Greenbaum states in her preface that her children accused her of complaining about old jobs, and then complaining when they were taken away. She assures the reader that she is going to avoid such complaints in Windows on the Workplace, but in my opinion, she fails. She neglects to present a solution to problems with modern jobs.
Braverman abhors the over-division of labor. He complains that tasks are broken into more and more specialized tasks, which allows management more control over the work process. Super-division of labor stifles creativity of the worker, allows management to drive the worker to work faster, and so on and so forth. Tasks in the past were very divided; indeed, there were separate workers to answer a phone, type a document, or sort the mail. However, in recent days, many workers are expected to take on more than one of these tasks. Workers must perform less-divided tasks. Workers rejoice, right?
Greenbaum points out many issues with less-divided labor. Admittedly her focus is on technology and its effects on work, but a major focus is how workers are expected to complete more diverse tasks. According to Greenbaum, this is erasing jobs and displacing workers who find themselves suddenly underskilled and unable to compete in the current job market. This may be a result of uber-division of labor, but Greenbaum wonders what happens if workers are asked to complete more and more varied tasks. Furthermore, she provides no solutions for problems with labor.
The sad fact of the matter is that any form of labor presents a problem. Divided labor is boring, controlled, and exploitative; undivided labor is stressful, competitive, and leaves many workers out of a job. People have disliked aspects of their jobs since the beginning of time. And while our current labor system has problems, and may not be the best system; I guarantee that whatever the next system is, people will have endless complaints about it.
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Jess, I don't know what I would do without your refreshing cynicism grounding us in reality day after day. I too liked that quote from Greenbaum's work, and I too believe that people will continue to gripe about whatever it is society forces them to do to make a living. Complaining is just what we do; we seem to think it makes us feel better.
ReplyDeleteAs I said in my blog entry, though, it may also be the case that in the presence of highly advanced technology humanity will come full-circle back around to an existence where a high percentage of workers are artisians or even just artists. In other words, I think the present state of widespread boring, factory-style work is just a phase that humanity will grow out of when computers can do it all for us. It took us 200 years to figure out how to run an assembly line and to automate it fully is taking another 200 years; after that, who knows? We might all just go play water-polo.