separate, and even opposed to the union. The craft union had been an agency of ex­ plicit control. The informal work group functioned on a guerilla basis, as what Montgomery describes as “a submerged, impenetrable obstacle to management sov­ ereignty.”73
Foremen and gang leaders often participated in or even organized restrictive practices to protect their own positions. Many strikes during 1910-20 among unskilled workers were to oppose the firing of an ap­ proved foreman. In the garment industry, strikes were sometimes led by the contractors or “sweaters” them­ selves.74
Dealing with foremen was obviously one of the keys to countering management power on the job. Workers developed a number of methods for doing this: making unpopular ones look bad by failing to get production out; striking to eliminate the more oppres­ sive ones; winning the cooperation of foremen against higher management; and striking to protect acceptable ones.*
Activities of this kind depend on the organization of informal work groups. Among longshoremen, for example, socialization starts in the morning, where workers wait at the hiring hall for forty-five minutes or so for assignments. Next, workers generally have breakfast together before work. Another chance comes at the pier head, waiting for the work to start. The work itself requires very close cooperation between part­ ners. Finally, once the work is down to a routine, conversation of six or eight longshoremen was com­ monplace.
Output restriction by informal work groups has be no means been limited to blue-collar workers. Susan Benson has found considerable evidence for it among department store saleswomen, for example. In one Boston store, workers set an informal sales limit of
$100 a day. Those who sold more were maneuvered into undesirable jobs, stigmatized as “grabbers” and banged on the shins with dra:wers behind counters. Many techniques for “innocently” limiting sales ex-
*Foremen have been inadequately studied. Their own attempts at unionization were defeated, especially by the government after World War II. On the other hand, many of the changes in company policy in­ volved in company unionism, and, later, accomodation to regular unions, involved limiting the power of foremen.

isted, including feigned stupidity and ignoring of cus­ tomers.75 Long periods during the day when customers were few, combined with freedom to move about and congregate, facilitated the formation of informal work groups. These tended to develop their own sub-culture, with their own language and their own art form of comic dramatic dialogues. Workers supported each other against irritations from customers, as well as re­ sisting pressures from management.
Quitting has always been one recourse of workers. Since turnover of labor is costly for management, a high quit rate not only removes particular workers from the control of a particular employer, but pres­ sures that employer to make conditions of work more acceptable. The extent of early turnover was great: in metal trades in the 1912-13 boom, annual turnover rates of 100-200% were common; Ford hired 54,000 men in one year to maintain a workforce of 13,000.76 Such work structures as the rise of “personnel work” and the Goodyear Rubber “flying squadrons” were a direct response to high turnover rates, resulting primarily from workers’ propensity to quit.

Arenas of Workers’ Counter-power
In Part III, we have seen the variety of techniques used by employers to exercise power over their work­ ers. It is striking that in each of these areas, there are corresponding techniques that have been developed by workers. Research does not yet allow us to make a full­ scale analysis of these techniques. However, we can briefly indicate some of the methods used by workers in each of these categories:
A. Rationalization
Workers have fought for the right to control the activities that take place on the shop floor. In order to limit the arbitrary power of the boss, this has sometimes included worker initiated plans for rational­ izing the work process. According to Walter Licht, for example, American railway workers in the 1830-1877 era “organized in the name of fairness, justice and security to demand further bureaucratic standards and procedures in an attempt to control as much of the work process as possible.”77 At the same time, workers resisted the forms of rationalization which led to a re­ duction of their power.

B. Division of Labor
Workers have fought constantly for control over the division of labor. This has included resistance to the sub-division of jobs, introduction of job rotation, pro­ grams for raising workers’ skill levels, and resisting managerial incursions into control of the production process.

C. Technology
Workers have often established a degree of con­ trol over the application of technology through union or informally-imposed work rules and negotiated agreements. In many instances, management is not able to introduce new technology without union approval. Even where this is not the case, workers are often able to exercise a degree of veto-power by refusing to oper­ ate disliked equipment as management desires. Finally, workers may at times insist on the elimination or re­ placement of a given technology, particularly in the case where it is perceived as a hazard to health or safe­ ty.
D. Time Study.
In some workplaces, union agreements specify a degree of union control over time study; union officials can have a job retimed if they think it has been given too short a time. More commonly, workers discuss the times they consider appropriate for each job, and at­ tempt to impose by informal agreement a ceiling on the speed with which each job is done.
E. Supervision.
In many workplaces there is a continuous maneuvering to limit and neutralize the power of supervison over workers’ lives. This includes making foremen look good or bad to their supervisors, depend­ ing on how they behave toward workers; refusing to recognize the legitimacy of their authority in many areas; and challenging specific decisions through wild­ cat strikes and other forms of direct action. Contract agreements and union procedures also place formal limits on the arbitrary power of supervisors.
F. Hierarchy and Job Ladders.
Unions in many industries have striven to gain control from management over job grades and ladders. Such power, where gained, has been used in quite dif­ ferent ways. Industrial unions in the 1930’s, for ex­ ample, pushed for cents-per-hour (rather than percent­ age) wage increases, which had the effect of reducing wage differences among different groups of workers. Skilled workers, whether within their own unions or within industrial ones, have often pushed to increase the extent of their advantages. Unions have often urged job ladders as a means of expanding opportunities for workers. In general their greatest emphasis has been on reducing favoritism through such means as senior­ ity systems.

G. Forms of Payment.
Workers have opposed, often successfully, man­ agement efforts to use payment as a way to drive work­ ers. For much of its history, the labor movement has

fought various forms of piecerate and incentive pay. On the other hand, in many instances workers have been able to develop considerable control over such systems. In such situations, workers have fought for the extension of incentive pay, and opposed manage­ ment attempts to replace it with such schemes as “measured day work”.

H. Hiring.
Union control of hiring lies at the heart of craft unionism: only members of the union can be hired under union rules. Many unions – including both craft unions and some others such as the longshoremen
– maintain union-controlled hiring halls, which dis­ tribute available jobs among workers. Where they have controlled hiring, specific groups of workers have of­ ten attempted to use it to exclude those of other groups
– notably women, blacks, and other minorities. Other specific groups, such as blacks and women, have chal­ lenged discriminatory hiring practices by both em­ ployers and unions, and forced adoption of less dis­ criminatory procedures. While industrial unions have generally left management’s choices about hiring un­ contested, seniority regulations have meant that work­ ers who have been laid off are first in line for rehiring.

I. Training.
Craft unionism is largely based on control of the training process through apprenticeship. Even in the absence of apprenticeship, most workers learn the skills necessary to do a job from the other workers on the job. Along with this instruction often goes an initi­ ation into work attitudes that workers consider appropriate. Unions have also contested for a degree of formal control over employer apprenticeship and training programs.

]. Welfare programs.
A major thrust of modern union policy has been the creation of welfare programs, particularly health and pension plans, which are partially or entirely under union control.

K. Unions.
As we have seen throughout this paper, unions have served both as a means by which workers have es­ tablished a degree of control over life at work, and as a means by which employers’ exercise control over workers. Workers have used both official union pro­ cedures and their own capacity for direct action to exercise power over unions as organizations. To the ex­ tent that they have controlled unions, they have used them as a means of establishing a degree of formal con­ trol over conditions at work.
L. External Institutions of Control.
One of the principal reservoirs of power workers have to draw on are the associations, neighborhoods, and communities they are part of outside the work­ place. Working-class political activity – including working-class parties, working-class activity within major parties, and non-electoral direct action – has played a significant role in shaping the context within which workplace struggles are contested.
M. Location
Workers’ own residence and migration patterns play a considerable role in determining workplace locations: employers can only locate where workers live or are willing to go. Many strikes and other ac­ tions, including the great auto sitdown in Flint in 1936- 7, have been conducted to prevent industrial reloca­ tions. Where unions are strong, they have often.been able to exercise a formal or informal veto power over employer location decisions.
N. Ideologies.
A great variety of ideologies and value systems have played a role in workers’ struggles for greater con­ trol of the workplace. These have included traditional social and religious ideas, such as the concept of the “productive classes,” the “nobility of labor,” or “Christian duty”; class values such as “solidarity” or “manly bearing”; and more formal political beliefs concerning democracy, socialism, anarchism, commu­ nism, and the like. Sophisticated analysis of the inter­ play of ideologies in the workplace context has barely begun.

V. CONCLUDING REMARKS: WHY THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF WORK MATTERS –
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORK RELATIONS RESEARCH

Work relations research forms only one area among many in which radical analysis and research is needed. Life is not circumscribed by the job, nor is the workplace the only sphere in which working people and capitalists confront each other. Work relations re­ search is complementary, rather than an alternative, to

the more traditional study of labor organizations, eco­ nomic forces, and politics, as well as more recent ap­ proaches to the family, community, and culture. traditional study of labor organizations, economic forces, and politics, as well as more recent approaches to the family, community, and culture.

For the purpose of developing a movement to fight for our needs as working people and to challenge capital’s power over us, work relations research has a number of specific contributions to make at various levels:

1. The Critique of Capitalist Work Relations
Work relations research shows the historically contingent character of present work structure. It thereby reveals that this structure is not “inevitable and eternal,” but a product of the existing form of capitalist society. It shows that the loathesome and much-loathed character of contemporary work is not simply a necessary result of the universal human need to produce use values, but results in large part from the way they are produced under capitalism.
This helps to debunk the myths of “technological determinism” and “‘inevitable bureaucratization.” These myths maintain that there is no alternative to the present organization of work, since that organization is rooted in technological or bureaucratic imperatives beyond the possibility of human control. The fact that work structures have been shaped by specific human agents, whose purposes and actions can be traced, gives the lie to these myths. The pessimistic view that “socialism would make no difference” because tech­ nology or bureaucracy would inevitably remain the same can be refuted, and the possibility justified that a very different technical and social organization of work could be created in a different economic system.
The actual history of the workplace also under­ mines the myth of worker acquiescence in the develop­ ment of capitalist society. It shows a history of con­ certed worker resistance, at times open, at others cov­ ert, sometimes dramatic, sometimes almost invisible, but always there. The fact of worker resistance demon­ strates the conflict of class interests at the heart of capitalist production, as well as providing one possible starting point for worker organization to challenge our domination by capital.

2. Generating Socialist Alternatives
Work relations research can help define socialist alternatives to the capitalist organization of labor. Its major contribution here lies in showing specifically the ways in which capitalist imperatives are built into the concrete structures of work. This makes it possible to identify social and technical structures that must be eliminated if the work process is to contribute to the liberation rather than the domination of its partici-

pants. It thereby points to necessary productive func­ tions for whose performance new structures will have to be developed.
Work relations research provides a powerful cri­ tique of the view that the problems of workers can be solved without fundamental change of the entire organization of work. It thus exposes shallow concep­ tions of “job enrichment,” “workers control,” and the like as window-dressing which leaves untouched the essential tyranny of the capitalist labor process. At the same time, it provides a critique of the idea that a socialist society can simply assimilate the existing pro­ ductive organization of capitalism intact, and run it “in the interests of the working-class.” The liberation of the working class can only be achieved through the dismantling of the entire apparatus for the control of workers embodied in the capitalist structure of work.
Work relations research can also provide some partial, imperfect, but nonetheless suggestive models from the past which can help stimulate imaginative thought about alternatives for the future. One example is the San Francisco longshoremen’s system of work allocation, which allowed continuous productive ac­ tivity to be combined with a high degree of individual freedom in selecting time and conditions of work. Another is the system of craft production, with its emphasis on the all-round skill and knowledge of the individual worker and the control of production by the work group, albeit for a privileged minority in the past. While no such model can be assimilated directly into a socialist society, let alone solve the problems workers face under capitalism, they can serve as one contributory element for envisioning a socialist soci­ ety.

3. The Development of the Contemporary Class Struggle
Work relations research has a contribution to make to the effort of workers to gain more power over their conditions of life within capitalist society. It can draw lessons from the struggles of the past that can be used by workers in concrete situations in the present. It can identify changes in the structure of work which require changes in workers’ tactics. It can expose the power functions of seemingly innocuous management policies and proposals. It can help indicate possible work structures that would increase workers’ power. And it can help workers appreciate more fully their capacity to act and the significance of the struggles in which they are already engaged.
The Work Relations Group

I. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.

NOTES

29. Brecher and Costello, op. cit., p. 45.

2. Stanley Aronowitz, “Marxism, Technology and Labor,” paper reviewed by the Work Relations Workshop, 1975.
3. Ronald Schatz, “The End of Corporate Liberalism,” Radical America, 1974.
4. David Montgomery, “Trade Union Practice and the Origins of Syndicalist Theory in the United States,” Unpublished,’ p. 12. The various published and unpublished papers by David Montgomery re­ ferred to in this report are soon to be published in book form under the title Workers Control.
5. Jon Amsden and Stephen Brier, “Coal Miners on Strike: the
Transformation of Strike Demands and the Formation of the Nation­ al Miners’ Union,” Unpublished paper. For a more extended discus­ sion of the early coal industry, see, Keith Dix, Work Relations in the Coal Industry: The Hand Loading Era, 1880-1930 (Institute for Labor Studies, 1977).
6. Katherine Stone, “The Evolution of Job Structures in the Steel Industry,” in Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich and David M. Gordon, eds., Labor Market Segmentation (D.C. Heath & Co., 1975),
p. 56.
7. Montgomery, “Trade Union Pl’actice,” op. cit., p. 12.
8, Montgomery, “Workers Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century,” Labor History, Fall, 1976.
9. Montgomery, “Trade Union Practice” op. cit., pp. 14-15; Montgomery, “The New Unionism and the Transformation of Work­ ers’ Consciousness in America, 1909-1922,” The Journal of Social History. Summer, 1974, p. 2.
10. Stone, op. cit.. p. 33.
11. Ibid., p. 34; Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972).
12. Amsden and Brier, op. cit., pp. 27-8.
13. Stone, op. cit.. p. 40.
14. Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), pp. 50-51. For an account of the role of engineers in this process, see David Noble, America by Design (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1977).
15. Nelson, op. cit.. p. 50.
16. Stone, op. cit., p. 46.
17. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (NY: Month- ly Review Press, 1974).
18. Stone, op. cit., p. 54.
19. Ibid., p. 57.
20. Ibid., p. 60-62.
21. Mark McColloch, “White Collar Electrical Machinery, Bank­ ing, and Public Welfare Workers, 1940-1970.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pittsburg, 1975.
22. For comparative data on the telephone and computer indus­ tries, see Maurine Greenwald, “The Transformation of Work and Workers’ Consciousness in the Telephone Industry, 1880-1925” (un­ published paper, University of Pittsburgh, 1975), and Joan Green­ baum, In the Name of Efficiency (Temple University Press, ) (forth­ coming).
23. Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Common Sense for Hard Times (New York: Two Continents/Institute for Policy Studies, 1976).
24. Berthoff, British Immigrants. p. 36; as quoted in Nelson, op. cit., p. 199.
25. Montgomery, “Immigrant Workers,” op. cit., p. 5. cf. Brecher and Costello, op. cit., pp. 46-47.
26. Montgomery, “Whose Standards: Workers and the Reorgani­ zation of Production in the United States, 1900-1920,” Lecture to the Work Relations Workshop, March 26, 1976.
27. Stone, op. cit., pp. 58-59. Unions later reinforced the prohibi­ tion on foremen working.
28. Greenwald, op. cit.. p. 18-19.

30. Stone, op. cit.. pp. 29, 46-49.
31. Susan Porter Benson, “The Clerking Sisterhood: Rationaliza­ tion and the Work Culture of Saleswomen,” Radical America, Vol­ ume 12 No. 2, March/April, 1978.
32. Greenwald, op. cit., p. 20.
33. Barbara Ehrenreich and John H. Ehrenreich, “Women in Health,” International Journal of Health Services, Volume 5, No. I, 1975, pp. 4-5, 8.
34. Stone, op. cit., p. 42.
35. Ibid., p. 43.
36. Montgomery, “Whose Standards,” op. cit.
37. Montgomery, “Immigrant Workers,” op. cit., p. 10.
38. For early introduction of measured day work at Ford, see Nel­ son, op. cit., p. 150. For its more recent introduction in the electrical industry, see Ronald Schatz, “American Electrical Workers: Work, Struggles, Aspirations, 1930-1950,” (Unpublished thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1977).
39. Nelson, op. cit., p. 151; Schatz thesis, op. cit.
40. Greenwald, op. cit., p. 15.
41. Susan Reverby, “Borrowing a Volume from Industry: A Study of Management Reform in American Hospitals, 1910-45,” paper pre­ sented to the Work Relations Workshop, 1975. cf. also Ehrenreichs, op. cit., p. 44.
42. Stan Weir, “Informal Workers’ Control: The West Coast Long- shoreman” Maxwell Review, Spring 1975, Vol. XI, No. 2, p. 54.
43. Montgomery, “Immigrant Workers,” op. cit., p. 6.
44. Greenwald, op. cit., pp. 14-16.
45. Stone, op. cit., p. 52.
46. Ibid., p. 50.
47. Montgomery, “Immigrant Workers,” p. I.
48. Stone, op. cit., pp. 53-54.
49. For fuller discussion and documentation, see Brecher and Cos­ tello, op. cit., Chapter 5. Also, Keith Dix, work in progress on wildcat strikes in coal.
50. Stan Weir, “Murder of an Occupation,” unpublished paper,
/PS, January 29, 1976, p. 24.
51. Ibid., p. 15.
52. Ibid., p. 26.
53. Schatz Thesis, op. cit.. p. 190.
54. Ibid.. p. 196.
55. Ibid., pp. 187, 188, 191. A similar use of unions to control competition occurred in the 19th century coal industry.
56. Ibid., pp. 198-199, 201,203.
57. Montgomery, “Whose Standards,” op. cit.
58. Joan Greenbaum, “Major Themes in the Changing Labor Proc- ess in the Computer Field,” Ph.D. dissertation, 1978.
59. Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, op. cit., pp. 44-45.
60. Montgomery, “Whose Standards,” op. cit.
61. Schatz Thesis, op. cit.
62. Ibid.
63. Stone, op. cit., p. 71. For an extended discussion of seniority, see Schatz and Montgomery, “Facing Layoffs,” in Radical America, May 1976.
64. Weir, “Informal Workers Control,” op. cit., p. 60.
65. Ibid.. p. 63-64.
66. Weir, “Murder of an Occupation,” op. cit., p. 8-9. Due to limi­ tations of space, we have had to omit a discussion of the role played by inherited cultural traditions in structuring work practices. For an important discussion of this aspect of work relations, see Herbert But­ man’s Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America.
67. Montgomery, “Whose Standards,” op. cit.
68. Montgomery, “New Unionism,” op. cit., p. 6.
69. Ibid., p. 23-25. cf. also Palmer, op. cit.
70. Stone, op. cit., p. 45.

71. Ibid., p. 69.
72. For an extended discussion, see Chapter 4 of Brecher and Cos­ tello, op. cit.
73. Montgomery, “New Unionism,” op. cit., p. 15.
74. Montgomery, “Immigrant Workers,” op. cit., p. 15.

75. Benson, op. cit., p. 62.
76. Montgomery, “Immigrant Workers,” op. cit., p. 13-14.
77. Walter Licht, paper presented at Organization of American Historians Convention, April 15, 1978, p. 34.

Workshop-Generated or Presented

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