Voice From The Back: We also tell lies (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the July 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

We also tell lies

First we set you free. Now we set new standards. Total freedom. A state rarely achieved and much sought after. For some it’s symbolised by the vastness of the ocean. For others, it’s the call of the open road. At Mazda it’s a guiding philosophy. Which is why we were the only car company . . . After all, nothing should stand between you and total freedom. Advertisement.

Capitalism’s realities

Russia’s foreign debt stood at more than £78 billion in January. Rescheduling delayed repayment until this year, and in 2003 Moscow is due to start paying back the billions borrowed by the Soviet Union. The backlog of unpaid wages has grown inexorably. The private sector owes employees £5.7 billion, while the state sector owes £700 million in wages. The backlog of pensions in both sectors has reached £8.8 billion. Meanwhile, the popular daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported yesterday that the presidential administration was secretly spending millions of pounds on an exclusive leisure centre—including indoor tennis courts, weights and a sauna—inside the Kremlin. Guardian, 2 April.

In case you wondered . . .

. . . the latest initiative from [French Prime Minister] Jospin is a true piece of backward-thinking madness—a proposed 35-hour week to be introduced by 2000. Jospin promises it will ease rocketing unemployment, but it is more likely to exacerbate the problem by hurting the competitiveness of French companies. “The notion of reducing unemployment through a shorter week is just farcical,” says Rob Hayward, senior economist at Bank of America in London. Financial Mail on Sunday, 19 April.

Death merchants

A report by Oxfam singles out Britain as a key player in the small-arms market, exporting to more than 100 countries in the past two years. Despite obsessive official secrecy, it has identified at least 120 British companies involved in the trade. The call for tough controls coincides with threats by the United States to block the export to Britain of more than 14,000 handguns which it believes are to be re-exported to war zones or used in organised crime. In the past year the government has sanctioned at least 11 small-arms export licences to Kenya and at least 20 to Turkey, Oxfam says. In 1995, it estimates, about three-quarters of African countries importing small arms from Britain were suffering political violence and other conflicts. Licences for small arms cover a wide category of weapons, including machine guns, mortars, grenades, shoulder-launched rockets and “chemical irritant” weapons. Guardian, 23 April.

Capitalism needs drugs

In Birmingham there are estimated to be around 22,000 men who are depressed, finding it difficult to motivate themselves to carry on with work, or maintain relationship with their family. But a new prescription anti-depressant drug called Edionax which works on replacing a substance in the brain called noradrenaline is offering new hope. Evening Mail, 24 April.

Drugs make profits

The government is attempting to block a Brussels move to cut the price of medicines. Its motive is to protect the multi-billion-pound profits earned by the UK’s drugs industry. Lord Simon, Minister for trade and Competitiveness in Europe, will defend Britain’s drugmakers at a key meeting of trade ministers that he is chairing next month. He fears that relaxing drug price controls in the European Union would unleash a flood of cheap imports into Britain from southern Europe, slashing profits for UK drug companies . . . It would bring down the prices that the National Health Service pays for pharmaceuticals to the cheaper levels of Spain and Italy. Financial Mail on Sunday, 26 April.

Inherently unstable

In the 10 months since the Asian economic crisis first burst on us, Asian governments have so far managed to contain the anger of their peoples. The crisis itself, and the measures which the West and the world’s financial institutions insisted were necessary to deal with it, have brought bankruptcy, unemployment, and privation on a large scale to societies which only a little time ago thought they had joined the ranks of the world’s winners. How, with the first deaths in Indonesian rioting, which had until now kept this side of serious street violence, and with the confrontation between government and labour in South Korea, a period of increased danger has obviously begun. Guardian, 7 May.

Doing time

BBC researchers in London are looking for three Birmingham volunteers to help make a TV programme about time . . . BBC researcher Mick Conefrey said: “We are interested in people who would be willing to try out time management techniques. People often say there isn’t enough time in the day but now there are people who say ‘yes there is’ and they will show you how to use it.” Mr Conefrey said that American companies were “really obsessed” with time management techniques. British firms were now becoming interested, he added. Evening Mail, 8 May.

How succinct!

We’re meant to accept that in this post-communist (or, as I prefer to think of it, pre-communist) world nothing comes for free, and everything has its price. Julie Burchill, Guardian Weekend, 28 February.

Marx in modern times (1979)

Book Review from the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labor and Monopoly Capital, by Harry Braverman. Monthly Review Press, 1974. (£3.25)

Labor and Monopoly Capital is a most remarkable book, providing the answer to the criticisms, alleged refutations and revisions of Marxism.

Carrying on from Marx’s own description of the transformation of the labour process by manufacture in Volume I of Capital (manufacture begins when the tool is driven by a machine) Braverman gives the first detailed historical study of the continuation of the process in its hot bed, the United States of America.

Our author, by the way, is in the best tradition of the worker-writer. Unlike Professors of Sociology, who do nothing but lecture students and conduct “surveys” (ask people their opinions of themselves) Harry Braverman is a skilled coppersmith who spent seven years or so working as a craftsman in the shipyards. While this does not necessarily make him right, it does make him interesting! He knows what he writes about, from books and from life.

He explains that the way to increase relative surplus value is to break down the labour process into the tiniest possible detail, transferring from the productive worker the last vestige of any kind of decision about size, shape, weight, material to the “office”. The worker can now be watched and timed, every moment being closely studied and recorded. This is the famous Taylor system of scientific management. Braverman recounts from Taylor’s own book The Principles of Scientific Management how he raised the handling of pig iron at the Bethlehem Steel Company from 12½ to 47 tons per man per day, with a 60 per cent increase in wages. They studied the men intently before selecting the first victim, “a little Dutchman”. The following dialogue ensued: 

“You see that pile of pig iron?”
“Yes”
“Well, if you are a high priced man you will load that pig iron on that car for $1.85 [the standard rate was $1.15]. “You will do exactly as this man tells you. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk—you walk; when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. And you do it straight through the day. But no back-talk — understand!”

As Braverman explains, this is the origin of the system of time and motion study now universal in capitalist production. True, now electronic timers, stroboscopic cameras, microphones, television cameras have been added, but the principle is the same (shades of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times).

Increasing Misery

Consequently Braverman is able to show pretty convincingly that Marx’s view regarding the increasing misery, dubbed the “weak point” of his system by so many latter-day critics, is not wrong, but absolutely right in America in 1979. The classic example is the Model T Ford car. With the invention of the now universal conveyor chain assembly line system, Ford was producing by 1925 as many cars in a day as he had in a year.

  But the new technology proved increasingly unpopular. The men walked out in droves; they could pick and choose. So great was labour’s distaste for the new system, that when the company wanted 100 men, it had to hire 963.

The Legend of Henry Ford, page 149.

However, once the conveyor belt system had spread to other plants the workers could not pick and choose: they were shackled to the assembly line.

Perhaps the author’s greatest achievement, in addition to showing the degradation of the craftsman to an automaton, is his shattering debunking of that sacred cow of American sociology, the “white collar worker”. How many gallons of ink, scores of surveys, dozens of graphs, have analysed the status of the so-called Management Sector?

From official sources, Braverman shows how the “white collar” worker in America today is actually paid below the wage rates of “blue collar” workers. The explanation given is that those very same methods of scientific management (Taylorism) have now invaded the office. The process of dividing all mental effort from the craftsman’s work has attacked the managers and their staffs.

  If one ascribes to the millions of present day clerical workers-the “middle class” of a long vanished clerical stratum of early capitalism, the result can only be a drastic misconception of modern society. Yet this is exactly the practice of academic sociology and popular journalism.
  [In the office] the productive processes of society disappear in a stream of paper, moreover, which is processed in a continuous flow line like that of a cannery, the meat packing line or the car assembly conveyor, by workers organised in much the same way.
  Time and motion study reveal just as startling results in the ordinary details of clerical work as they do in the factory . . . since every motion involves consumption of physical energy, why should not analysis result in the discovery of a mass of useful effort in clerical work, just as it does in the factory.
(Lee Galloway, Office Work, its Principles and Practice)

Braverman quotes from the Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards of the Systems and Procedures Association of America such gems as

           

          Chair Activity                   Minutes

Get up from chair                 .033
Sit down in chair                 .033
Turn in chair                         .009
Move in chair to adjoin desk .080

Similar times are given for cut with scissors, rubber stamping, collating, gather, lay aside, handle, punch, staple, and so on.

New Division of Labour

With the invention of the Hollerith punched card system a means of reading and interpreting simple data without direct human participation was available. Information is now stored by electric impulses, with the result that the magnetic disc-pack can store 29 million characters. These can be transferred to or from a computer at the rate of 186,000 characters a second. The computer introduces a new division of labour, the largest single new occupation being that of key punch operator.

  Mrs. Duncan described all key punch girls as nervous wrecks. Mrs. Calvin reported the same kind of tension. “If you tap one of them on the shoulder when she is working, she’ll fly through the ceiling. Although the girls do not quit, they stay home frequently and keep supplies of tranquillisers and aspirins at their desk”; they felt they were doing a factory job, “frozen” to their desk like an assembly line.

(Automation in the Office, Hoos)

The vice president of an insurance company, pointing to a room tilled with key punch operators, remarked “All they need is a chain”. Said one operator: “This job is no different from a factory job, except that I don’t gel paid as much”.

Typists' Pool Eliminated

With the use of the modern word processor the typists pool is eliminated. The other functions of the secretary are taken over by an “administrative support centre”, which handles filing, phone answering and postings. Thus Lewis Corey could write “a typical large office is now nothing but a white collar factory.”

  The problem of the so-called employees, or white collar workers, which so bothered early generations of Marxists, and which was hailed by the anti-Marxists as proof of the falsity of the ‘proletarianisation’ theses, has thus been unambiguously clarified by the polarisation of office employment, and the growth at one pole of an immense mass of wage workers. The apparent trend to a large non-proletarian ‘middle class’ has resolved itself into the creation of a large proletariat in a new form.

This is a book in which the problems of the so-called middle class, ‘‘increased misery", polarisation, automation, are dealt with on strictly Marxian lines . It has the further merit of being written in clear, limpid style of easy flowing English.

Horatio

Productivity deals (1970)

Book Review from the June 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Employers’ Offensive: Productivity Deals and How to Fight Them, by T. Cliff, Pluto Press. 6s.

In the preface to his new book on productivity deals Tony Cliff tells us that it is intended as a handbook to enable shop stewards to understand and resist offers of productivity deals. He regards such offers as “part of a major offensive by the employing class of this country to shift the balance of forces in industry permanently in their direction”.

This book is a continuation of Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards which T. Cliff and C. Barker wrote in 1966. The review of that book in the Socialist Standard (August 1966) ridiculed its claim that out of the shop stewards there would come a new “revolutionary working class movement”. Cliff now admits that we were right and he was wrong — “Life” he says “proved much more complex than the theory put forward”. Specifically he admits that incomes policy did not stop the rise of all wages, it did not provoke general working class resistance “economic, ideological and political”, and there did not arise “a new workers’ movement… overcoming the fragmentation of the working class”.

Nothing daunted, he is having another go. What Incomes Policy failed to achieve he now expects to be achieved by the employers’ campaign for productivity deals. Events will prove him wrong again.

His argument this time is that because of the big increase in the size of investment required for modern industry, the rapidity of technological change and the intensity of foreign competition, capitalism needs to plan years ahead and have long-term control of costs, including wages. The problem is alleged to be particularly great for British capitalism because inflation and the adverse balance of payments lead to “stop-go” and a slower rate of expansion, which in turn raises the cost of production per unit of the products. So the capitalist must have productivity deals which undermine the workers’ shop floor organisation, the shop stewards. This will be resisted with the help of Cliff’s handbook and the new revolutionary movement will emerge.

It will be seen that fate has been very unkind to the author; for about the time his book was being printed the adverse balance of payments was converted into a surplus; also inflation is going on in most other countries too; and productivity deals are going ahead often with the approval of the shop stewards.

One of the author’s errors is to underestimate the resilience of capitalism and the resourcefulness of business managements. Having seen that capitalism would rather like certain things he imagines that there are “musts”; but there is no must about it. Long term wage contracts would be useful to the capitalists but they are not indispensable, especially as employers know by experience that unions have little hesitation about presenting new claims during the life of a contract if circumstances favour this. The situation recently arose in America of the General Electric Company fighting for a one year wage contract while the unions were pressing for three years.

Again, employers would like to be able to enter into long period contracts with buyers to supply at a fixed price, but this is not a matter of life and death. The Shipbuilders and Repairers National Association reports that contracts to build ships are now being drawn up with a clause which allows for some form of price variation to meet unforeseen higher costs (Financial Times, 30 April 1970). Many other firms do the same where completion of the job extends over a long period.

What vitiates much of Cliff’s theorising is that he seems to be quite unaware of the past history of capitalism. He draws hasty conclusions from current events as if nothing very much happened before he came on the scene to observe them.

He tells us for example that in this country it was the Macmillan Government in 1962 which first embarked on an Incomes Policy. It was in fact started in 1948 by the Labour Government when it laid down the principle that there was to be no general increase of wages “unless accompanied by a substantial increase in production”. The same idea was present in the productivity campaign of 1920.

He says that ten years ago productivity bargaining was “a new and strange phenomenon to most workers in British industry”. Little is new about it except the name. The capitalists have always been intent on eliminating unoccupied time and wasted effort from the productive process and workers have always with varying degrees of success, resisted: it and tried to bargain about it. The basic attitude of the employers has always been the same as it is now, to try to get all the benefits of increased productivity themselves. Marx, in Volume I of Capital (Chapter XXI), dealing with the bitter struggles over piece work wages and the workers’ attempts to get higher rates in line with increased productivity and profits, ended the chapter with the following:

  “The capitalist . . . declares roundly that the productiveness of labour does not concern the labourer at all.”

Many of the present productivity deals are concerned with the worker giving up trade union restrictive practices for a wage increase. In the first world war workers were unwisely induced by appeals to their patriotism to give up trade union practices and accept dilution, getting in return only a pledge that after the war what had been given up would be restored. When that time came the workers were not in a position to make the pledge stick and, as Sidney Webb tersely remarked in his History of Trade Unionism “Trade unionists were on the whole ‘done'”.

Cliff has a good deal to say about Work Study (Measured Day Work) and job evaluation. Here again there is little new except that the methods have become more elaborate. Nearly half a century ago factory workers were bitterly resisting employers’ attempts to introduce the Bedaux system of unit measurement (the work expected of a worker in one minute). Job evaluation was years old when in 1955 it was formally introduced in the Civil Service. It was being used in a rough and ready way by the Post Office at the end of the nineteenth century and the Post Office long ago developed its own system of units of work to adjust the numbers of staff to the volume of traffic.

There is one superficial change concerning wage bargaining brought about by years of inflation. For a quarter of a century governments have more or less continuously run a policy of depreciating the currency, with the consequence of an abnormal rise of prices and the cost of living. They have done this as part of their belief that they were thereby securing “full employment”. A rising cost of living is politically unpopular so the governments have also strenuously sought to offset some of the rise by finding ways to increase productivity per worker (Reducing the amount of labour required to produce commodities). As in this situation employers could count on getting continuously rising prices for what they sold they were content to put up a more or less token resistance to wage increases required to keep up with the cost of living, offering their real resistance to increases beyond that level, just as when Marx wrote about it a century or more ago. Official figures for 1969 give a revealing picture of what happens.

“Wages and salaries alone rose by 7 and half per cent; but this increase was reduced to 5 and half per cent by higher personal tax payments and national insurance contributions. Most of the remaining 5 and half per cent rise in personal disposable income was offset by higher prices . . . “ (Financial Times, 9 April 1970.)

The workers would be on sound ground in resisting all attempts to intensify their work or worsen its conditions and should always try to get the highest wage possible in the circumstances of the time, the strike, or threatened strike being the one way to test the possibilities. Cliff turns this simple proposition into something needlessly complicated. He produces a handbook for conducing productivity bargaining but declares himself to be “bitterly and unalterably opposed” to such deals. Then he hedges by saying that you can’t just say no to an employers’ offer, and by directing his fire against “derisory” offers and ones which give only “a few miserable shillings”. His real reason why shop stewards cannot just say no is that many workers want such deals and if the shop stewards take a negative attitude they isolate themselves from the workers.

One of his recommendations is that shop stewards should “invent” restrictive practices the abandonment of which will be of no value to employers and then sell these to the employers for wage increases. It is open to question whether the employers’ negotiators are so easily deceived but if Cliff believes them to be that naive it is for him to justify making these tricks public. Certainly the point was taken by Peter Jay who reviewed the book in the Times (25 March 1970) for he recommends to “any business executive who expects to be engaged in negotiating productivity deals” to get a copy and “know your enemy”.

Cliff is a firm believer in leadership as against the Socialist principle that working class emancipation requires the understanding of the workers themselves. He believes however, that the “natural leaders” of the workers are the shop stewards and other “floor” representatives and not the national trade union leaders.

His case against national trade union leaders and for shop stewards is that the national leaders get out of touch with their members, but he then admits that many of the shop floor representatives also “get completely divorced from their base”. Without knowing that he is doing so he actually shows how little use his “good” leaders are for they cannot act beyond the understanding of the workers; he grants “that a trade union leader can’t be expected to march 10 miles ahead of his membership”, and, as already remarked, he admits that unless shop stewards fall in with workers’ support for productivity deals they become “isolated”.

One of his proposals for reforming the trade unions is that “union officials should get the same rate of pay as the average members”. This is a question that occupied the unions as soon as the need arose to have full-time officials and to many trade unionists. Cliff’s proposal looks a useful one. It was being propagated nearly half a century ago by an organisation of trade union office staffs. It is practicable for unions of comparatively highly paid workers and something of this kind is operated by some unions. But where the membership is of low paid workers it can be quite impracticable. For example, in the agricultural workers union, which has its head office near the centre of London, it would mean that the full-time officials would be paid considerably less than their clerks and shorthand typists because it would be quite impossible to recruit staffs in Central London at the wage of an agricultural worker.

In any event it is misdirected. What is of much more importance is that union membership should see to it that they formulate policy themselves and insist on officials and executives and shop stewards carrying it out.

Cliff’s book is dotted with references to Socialism and the abolition of capitalism but without any real understanding of what Socialism implies — on occasion he indicates that he thinks state capitalism (nationalisation) is Socialism. Emancipation is not going to be achieved by non-Socialists led by shop stewards because it requires a Socialist working class getting control of the machinery of government.

So little does he understand the futility of putting a party of capitalism in control of the machinery of government that he and his organisation (“International Socialists”) were telling the workers to support Labour candidates at the last two elections — and are doing so again at this one. His book is not going to achieve the new revolutionary working class he anticipates.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Passing Show: Details (1962)

The Passing Show Column from the November 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Details

The system which exists today in Russia is clearly capitalism. All the classic features of capitalism are there — commodity production, wage-labour, employment (which couldn't exist without employers and employed), currency, the coercive forces of the state, and so on. Naturally, the historical background of the development of capitalism in Russia, and the immediate circumstances in which capitalism came into being there, meant that some minor details of capitalism in Russia differ from details in those countries where capitalism had a longer and slower development. In particular, the very speed with which the old system collapsed, and the new one was introduced, demanded that the state itself, the central committee of the capitalist class, should play a much larger part in the establishment of the new order than it had done in western Europe and North America. Of course, since that time state capitalism has been more and more introduced into the older-established capitalist states; but it has not yet, and one does not know if it ever will, come to play such a part in Western capitalism as it does in the capitalist systems established in Russia, China, India, the African states, and so on.

Proposals

However, even in these comparatively minor details, there is coming to be less and less difference between Russian and Western capitalism. Not only are state planning and control playing a larger part in western capitalism; other changes are being mooted in Russia itself. As The Times said on October 3rd, “Proposals are at present under discussion in Russia to link the remuneration of workers to the profits made by their enterprises in relation to the investments made in them.” Since these and other proposals have aroused controversy, Pravda has recently printed what it calls "a previously unpublished version of a document dictated by Lenin in 1918.”

Raising labour productivity

“Lenin argued that political victory over the capitalists had been won and the struggle was passing to the economic sphere. Those who had formerly sought to sabotage the Bolshevik cause were now (in 1918) offering their services to the new state. It was of the utmost importance to take advantage of these offers and harness to the communist cause the best methods and systems of capitalism. “He proposed that highly paid experts be hired from the United States and elsewhere as consultants and managers. Bourgeois staff and also their methods of labour organization could be used if they helped to raise production. The old world had created systems of labour organization which were diabolical methods for exploiting the worker. At the same time these systems are ‘the last word in the scientific organization of production' and should be copied in the Soviet Union where they would lose their noxious character.

“An example was the system of Mr. Mr. F. W. Taylor, the American engineer who perfected “scientific management”—on which present day time-and-motion studies and “work study” are to a large extent based. “We must apply Taylor’s system and American scientific methods of raising labour productivity throughout Russia,” Lenin wrote, for under Soviet conditions it would lead to a shortening of working hours and an improvement in conditions of work.” The Times 3/10/62

Latest methods

All Lenin was calling for was what could have been expected from any leader of a new capitalist revolution: the application of the latest and best methods (best, that is, from the capitalists’ point of view) which had been evolved in the older capitalist states. As might have been foreseen, when Lenin attempted to square all this with his own statements that the Bolsheviks were really introducing Socialism in Russia, common sense was thrown overboard. Pravda even quotes him as saying that “Socialism has to be learnt to a great extent from the leaders of the trusts, Socialism has to be learnt from the major organizers of capitalism.”

As to that, one can only say that all you can learn from the major organizers of capitalism is how to organize capitalism; and all you can learn from the leaders of trusts is how to lead trusts.

These statements, quoted by Pravda from the greatest figure of the Russian revolution, must surely go far to convince anyone who is still open to reason that Russia is capitalist.

Contrast

On the back of The Times recently there were some photographs of scenes in Peru, and the text beside them read “Peru is a land of contrast and anomaly. It is a rich country where there are also austerity and poverty.”

No wonder there is a saying that the onlooker sees most of the game. The writer of the text saw clearly the social position in Peru. Perhaps if he lived in Peru, he would see just as clearly the “contrast and anomaly,” the riches and poverty side by side, which exist in Britain.

Hard work

Not long ago there was an advert in the daily press from a man who claimed he had amassed £300,000 “through hard work.” As it stands, no one could take exception to the statement. It would be impossible for anyone to amass three hundred thousand pounds without a great deal of hard work.

In fact, only one question remains unanswered.

Whose hard work was it?

Alwyn Edgar

Mixed Media: The Pajama Game (2015)

The Mixed Media Column from the April 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Pajama Game, a Broadway musical comedy was produced last year at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London’s West End directed by Richard Eyre. The musical originally opened in 1954 and is based on the 1953 novel 7½ Cents by Richard Bissell, who had worked as a manager in the family’s pajama factory in Dubuque, Ohio.

The musical is set at the Sleep-Tite Pajama Factory in 1950s Mid-West America where the majority of the workers are women. In this period 35 percent of the American workforce belonged to a Union, and 29 percent of the workforce were women while in 1952 unemployment stood at only 3 percent (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics).

It is a story of Capital and Labor where the workers in the pajama factory demand a 7½ cents an hour pay-rise. Bissell described the shop floor: ‘the sewing machines are working out themes by Stravinsky: it’s warm and lively: the blonde table tops gleam; the needles are punching their way to glory, 4,500 stitches a minute. Telephones are ringing, the elevator gate is banging.’ (7½ Cents) In The Pajama Game the new factory Superintendent Sid Sorokin falls in love with his adversary, Union representative ‘Babe’ Williams (Joanna Riding). Babe is a proto-feminist heroine declaring ‘If I needed a man to look after me, I’d kill myself.’

Capital is represented by such numbers as Racing with the Clock where we see factory work and the insistence on ‘Time is Money’, and Think of the Time I Save by Hines, the Time and Motion manager. The 1950s saw Time and Motion studies introduced to industry based on a business efficiency technique combining the Time Study work of Frederick Winslow Taylor with the Motion Study work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Taylor and his colleagues placed emphasis on the content of a fair day’s work, and sought to maximize productivity irrespective of the physiological cost to the worker. The capitalist boss Hasler speaks of ‘profit levels are perniciously low’, and refuses the workers’ demands saying ‘7½ cents will price us out of the market.’

The pajama workers are organised in the Amalgamated Shirt and Pajama Workers of America, and the antagonism between the workers and the bosses is evident in Babe’s words to Sid: ‘your the Superintendent and I’m the Grievance Committee’, and ‘Don’t listen to this man. He’s management.’ The Union say that ‘7½ cents an hour pay-rise is standard in the industry’ and that ‘business is doing well’ so the workers engage in a slow down, and ‘new ways of jamming things up’, it is 7½ cents or a strike. Then it is discovered that 7½ cents had been added to the operating costs six months previously, and Hasler had pocketed the difference.

The pajama workers win their 7½ cents per hour increase in wages and the climax of the musical is the number Seven and a half Cents: ‘Seven and a half cents doesn’t buy a hell of a lot, Seven and a half cents doesn’t mean a thing! But give it to me every hour, forty hours every week, and that’s enough for me to be living like a king! That’s enough for me to get an automatic washing machine, a year’s supply of gasoline, carpeting for the living room, a vacuum instead of a blasted broom, not to mention a forty inch television set! I’ll have myself a buying spree.’

In the 1950s the working class are bought off in capitalism with consumerism. John Bugas, Ford Motor Company boss coined the term ‘consumerism’ as a substitute for ‘capitalism’ to better describe the American economy in a 1955 speech: ‘The term ‘consumerism’ would pin the tag where it actually belongs – on Mr. Consumer, the real boss and beneficiary of the American system. It would pull the rug right out from under our unfriendly critics who have blasted away so long and loud at capitalism. Somehow, I just can’t picture them shouting: ‘Down with the consumers!’

Consumerism in capitalism was critiqued early on when economist Victor Lebow wrote in 1955 ‘Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate’ (Journal of Retailing), and in Vance Packard’s 1960 book The Waste Makers, ‘consumerism’ is changed from a positive word about consumer practices to a negative word meaning excessive materialism and waste.

For socialists, modern capitalism manufactures false desires with advertising, the glorification of accumulated capital, and the abstraction and reification of experiences of authentic life into commodities and passivity which become the concrete manufacture of alienation.

Steve Clayton

"Bedaux" and the Workers (1937)

From the December 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

Charles E. Bedaux is the inventor of the high-pressure system which bears his name. For many years the system has been well known among workers, who mistrust and detest it. Recently, Mr. Bedaux was to have "managed” a tour by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to U.S.A. On November 3rd, the Baltimore branch of the American Federation of Labour passed a resolution strongly condemning the tour, and this was followed by other resolutions. In 1916 a company, was formed to exploit the Bedaux system, with headquarters in New York and branches throughout the world. The company pays a highly respectable dividend. Bedaux, who began life as a semi-skilled worker, now employs a large income in extravagant and expensive tastes.

According to the official account, the “ Bedaux” principle is a means of measuring human power in terms of a common unit. This unit is christened “B,” and equals so many seconds of work and so many seconds of rest, always totaling one minute. The “rest” is by no means actual but only that natural relaxation of effort which, as part of a process, allows work to proceed. The completion of a certain job requires so much “work and rest,” i.e., a certain number of B’s. Sixty B’s per hour is regarded as normal, and Bedaux engineers calculate from observations of factory conditions how much work and rest on an average would make up one B in order that there may be sixty B’s per hour.

The method by which the investigators manage their computation is, however, a closely guarded secret. The Trades Union Congress, in their inquiry, remark:—

   As regards the assessment of the B.’s. it must be said that in the opinion of experts in industrial psychology the task undertaken by the Bedaux engineers is an impossible one. There is no known method of calculating the unit of work (in this sense) scientifically. It is not a question of merely measuring physical effort. It is rather a problem of measuring physical and mental effort undertaken in complex and varying circumstances. It is impossible to evaluate such a unit scientifically, and the Bedaux claim in this respect must be dismissed as unsound."—(“Bedaux,” Trades Union Congress, page 11.)

One thing is certain, that such a unit will be chosen as will in practice reduce running costs, and substantiate Bedaux’s claims to the capitalist. The “ expert "engineers" are sometimes unaware of the specific factory conditions, and the times set are difficult or unworkable; with the result that workers complain or resist. When their opposition is successful, a lower “B” unit is set up after “investigation." The high-flown claims of the system to scientific accuracy become, therefore, nothing more than mere trial and error carried out at the expense of the workers; the usual factory practice of finding out just how much the workers will stand. Moreover, since the Bedaux engineers are highly paid, the management is anxious to hurry the job, which increases the inaccuracy. In recent years the engineers have also advised on factory management, etc., with a view to higher efficiency and speeding-up.

Wages are based on a basic hourly rate. The Bedaux system is said to guarantee to workers this rate based on sixty B's per hour. But it is obvious that once a “norm" has been established, any workers who fall below that productive level are not retained. Those who do more than sixty B's per hour receive a bonus, but only seventy-five per cent, of the normal rate. The remaining twenty-five per cent, is paid to indirect labour— partly foremen and overseers, who thus have a direct incentive to speeding-up.

It is plain that, when applied in the workshop, the system becomes deeply intricate. Usually (unless as sometimes occurs, a worker is trained specially to check up the pay sheets) the staff are dependent on the employer’s good faith. This is the worker’s first and most natural resentment— that the, system is unintelligible. The boss may be “doing” him. A deeper grievance is in the nature of the intensive speeding-up, required by the maintenance of a normal rate. Not only does this increase the strain, mental and physical, endured by the worker, so that only the youngest and fittest survive, but also sets up a sense of conflict between workers themselves.

On November 6th the Daily Express reported a visit to an East End factory. One of the workers, aged twenty, said to their correspondent: “The Bedaux system is all right in some ways. But we were more contented before. Now we are always arguing with one another over little things. We work so quickly that small things upset us.”

Another worker in the same factory said: ”. . . I would sooner work as we did before. It seems to make the time go quickly, but we are not all friends any more. We were always laughing and singing and happy-go-lucky. Now we have time for nothing—but cross words.” This rosy view of the past is perhaps exaggerated; but both workers reveal what Bedaux means to the workers in nervous weariness and strain.

Workers become more than ever before cogs in a machine. There is no room here for a worker taking pride in his work. He will probably be discharged as too slow, and increase the number of those whom reorganisation has already thrown out of work. Bedaux claims that employment is increased by its introduction. This may apply to a particular worker, or even factory, but it is patently untrue over industry as a whole. This, of course, applies equally to every other. “efficiency” system.

A number of cases are quoted in the T.U.C. pamphlet referred to above, in which trades unions opposed the introduction to Bedaux, and in many cases concessions were obtained. The pamphlet adds, however: “It is not suggested that in those cases where the system thus modified has been accepted that there is any enthusiasm or even approval for this method of wage payment."

The reaction of the trades unions in U.S.A. to a tour organised by Charles E. Bedaux is therefore understandable. In England, where the system has sold less well, there have been strikes against its introduction at Norwich, Wolverhampton, Acton, Leicester, Silvertown, Birmingham, and elsewhere.

Essentially the Bedaux system, apart from certain special features, is a piece-work system, concealed behind a complicated theoretical structure. Its attractiveness to certain capitalists is in the results achieved. Productivity per worker, according to the Bedaux Co., Ltd., has risen in many cases from fifty to-seventy-five per cent., and sometimes to over 100 per cent. Workers' earnings, however, lag behind with an increase of ten to twenty per cent. (New Statesman and Nation, November 13th, 1937). The system is plainly one in which high organisation plays the part of additional labour-saving machinery, exploiting the worker more fully than would otherwise be possible. In the meantime, British Bedaux, Ltd., with a capital of £300,000, makes profits averaging nearly £50,000 a year. First and foremost, Messrs. Bedaux, Ltd., is a business house engaged in making profits for the shareholders.

By holding out to workers the inducement of higher-wages it saps their health and energies in an orgy of production. Labour laws and agreements, notwithstanding, the capitalist has succeeded, by methods more subtle than ever before, in extracting the last ounce from the worker before he is scrapped, no longer able to keep up the pace.

C. Kilner