Anarchy 47/Towards freedom in work

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Towards
freedom
in work

JAMES GILLESPIE

The heart of this essay is the idea of free work in fel­low­ship, and it can be il­lus­trated simply from the prac­tice:

  In an elec­trical com­pon­ents fact­ory we had trouble plan­ning for smooth flow of com­pon­ents and bal­an­cing of oper­a­tions. Out­put varied con­sider­ably from one oper­ator to another. Mon­day’s out­put was some 25% lower than out­put on Thurs­day which was the clos­ing day of the bonus week, and work dis­cip­line was only fair. After some study a group bonus sys­tem was de­signed and the out­line, mean­ing and pur­pose of this was put to the group which was then left to dis­cuss it among its mem­bers, (free group dis­cus­sion). The girls agreed to have a trial and they were then in­vited to check the base times set per oper­a­tion, (group par­ti­ci­pa­tion in method). The sys­tem was intro­duced with the quick re­sult that the group mem­bers so or­gan­ised them­selves that the flow of work was greatly im­proved, dis­cip­line im­proved as a result of in­ternal group con­trols, and out­put in­creased by about 12% over that pre­vi­ously at­tained under the indi­vidual piece­work sys­tem. (Here the group took over the local man­age­ment func­tion of in­ternal work pro­gres­sing and, more im­port­ant, that of local man-manage­ment).

  But inter­est­ing though the fig­ures given are, the heart of the mat­ter for me was in the group’s at­ti­tude to a girl called Mary, whose out­put, I pointed out, was some 16% lower than the group av­er­age. I was met with the ant­ag­on­istic group re­join­der that Mary was a nice girl. This pro­foundly true eval­u­a­tion by the group of the worth of qual­ities like kind­ness and good­ness cuts across the mot­iv­a­tional fab­ric of our modern cul­ture, and it is a state­ment of values I have found in nearly all small groups who work closely to­gether. I knew that Mary was un­wit­tingly the “group psy­chi­at­rist”, but were I a poet it would take an epic pen to tell that here was a guid­ing candle­light in the dark waste­land of our

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ma­ter­i­al­ist cul­ture. In terms of pro­duc­tion ef­fi­ciency, indi­vidual cost, and export-import bal­ance, Mary is a dead loss whose vir­tues are not en­tered in the com­mer­cial stat­ist­i­cian’s re­ports; but the Mary’s are the sym­bols of the riches of small com­mun­ity liv­ing in which good­ness and kind­ness are highly re­warded, whereas our eco­nomic cul­ture highly re­wards indi­vid­u­al­ist ac­quis­it­ive­ness and ego­centric power and status seek­ing. In terms of indi­vid­u­al­istic cost­ing, based on indi­vid­u­al­ist in­cent­ive schemes, the Mary’s are a costly bur­den, but in terms of over­all group ef­fi­ciency, Mary was a lub­ric­ant factor without which the group could not, would not, have reached and main­tained its state of high pro­duct­ive ef­fect­ive­ness. This ef­fect­ive­ness was a result of a situ­a­tion in which the group shared work and the re­ward of work with en­cour­age­ment of co-oper­a­tion and mu­tual aid, and with group ac­claim of indi­vid­u­al ma­ter­ial and spir­it­ual con­trib­u­tions.

  We use the so­cial-psycho­lo­gical term “group”, but our little group was more than an eco­nomic group dom­in­ated by eco­nomic self-inter­est. Be­cause the group mem­bers con­sciously recog­nised the whole worth of each per­son in the group, there was a fel­low­ship (com­munis), or, it may be said, a fel­low­ship group. Later it will be shown that free work and fel­low­ship are the twin com­pon­ents of indi­vidual growth towards per­sonal matur­ity.

  Tens of thou­sands of kind-hearted Mary’s are vic­tims of our ma­ter­ial­ist cul­ture which of­fers high re­wards for some of the basest hu­man char­ac­ter­ist­ics and penal­ises some of the best through the stu­pefied at­tach­ment of both man­agers and man­aged to indi­vid­u­al­ist­ic rat­ings and re­wards:

Sweet Mary your production’s poor,

Just dry your tears and go,

For speed and greed are rated high,

But love-for-others, no.

Christ! Where’s the electrician?

Our lamps are burning low!

  The il­lus­tra­tion given de­scribes in simple form the group con­tract sys­tem in which the group shares work and the re­wards of work, and has a share in de­ci­sion-making within the local work en­vir­on­ment, a func­tion which hitherto was in the sole field of man­age­ment. The il­lus­tra­tion also touches on the free or in­formal group dis­cus­sion sys­tem which has been in use dur­ing the past fifteen years in a num­ber of com­panies, and in which de­ci­sion-making is shared on a wider level than in the group con­tract sys­tem.

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Man Citi­zen and Man Worker

  Deci­sion-making, ac­cord­ing to ortho­dox man­age­ment the­ory is the sole func­tion of man­age­ment; why is it, then, that the prim­ary or non-man­aging worker is not a sig­ni­fic­ant de­ci­sion-maker in work life, but in so­cial life is a re­spons­ible citi­zen who, when he votes for who shall

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rep­res­ent him at local and na­tional level, shares in de­ci­sion-making in a co­gent man­ner? Why is it, too, that in work life the chief de­pend­ence is on money re­wards and pen­al­ties to gain be­ha­viour which is con­form­ist to the eco­nomic code of laws, whereas in so­cial life, the large ma­jor­ity of laws are un­writ­ten and de­pend­ence for their oper­a­tion is on free con­sent or morale in the part of the citi­zen? True, the state is lim­it­ing the field of citi­zen free de­ci­sion-making, citi­zen free choice, as cent­ral­ised plan­ning in­creases, but it is never­the­less true that man-worker and man-citi­zen is split schizo­phrenic-wise in a man­ner which in­evit­ably makes for ant­agon­ism be­tween work life and leisure life, and de­grades both. Man-worker is work con­scious (class con­scious?), but as work life is the im­port­ant, money-earn­ing as­pect of living, man-citi­zen oc­cu­pies a sec­ond­ary posi­tion and his work-con­scious­ness enters strongly into so­cial life with con­sequent “anti-social be­ha­viour that seems like black­mail” but, at root, is likely to be un­con­scious healthy pro­test against the schizo­phrenic role in the com­mun­ity.

  Now, there is a school of apo­lo­gist thought which sug­gests that re­spons­ible in­dus­trial demo­cracy is at work when op­pos­i­tion takes place be­tween trade un­ions and em­ploy­ers in col­lect­ive bar­gain­ing . This plaus­ible the­ory has, it seems, con­sider­able sup­port at ex­ec­ut­ive level within the trade un­ions, but it is really a kind of verbal­ism; for while free op­pos­i­tion is a char­ac­ter­istic of demo­cracy, so also is de­pend­ence on in­di­vidual citi­zen morale and the spread of in­di­vidual de­ci­sion-making at the bot­tom as well as at the top of the so­cial struc­ture. A worker who is trained to sit cor­rectly in a chair de­signed to pro­mote max­imum out­put, to move his left arm so and his right arm thus, who is clocked in and out of the works and the lavat­ory while en­gaged on con­tinu­ous, re­pet­it­ive pro­duc­tion in which there is no de­ci­sion-making, is cer­tainly not play­ing a re­spons­ible citi­zen role, even though he has big brother argu­ing against his em­ployer on hours of work and wages. De­pend­ence on big brother man­ager and big brother trade union ex­ec­ut­ive is equally neur­otic in a situ­a­tion in which plan­ning is for ma­ter­ial ad­vant­age and not also for self-respect.

  However, this mat­ter of our schiz­oid cul­ture and of plan­ning for every­thing but self-respect was dealt with many years past in Free Ex­pres­sion in In­dus­try and there is no need to labour it here.

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Man­age­ment or Leader­ship in Work?

  There is a quaint idea among man­age­ment con­sult­ants and other ex­perts that man­age­ment in­cor­por­ates lead­er­ship. Indeed, in all modern books on man­age­ment this wish­ful no­tion is cul­tiv­ated. Thus a recent book called The Busi­ness of Man­age­ment makes the state­ment that man­age­ment and lead­er­ship are com­ple­ment­ary, “but they are not the same thing”. In this, as in the ap­pro­pri­ate lit­er­at­ure, ideas on lead­er­ship are hazy; “it is an art that is time­less … it is of the spirit … etc.”, but what­ever lead­er­ship is, it is “an ele­ment in man­age­ment”. Three defin­i­tions, the sec­ond and third from polit­ical sci­ence, may help to clear

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the air:

Man­age­ment:  Man­age­ment is a (so­cially ne­ces­sary) activ­ity ex­pressed in the sci­ence and art of di­rect­ing, or­gan­is­ing and con­trol­ling ma­ter­ial and human factors within the work in­sti­tu­tion with a view to ef­fect­ive and pro­fit­able re­sults. (No-one, I think, will quar­rel with this ortho­dox defin­i­tion of man­age­ment; the “art” men­tioned is the art of lead­er­ship).

Lead­er­ship:  Lead­er­ship is a power activ­ity in which the leader and the led ident­ify in­tern­ally with each other (a “we” feel­ing) and the leader uses his power in a man­ner which ac­cords with the wishes and ex­pres­sions of the led .

  Man­age­ment (apart from the situ­a­tion when one man is both policy-maker and man­ager) is an agency for its prin­cip­als who are the top policy-makers who en­force eco­nomic policy and re­ward or pen­al­ise man­age­ment in terms of re­sults. An agent always iden­ti­fies with his prin­cipal, even when the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is only ex­ternal and is ex­pressed in formal loy­alty. He acts in con­form­ity with the pur­pose and policy of his prin­cipal. Make no mis­take, it is not said here that all man­agers iden­tify in­tern­ally with their prin­cip­als (a “we” feel­ing), al­though formal al­le­giance at least is ex­pected. But if man­age­ment iden­ti­fies with its prin­cip­als, as it must, where is the sup­posed iden­ti­fi­ca­tion be­tween prim­ary work­ers and man­agers? Is there really a “we” feel­ing be­tween man­age­ment and man­aged? Is it not, rather a “we-they” feel­ing?

Boss-ship:  Boss-ship is a power activ­ity which, though it may con­form to the eco­nomic for­mula, is lack­ing in two-way iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and may not in­clude the re­spect and loy­alty of those who are bossed. Boss-ship may be ex­pressed in master­ship or skill­ship, in fixer­ship or cap­acity to gain con­form­ity by nego­ti­a­tion, in­dul­gen­cies, re­wards and pen­al­ties, and in whole or par­tial dic­tat­or­ship, or all three .

  By defin­i­tion, man­age­ment is boss-ship when man­age­ment is ortho­dox, and the con­fu­sion about lead­er­ship and man­age­ment comes from the as­so­ci­a­tion of lead­er­ship with skill­ship and fix­er­ship. It may be said that polit­ical sci­ence has no­thing to do with man­age­ment and, in any case, busi­ness could not be run with the defined lead­er­ship. The eco­nomy is part of the body politic even though it has its own for­mula, and lead­er­ship is lead­er­ship just as a rose is a rose. In fact, when I was a shop stew­ard I had the kind of two-way iden­ti­fi­ca­tion spoken of in the lead­er­ship defin­i­tion, and when I was a man­ager I had to iden­tify with the policy-makers and not with the prim­ary work­ers. When the trade union leader meets the man­aging dir­ector, or the local super­visor meets the shop or union stew­ard, who is then the leader?

  A new defin­i­tion of ortho­dox man­age­ment is in order:

Man­age­ment:  Man­age­ment is skilled power activ­ity ex­pressed in the dir­ec­tion, or­gan­isa­tion and con­trol of human and ma­ter­ial fac­tors with a view to ef­fect­ive, pro­fit­able re­sults on be­half of the prin­cip­als, pub­lic or priv­ate, with whom man­age­ment tends to iden­tify when carry­ing out the eco­nomic aims of their prin­cip­als.

  Man­age­ment, though it has yet to be ad­mit­ted in the lit­er­at­ure, is a

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power activ­ity. Power is the pro­duc­tion of in­tended ef­fects . Pro­fes­sor Tawney’s defin­i­tion deals with power in a human situ­a­tion, for man­age­ment is a kind of power rela­tion­ship be­tween human beings. Tawney says:

  “Power may be defined as the cap­acity of an indi­vidual, or group of indi­vidu­als, to mod­ify the con­duct of other indi­vidu­als or groups in the man­ner which he (the power-holder) de­sires”.

  It is clear that man­age­ment is a power activ­ity, but what is not made clear in the lit­er­at­ure is that the power is not given by those led as in lead­er­ship, but is granted to man­age­ment by the eco­nomic for­mula which makes the power legal and is en­dowed by ex­ist­ing power holders within the busi­ness hier­archy. Thus man­age­ment’s power at root is formal au­thor­ity.

  Au­thor­ity does not de­pend only on the eco­nomic for­mula which gives it legal sanc­tion; it de­pends on al­le­giance or formal loy­alty from those over whom au­thor­ity is wielded. The au­thor­ity, as I have said, is legal, and to have legal­ity is to win al­le­giance (but not iden­ti­fi­ca­tion) in the minds of the ma­jor­ity of people, given other things are equal.

  Au­thor­ity has small real power, but the prestige of the per­son hold­ing au­thor­ity is an im­port­ant factor. “Even a nod from a per­son who is es­teemed”, said Plutarch, “is of more force than a thou­sand argu­ments”. Wealth, status and tech­nical skills are at­trib­utes which tend to in­crease the weight of au­thor­ity, and it is on these that ortho­dox man­age­ment must on the whole de­pend, if out­right co­er­cion is not to be the rule. But, to re­peat, the gain­ing of formal al­le­giance through ex­ternal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with au­thor­ity itself, or with this or that at­trib­ute of the per­son hold­ing au­thor­ity, is not lead­er­ship.

  The ex­perts, eco­nomic and psy­cho­lo­gical, who have had this point of view on lead­er­ship in work put to them have, without ex­cep­tion, hotly re­jected it. This re­jec­tion is under­stand­able in view of the hun­dreds of books and the many edu­ca­tional courses on man­age­ment which have pro­moted, and still pro­mote, the idea that ortho­dox man­age­ment and lead­er­ship of human beings are in some mys­tical man­ner twin func­tions. But in our ana­lysis of human lead­er­ship there is no re­jec­tion of man­age­ment and the neces­sity for man­age­ment; rather, there is ad­vanced the idea that the man­age­ment struc­ture be de­signed to inte­grate the human lead­er­ship func­tion with tech­no­lo­gical and com­mer­cial func­tions in a man­ner later to be de­scribed.

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Man­age­ment’s Work Doc­trine

  Man­age­ment doc­trine, as with other polit­ical and eco­nomic doc­trines, serves to jus­tify the hold­ers of power and those of the group or class with which the power-hold­ers iden­tify .

  Some of the doc­trinal as­sump­tions are:

1.  That lead­er­ship is a com­pon­ent of ortho­dox man­age­ment activ­ity. (This we have ex­amined.)

2.  That man­age­ment is or can be a pro­fes­sional body with an eth­ical code in­de­pend­ent of the code of the policy-making group which em­ploys

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man­age­ment as agent and with which man­age­ment neces­sar­ily iden­ti­fies. The latter part of the fore­going sen­tence con­tains the answer to the first part.

3.  That the ortho­dox man­age­ment pro­cess and struc­ture is the best pos­sible and there is no reason­able al­tern­at­ive.

4.  That the de­ci­sion-making pro­cess is by right and, in terms of busi­ness ef­fi­ciency, the sole pre­rog­at­ive of man­age­ment, (i.e. the man­agers-must-manage philo­sophy of the Harvard Busi­ness School, the meth­ods of which are being humbly copied in British busi­ness schools.)

  The mat­ter of whether there is a reason­able al­tern­at­ive to ortho­dox man­age­ment pro­cess and struc­ture re­mains to be ex­amined, but that de­ci­sion-making is the sole pre­rog­at­ive of man­age­ment is ques­tion­able.

  It has been shown that man­age­ment is a skilled power activ­ity. Power is de­ci­sion-making or par­ti­ci­pa­tion in the making of de­ci­sions. A has power over B with re­spect to value C, when A par­ti­ci­pates in de­ci­sion-making af­fect­ing the C policy of B . In other words, the man­ager has power over a non-man­aging worker (or a sub­ord­in­ate man­ager) in re­spect of money when the man­ager de­cides that the bonus re­ward for a cer­tain job, which the man­aged-one does to earn money, is so much money. Like­wise, a man­ager ex­hib­its power when he de­cides to move Bill from the job Bill likes to another job which Bill doesn’t like. This is power with re­spect to a man’s de­sires and feel­ings.

  In his book De­ci­sion-making and Pro­ductiv­ity, Pro­fes­sor Melman, as will later be shown, in­dic­ates factu­ally how fool­ish is the man­age­ment doc­trine that the man­agers must man­age, , as does Pro­fes­sor Likert in his New Pat­terns of Man­age­ment . But the change from cen­tral­ised de­ci­sion-making to shared de­ci­sion-making is not easy. For the hold­ers of power, if they are not en­light­ened by ma­ture in­sight, tend to hold on to their power. As Lord Acton said, “Power cor­rupts; ab­so­lute power cor­rupts ab­so­lutely”.

  I like the philo­sopher Roger Bacon on the ef­fect of power on man, (I will mis­quote slightly): “Man doeth like the ape, the higher he goeth the more he show­eth his ass”. Power is of an en­croach­ing na­ture, or, as the polit­ical sci­ent­ist Michels put it:

  “Every human power seeks to en­large its pre­rog­at­ives. He who has ac­quired power will al­most al­ways en­deavour to con­solid­ate and to ex­tend it, to mul­ti­ply the ram­parts which de­fend his posi­tion, and to with­draw him­self from the con­trol of the masses”.

  Part of the man­age­ment doc­trine has to do with work, but, it should be said, the idea of work held by man­age­ment is that held by the ma­jor­ity of people:

1.  Work is ef­fort ap­plied for the ma­ter­ial values which in­come from work will buy. (Eco­nomic the­ory.)

  There is a corol­lary to this defin­i­tion of work and this com­pre­hends the no­tion of eco­nomic man:

1a.  A whole man can wholly be bought for money and money in­cent­ives.

  Many man­agers will rightly re­ject the corol­lary out of hand, but on the whole, judging in terms of eco­nomic tech­niques, the corol­lary

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ex­presses eco­nomic doc­trine. It is true that some men will sacri­fice money for status, but not will­ingly in the fol­low­ing case of the loyal forty-years ser­vice clerk who went to the boss in a wool­len mill for a rise from £1 a week. In those days the top men in the wool­len trade wore top hats, and the boss re­plied, “Ah wain’t gie thee a rise Nathan, but that has been a guid and faith­ful ser­vant so on Mon­day tha can come ti wark in a top ’at.”

  If we com­pare other defin­i­tions of work with that given above we will find our­selves leav­ing the con­ceal­ing smoke of eco­nomic work, and breath­ing a sweeter air:

2.  Work is prayer; prayer is work. (St. Benedict).

3.  I pray with the floor and the bench. (Hasidic Juda­ism).

4.  Labour is the great real­ity of human life. In labour there is a truth of re­demp­tion and a truth of the con­struct­ive power of man. (Berdyaev).

5.  Laying stress on the im­port­ance of work has a greater ef­fect than any other tech­nique of real­ity living. (Freud).

6. Work and love are the two chief com­pon­ents in the growth of ma­ture per­son­al­ity in com­mun­ity. (Erich Fromm).

  Although our stress is on the psy­cho­lo­gical value of work, as in Freud, Fromm and others, it would be pleas­ing if we had more room to de­velop a work philo­sophy and to quote the poets’ work vi­sions, the fine work philo­sophy in the Hindu Bhagavat Gita (Gandhi’s Karma Yoga), Zen Buddhism, which some­what paral­lels Bene­dict­ine work prac­tice, Chin­ese <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: neo-Confu­cian­ism">neo-Confu­cian­ism which af­firms the ‘Tao or Way’ as that of draw­ing water and gather­ing wood, and as the mar­riage of the sub­lime and the com­mon­place, and the re­spect for the com­mon task in Isaiah, Deutero­nomy and Ecclesi­astes: “There is no­thing bet­ter for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul en­joy good in his labour”.

  But there is small joy in work within the work in­sti­tu­tion, for work is an en­forced means to earn­ing money; and how can the soul en­joy good in its labour when there is no soul in the places where labour is or­gan­ised? But these are big, if some­what odd thoughts, which have as yet no echo in the work in­sti­tu­tion, for to equate work with fel­low­ship, with love, with the liber­ated vital­ity of the art­ist of which Morris, Ruskin, Kropot­kin and others speak, is to be met with the hid­den smile behind the po­lite hand, or with a psy­chi­at­ric diag­nosis. Once I at­tacked what is now called “work study” in one of my books and quoted Plato. “What”, a re­viewer of the Amer­ican edi­tion asked, “has Plato to do with work?” What indeed?

  Yet there is joy in work when the task is a man’s own; when he is not ant-heaped in a mon­strous tall flat which shrinks him to less than man-size, but has a garden in which there is the poetry of ful­fill­ment, “The Apple tree, the Sing­ing, and the Gold.”

  Or he makes a table, or she bakes a good cake, or sews a dress, or to­gether they raise a family—why is there ful­fill­ment only in this work and not in the other? I have been told, “But that’s dif­fer­ent; we

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couldn’t or­gan­ise pro­duc­tion that way”. Why is it dif­fer­ent, and who is this “we”?

  What func­tion, if any, has work in the well-being of the per­son­al­ity or, on the other hand, what re­la­tion­ship has work to life as a whole? Why is it, for ex­ample, that the cap­acity reg­u­larly to work is a dom­in­ant factor in indi­vidual norm­al­ity from the psy­chi­at­ric and the depth psy­cho­lo­gical points of view? Why too is work-therapy an es­sen­tial treat­ment in neur­otic and psy­chotic ill­nesses where there is a with­drawal from real­ity? It is be­cause in free, mean­ing­ful work which calls for skill and de­ci­sion-making there is at once a focus­sing of con­scious­ness on the world of real­ity and a pro­tec­tion against the back­ward group of un­con­scious fantasy and in­fant­il­ism.

  Work in which there is free ex­pres­sion of the whole man is an ego-build­ing and sus­tain­ing func­tion of the self. The age of prim­it­ive in­no­cence, of the par­ti­ci­pa­tion mys­tique when men were yet in the mind­less state of one­ness with na­ture, was the Golden Age spoken of in the great reli­gious tra­di­tions. In the Hindu epic, the Maha­barata, there is a Krita or Golden Age: “In that age no buy­ing or sell­ing went on, no ef­forts were made by man; the fruits of the earth were ob­tained by their mere wish; right­eous­ness and aban­don­ment of the world pre­vailed”. The Greek peas­ant poet Hesiod be­moans the pass­ing of the Golden Age in which men cared no­thing for toil and lived like gods and had no sor­row of heart. But of his own, the Iron Age, Hesiod cries: “Dark is their plight. Toil and sor­row by day are theirs and by night the an­guish of death”.

  Writing over 2,000 years past, the Chin­ese philo­sopher Chuang Tzu de­scribes the Golden Age of Chaos, of placid tran­quil­ity in which no work was done and there was no need for know­ledge. In Genesis, man lived in a para­disal Golden Age until with the ex­pres­sion of self-con­scious­ness, of know­ledge of good and evil, the curse of work was placed upon hu­man­ity.

  Always, in the great tra­di­tions, the pain of work and the rise of self-con­scious in­di­vidu­al­ity are twinned, and in other lan­guage the story is re­peated by modern anthro­po­lo­gists who have stud­ied prim­it­ive so­ciet­ies and tell of their loath­ing of work. Prim­it­ive man obeyed the call of the an­cient blood which would charm us away from the sore round of duties and ob­liga­tions to a state of prim­it­ive in­dol­ence in which per­son­al­ity dis­in­teg­rates and, as in the prim­it­ive, the wish sub­sti­tutes for the act, and fan­tasy sub­sti­tutes for dir­ec­ted thought. It is against this re­gres­sion, so well-known to psy­cho­therap­ists, that Freud and Jung warn us:

  “Laying stress upon the im­port­ance of work has a greater ef­fect than any other tech­nique of real­ity liv­ing in the dir­ec­tion of bind­ing the indi­vidual to real­ity. The daily work of earn­ing a live­li­hood af­fords par­tic­u­lar satis­fac­tion when it has been se­lec­ted by free choice; i.e. when through sub­lim­a­tion it en­ables use to be made of ex­ist­ing in­clin­a­tions, of in­stinct­u­al im­pulses that have re­tained their strength, or are more in­tense than usual for con­sti­tu­tional reasons.” (Freud, ).

13

  Freud also stresses the psy­cho­lo­gical value of work in com­mun­ity. Jung has this to say: “The best liber­a­tion (from the grip of prim­it­ive and in­fant­ile fan­tasy) is through reg­u­lar work. Work, however, is sal­va­tion only when it is a free act and has no­thing in it of in­fant­ile com­pul­sion.”

  Work which is cre­at­ive and thought-provok­ing is a bless­ing and a boon to grow­ing per­son­al­ity, but work in which there is no thought and no de­ci­sion-making breeds in­fant­il­ism and is once ac­cursed for those who, like re­pet­it­ive psy­cho­paths, are forced to do it, but mani­fold for those who en­force it and would re­duce another per­son to the level of in­stinct­ive beast or cata­leptic stone. Men do not so much dis­like work as they dis­like their man­age­ment-depend­ent status. They do not dis­like work as such, but mainly that work which calls for small skill and for re­pet­it­ive move­ment, the ef­fect of which, the Amer­ican so­cio­lo­gists Walker and Guest show, is to re­duce in­ter­est in so­cial af­fairs, in sport, in reli­gion, and in out-of-work activ­it­ies gen­er­ally. The im­port­ant aspect of this is that if a man’s oc­cu­pa­tion is thought­less and skill-less, or if he has no oc­cu­pa­tion, he will in­tro­vert and so re­treat from the call of so­cial, family and eco­nomic duties.

  This is the un­spoken fear of the many writ­ers on the prob­lem of leisure: that man, drugged by com­fort and dis­tracted by mass amuse­ments, will re­gress to a state of neur­otic de­pend­ence on the state, the man­agers, the amuse­ment cater­ers, and the com­put­er­isers:—

Here where brave lions roamed, the fatted sheep,

and poppies bloom where once the golden wheat.

s4

Auto­mated Work

  Mech­an­isa­tion pre­cedes auto­ma­tion, and the fruits of mech­an­isa­tion and of tech­no­logy gener­ally, have been dis­trib­uted roughly on the basis of half to in­creased leisure and half to in­creased eco­nomic living stand­ards. If we move into auto­ma­tion in a sub­stan­tial way and the trend con­tinues, then, on a con­serv­at­ive estim­ate, the present work­ing week will be cut by 50% in the next thirty years.

  Mech­an­isa­tion is the use of ma­chines which, on the whole, re­place hand­work. But the pro­duct parts have to be loaded and un­loaded into and out of the ma­chine, the ma­chine itself may re­quire indi­vidual at­ten­tion, and the pro­duct part has to be moved manu­ally be­tween one ma­chine and another. With auto­ma­tion, load­ing and un­load­ing the ma­chine is mech­an­ised and trans­fer ma­chines take the pro­duct part to the next ma­chine, and so on down the line until the pro­duct parts reach as­sembly, when, again, this may be taken over by auto­mated process. The auto­mated pro­cess may be con­trolled by an “elec­tronic brain” and, at higher levels of work, de­ci­sion-making may be the func­tion largely of com­pu­ter­ism.

  I have seen re­mark­able re­sults in labour dis­place­ment in both of­fices and works through auto­ma­tion and com­pu­ter­ism, but it is from Amer­ica that a clear in­dica­tion may be had of the pre­sent and prob­able ef­fects of these pro­cesses. For ex­ample, two men can as­semble as many

14

radio sets in a day as were formerly as­sembled by two hun­dred men, and a car engine block can be pro­duced by one-eighth of the pre­vi­ous labour force in half the time pre­vi­ously taken. It should be noted, how­ever, that only about 50% of our pro­duc­tion plants are likely to be the sub­ject of full auto­ma­tion.

  About half of the auto­ma­tion slack is taken up by shorter hours, and the other half by in­creased pro­duc­tion, ab­sorp­tion of dis­placed pro­ducers in ser­vice in­dus­tries, and by un­em­ploy­ment. The ten­dency is to in­crease the num­ber of “de­greed” man­agers, elec­tron­ics en­gin­eers and plan­ners, (“From ap­pren­tice to man­aging dir­ector” will be the sub­ject of his­tor­ical novels only, in the future), and to de­crease skill on the work­shop floor. Al­though there will be a lower­ing of skill and thought on the shop floor, it is likely that there will be an up­grad­ing of status, by giv­ing floor work­ers “staff” stand­ing—an event much to be de­sired.

  The re­sult of labour dis­place­ment on ser­vice in­dus­try is re­mark­able and it is likely that in a few years more than half the coun­try’s labour force will be en­gaged in ser­vices—that is, the per­cent­age ef­fort put into man­aging, plan­ning, sell­ing, fin­an­cing, and mov­ing things will radic­ally in­crease. But these ser­vices are also being auto­mated and com­put­er­ised in­creas­ingly. For ex­ample, the auto­mated super­mar­ket, the elec­tron­ic­ally con­trolled rail and motor roads, and, who knows, the com­put­er­ised med­ical and psy­chi­at­ric dia­gnosis and treat­ment, the com­put­er­ised mar­riage ar­range­ment, and the com­put­er­ised, psy­chi­at­ric merit rat­ing card in the per­son­nel de­part­ment which will pick out the rebels and out­siders who need brain sur­gery to make them happy, laugh­ing, well-adjus­ted indi­vidu­als? And why have a doubt­ing, argu­ing, demo­cratic as­sembly com­posed of frail, party-minded humans when a com­puter can so easily and quickly make more reas­on­able and work­able de­ci­sions?

  Auto­ma­tion is more than a works or of­fice method; it is a de­sign for liv­ing which has to be paid for. Indeed, as Aldous Huxley re­marks in his Brave New World Re­vis­ited, like last year’s wash­ing ma­chine, tech­no­lo­gical ad­vances are still being paid for, and each in­stall­ment is higher than the last.

  And auto­mated fact­ory meth­ods have in­vaded the farms and farm­ing em­ploy­ment is fast de­creas­ing. The use of meat-producing fact­or­ies with large sav­ings in labour cost and ef­fi­cient re­duc­tion of an­imal life-hours per unit of meat pro­duced is at once a vic­tory for modern tech­no­logy and a sacri­le­gious monu­ment which bodes ill for our future.

Not now for them the friend­ship of the sun,

the bene­dic­tion of the shel­ter­ing trees,

or soft sweet grass to rumin­ate upon in mead­owed ease

—their Mother-nature ster­iled and undone.

Now sun­less fact­or­ies speed their orphan flesh

these egoid other an­imals to refresh.

After we eat of auto­mated cattle,

let’s light a candle in Saint Francis’ chapel.

This odd aside I call “In­scrip­tion for Whited Sep­ulchres.”

15

  We are cease­lessly told that the major solu­tion to our so­cial and eco­nomic prob­lems is more pro­duc­tion to keep up em­ploy­ment which will keep up buy­ing power which will keep up pro­duc­tion; and in this auto­ma­tion is to play a large part. The func­tion of pro­duc­tion, etc., is said by ortho­dox eco­nom­ists to be the satis­fac­tion of in­creas­ing natural wants—this is the eco­nom­ics of scar­city. But, as the bril­liant Harvard eco­nom­ist Gal­braith points out, we are no longer in an age of scar­city but in an age of af­flu­ence, and in­stead of pro­duc­tion satis­fy­ing natural wants, it is also geared to the satis­fac­tion of arti­fi­cially cre­ated wants on the pro­mo­tion of which mil­lions are spent in ad­vert­is­ing. We are caught up in a vi­cious circle from which, it seems, there is no escape—yet there are elec­tric sleep­ing ma­chines, not yet mar­keted; so …

  There is no doubt that tech­no­lo­gical pro­gress has far out­stripped human pro­gress towards per­sonal and so­cial matur­ity, and many are the vali­ant ef­forts to solve this threat­en­ing prob­lem. Per­haps it may be solved by large edu­ca­tional meas­ures; per­haps one of his­tory’s erupt­ing minor­it­ies may opt out of the rat race and lead us in the pro­cess of chal­lenge and re­sponse; per­haps there will be a new Fran­cis­can­ism, per­haps a na­tion like India may opt out in Gandhian terms. Per­haps small com­mun­it­ies of indi­vidu­als will form to do use­ful work by hand and with small tools on the land and in work­shops. There is as much cause for hope as for gloom, and I think that the escape from auto­mated leis­ure in and through fel­low­ship work groups is a prob­ab­il­ity.

s5

Work in Fel­low­ship

  The broken fel­low­ship of au­thor­it­arian work life and demo­cratic so­cial life be­speaks the schiz­oid dis­ease of our cul­ture. But this is not seen as a root prob­lem of com­mun­ity life but, rather as a prob­lem of edu­ca­tion for lei­sure. We are going to be­come art­ists, handi­craft men, <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: do-it-yourself">do-it-yourself spe­cial­ists and what have you, so that we shall not be­come a dec­ad­ent so­ciety liv­ing under the com­pul­sion of the un­con­scious wish to re­gress to that prim­it­ive in­dol­ence, against which Freud and Jung warn us. This work in which we have to be edu­ca­ted is free work, and it is known to be a per­sonal and so­cial good.

  But why not also have the work we do now as a per­sonal and so­cial good. The way for­ward for man is the way of free work in fel­low­ship. Erich Fromm puts it thus, when writ­ing of man as a free, spon­tan­eous creature:

  “Love is the first com­pon­ent of such spon­taneity; not love as the dis­solu­tion of the self in another per­son, not love as the pos­ses­sion of another per­son, but love as the spon­tan­eous af­firm­a­tion of others on the basis of the pre­ser­va­tion of the indi­vidual self.

  “Work is the other com­pon­ent—work as cre­ation in which one be­comes one with nature in the art of cre­ation.”

16

s6

Work­shop Floor Groups

  Numer­ous at­tempts have been made to solve some of the prob­lems stated earlier. One of the most widely pub­li­cised of these is the use of Joint Coun­cils in which prim­ary worker-appointed re­pre­sent­at­ives meet man­age­ment-appointed re­pre­sent­at­ives in, usu­ally, monthly meet­ings. Al­though a joint coun­cil may work ad­mir­ably within its terms of re­fer­ence where top man­age­ment has faith in the method, ex­peri­ence of the method and com­pet­ent re­search in­dic­ate that the first pro­mise of joint con­sult­a­tion is sadly un­ful­filled. Pro­fes­sor Ronald Edwards, writ­ing on the elec­tri­city sup­ply in­dus­try has this to say:

  “Experi­ence has shown there is a gap be­tween the local ad­vis­ory com­mit­tee and the shop floor, and this is now being filled by the or­gan­isa­tion of small work­ing groups within each man­age­ment unit …”

  The work of Dr W. H. Scott and of Lisl Klein re­peat in other lan­guage what has been dis­covered in the elec­tri­city sup­ply in­dus­try, and a re­cent book from the In­dus­trial Wel­fare So­ciety on joint con­sulta­tion pre­sents at best a sorry spec­tacle.

  To make joint con­sulta­tion work a very im­port­ant step has been taken by the elec­tri­city sup­ply in­dus­try. The ex­tent of this ad­vance is in­dic­ated in the annual re­port of the Elec­tri­city Sup­ply In­dus­try Joint Ad­vis­ory Coun­cil in which it is stated that in 1963, of the 471 local ad­vis­ory com­mit­tees in the in­dus­try, 142 were in some way as­so­ci­ated with the oper­a­tion of prim­ary worker group meet­ings in works time with pay­ment dur­ing at­tend­ance. I have not seen any of the group meet­ings at work and de­pend­ence is here on a use­ful meet­ing with Mr Garnett of the York­shire Di­vi­sion of the Elec­tri­city Coun­cil and on in­form­a­tion sup­plied by Mr M Skinner, Sec­ret­ary of the Elec­tri­city Coun­cil. From them I have learned that the work­shop floor meet­ings now cover about one fourth of the in­dus­try’s em­ploy­ees. A brief state­ment from Mr Skinner, who is also Con­sulta­tion Of­ficer to the Elec­tri­city Coun­cil, out­lines the oper­a­tion of the prim­ary groups:

  “These in­formal group meet­ings take many dif­fer­ent forms de­pend­ing on local needs and local or­gan­isa­tion struc­ture. I gen­eral, how­ever, it can be said that the work­ing group meets reg­u­larly, but not too fre­quently, usu­ally in its normal place of work, and in work­ing hours. The pro­ceed­ings, which are in­formal, are chaired … either by the group’s fore­man or super­visor or by a more senior of­ficer who has some re­spons­ib­il­ity for the work of the group. It is a card­inal rule that the group’s rep­res­ent­at­ive on the local con­sult­at­ive com­mit­tee should always be present. Some­times groups meet prior to the meet­ing of the local con­sult­at­ive com­mit­tee so that they can give their views on items to be dis­cussed at their meet­ing, but in other cases there is no time link with the formal com­mit­tees. Group meet­ings are valu­able as a chan­nel of com­mun­ica­tion. They also suc­ceed in solv­ing many work prob­lems pe­cu­liar to the group and often give rise to mat­ters of greater im­port­ance which are the proper sub­jects for con­sider­a­tion within the formal

17

ma­chin­ery.”

  The prim­ary group meet­ings were ini­ti­ated in the York­shire Power Sta­tions about five years ago and have since spread through­out the in­dus­try. The ef­fect of these meet­ings on mor­ale is un­doubt­edly good, if only for the reason that prim­ary work­ers as a whole are dir­ectly in­volved in the con­sul­ta­tion pro­cess and be­cause their sig­ni­fic­ance as per­sons is pos­it­ively re­cog­nised. So far as the pro­duc­tiv­ity of the meet­ings is con­cerned, the fol­low­ing seems to be typ­ical: in the Tees No 2 Area the sub­jects dis­cussed in nine meet­ings were, Ef­fi­ciency 42, Wel­fare 26, Train­ing and Gen­eral 25. There is, in pass­ing, no com­puls­ory at­tend­ance at group meet­ings.

  There is a large dif­fer­ence be­tween these shop-floor meet­ings and the free group meet­ings in that a mem­ber of the man­age­ment team, may set the pace for the meet­ing by bring­ing for­ward cer­tain prob­lems. Over the last twenty years we have had many shop-floor meet­ings of the kind used in the elec­tri­city sup­ply in­dus­try, but whereas we now at­tempt to inter­lock the fore­man­ship func­tion with free group activ­ity by sug­gest­ing the fore­man at­tend for a group agreed time to state local man­age­ment prob­lems, our ex­peri­ence is that if the atmo­sphere of the meet­ing is not per­missive, the basic we-they at­ti­tude ex­ist­ing in the work situ­a­tion will not alter be­cause, as is shown later, it is es­sen­tial if reas­on­able co-opera­tion is the aim, that the in­di­vidu­als in­volved in meet­ing should feel free to ex­press their deep as­sump­tions even if these are ir­ra­tional. For ex­ample, many times we have had from the free groups the state­ment that man­age­ment and espe­cially top man­age­ment is only an ex­pens­ive over­head which the prim­ary work­ers have to carry; to us this was an op­por­tun­ity to ex­hibit the edu­ca­tional as­pect of free group dis­cus­sion with ex­cel­lent re­sults.

  The free group meet­ing aims at re­ducing de­pend­ence on fig­ures of au­thor­ity who know all the an­swers; that is, we at­tempt in so­cial-psychi­at­ric terms to re­duce leader-centred­ness and to foster ma­tur­ity and in­de­pend­ence. On the other hand, my ex­peri­ence of psy­chi­at­ric groups in­dic­ates that if the group con­ductor does not take the lead but, in Lao­tse’s words of 2,500 years past, seems to fol­low, the re­sults will be some­what akin to those aimed at by those who spon­sor free group meet­ings.

s7

Free Group The­ory

s8

Free Group Struc­ture and Method

s9

Fifteen Years of Group Dis­cus­sion

s10

The Free Group Con­tract Sys­tem

s11

The Stand­ard Motor Gang Sys­tem

s12

The Dur­ham Min­ers’ Free Group Pro­ject

s13

The Wider Issues

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s14

Re­com­mended Basic Read­ing

s15

Book Re­fer­ences