Din meşteri am devenit roboţi
Rochelle Gurstein scrie în numărul din martie al revistei online Guernica despre muncă şi despre modul în care munca complexă a meşterilor şi artizanilor a fost spartă în părţile sale componente şi transformată într-o serie de sarcini repetitive pentru a deveni compatibilă cu modul de lucru construit în jurul liniilor de asamblare ale uzinelor Ford.
De la stilul vechi de a munci
In the mid-sixteenth century, a book described ninety different crafts, including jewelers, metalsmiths, goldsmiths, coiners, tapestry makers, printers, musical instrument makers, dyers, potters, tanners, weavers, carpenters, bakers, and millers. Two centuries later, Diderot’s Encyclopedia counted two hundred and fifty. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in a medium-sized town in England, over fifty crafts were still being practiced.
care presupunea o ucenicie îndelungată şi un act în care se îmbinau imaginaţia şi măiestria unui artizan, s-a trecut la un stil de lucru pe care muncitorii îl găseau revoltător:
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.”
Din nefericire, pe măsură ce sistemul de muncă bazat pe linia de asamblare a început să se extindă, artizanii au fost împinşi din ce în ce mai mult către periferia societăţii de tip nou, în care o mare parte a membrilor săi nu au habar să facă nimic dincolo de cele câteva sarcini repetitive pentru care s-au pregătit.
Instead of putting forward, as so many of our elected officials, policy analysts, pundits, and journalists predictably do, a picture of our world that is essentially the same, except that it is somehow “green” and somehow peopled with college-educated or better “trained” workers, we need to focus our attention on the more pressing and more basic question of what kinds of work people should be expected to devote their lives to doing. The last time this question—the question of meaningful, satisfying, dignified labor—got a public hearing was in the nineteen sixties and seventies, with Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital being the intellectual high-water mark. What Braverman convincingly demonstrated is that there is nothing natural or inevitable about our system of labor; that it came about through conscious decisions made by industrial capitalists in the name of profit for them alone; and, so long as there were living alternatives to it, that assembly line work was forcefully resisted by skilled craftsmen who walked off the job rather than submit to work that they felt demeaned them. William Morris spoke for those men when he declared the new factory work “worthless; it is slaves’ work—mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.”
Din păcate, alternativele au cam dispărut. În ziua de astăzi oamenii visează să meargă la ţară sau să devină entrepreneurs, metode indirecte de a recâştiga ceea ce s-a pierdut şi de a scăpa de plictiseala incredibilă a muncii repetitive.
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Sursa:
Rochelle Gurstein, Labor Pains