Imagine a World Where People Love Their Jobs

via AlterNet:



Guernica Magazine / By Rochelle Gurstein

Imagine a World Where People Love Their Jobs
With 15 million men and women unemployed, the first step to fixing the job crisis is re-imagining what Americans should be working on in the first place.

April 18, 2010 |


When the Ford Motor Company opened in 1903, “jack-of-all trades” mechanics were needed to build the first cars. This kind of labor still belonged to the craft tradition—“worthy work” that required skill, knowledge, and experience obtained through years of apprenticeship. The work was varied and interesting and carried with it, as William Morris once put it, “the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.” In the face of growing demand for the Model T, however, the knowledge and experience of mechanics were found to be expendable. To increase productivity, Ford’s managers broke up the craft of building cars into its constituent parts; highly skilled mechanics found themselves turned into mere assemblers, reduced to performing an ever more limited set of tasks.

By 1910, these once-independent craftsmen refused to accept what they experienced as the mind-numbing and degrading division of their labor and began to walk off the job. During the next few years, Ford took even more extreme measures to step up production, instituting the endless-chain conveyor system; car assemblies now moved past fixed stations where men carried out ever more simple, repetitive operations. Again, these men registered their revulsion at this systematic destruction of their knowledge and skill by walking off the job, this time in droves. “It was apparent,” writes Keith Sward in his The Legend of Henry Ford, “that the Ford Motor Co. had reached the point of owning a great factory without having enough workers to keep it humming.” For the year 1913 alone, the employee turnover rate reached 380 percent. “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system,” Sward reports, “that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.”

This crisis only intensified when the Industrial Workers of the World began a unionization drive of Ford workers during the summer of that same year. To put down both threats, Ford introduced his much-trumpeted five dollars a day. Harry Braverman, in his groundbreaking Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974), questions whether even this pay rate, which was almost double that of Ford’s competitors, would have kept the men on the job had there been any other viable options for skilled mechanics. But there were not; by this time, competing manufacturers, in an effort to keep pace with Ford’s increased output, had also forced the assembly line on their skilled mechanics, thus wiping out all alternative modes of work in the burgeoning car industry. Ford’s workers had no choice but to stay put and their union representatives began their long fight for concessions from management. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/vision/146484/imagine_a_world_where_people_love_their_jobs

And there are MBA's and chop shop lawyers being pumped out of America's schools to do just that. Sell it all.


Gordon Gekko: "Greed is good."

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The American workplace in this day and age seems to me like a rigid militaristic hierarchy. These days you can treat people any way you want by justifying it as a business decision.

I also think that sycophants are the personality type that make it up the management ladder these days. A hierarchy of brown nosers. Insecure small people in charge of managing people more capable than they are.

This scenario is exacerbated during a recession, where they treat you like they got you by the balls and you both know it.

We are not back to sweatshops in America yet. What we have now is climate controlled sweatshops where the workers are there "at will".

Like George Carlin has said; "They don't want critical thinkers, they only want people just smart enough to keep the machines running for them."

I answered to an empty suit manager and it made me loose respect for the rest of management that they would leave such a zero in such a visible position. I got laid off last February, possibly because I could not always hide my utter contempt for my boss. It was my responsibility for getting axed. I had made my mind up many years earlier I would not spend my workday in fear of my job.

-90% jimmy

all four were "craft jobs".

People working two jobs, not enough time to rest, relax, sleep, make friends, cook dinner, interact with the spouse or the kids. Adults that are always terrified of the boss. Most people live in a total fog of sleep deprivation. Living on caffeine, sugar and panic.

I've been there. I got to where I hated humanity and lawyers in particular.

Epidemics of autoimmune diseases, like hypothyroidism, lupus, chronic fatigue, glands that just stop working -- diabetes, adrenal fatigue, etc.

Me personally, it's been quite a few years since I dropped out of the work force and just stopped looking, but I can still sleep 13 hours straight with no problem. I think it's adrenal fatigue and a dead thyroid I've carried around for 45 years (and is being treated).