CHAPTER TWENTY
What We Know About Work, Working, and Worker
WORK HAS BEEN CENTRAL to human consciousness for untold ages. Man is not truly defined as the toolmaker, but making tools, the systematic, purposeful, and organized approach to work, is specific and unique in human activity. Work has, therefore, been a profound concern for millennia.
What was always a profound concern became central with the industrial revolution. The economic and social theories of the last two hundred years center on work.
However central work has been all along, organized study of work did not begin until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Frederick W. Taylor was the first person in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor’s “scientific management” rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do. Taylor, though the Isaac Newton (or perhaps the Archimedes) of the science of work, laid only first foundations, however. Not much has been added to them since.
The worker has been given even less attention—and the knowledge worker has received so far almost none. Rhetoric there is aplenty, but serious, systematic study has been confined to only a few aspects of working.
There is industrial physiology, dealing with the relationship of such things as lighting, tool and machine speeds, design of the work place, and so on, to the human being who is the worker; the fundamental work here was done in the early years of this century, e.g., in the fatigue and vision studies of the German-born Harvard psychologist Hugo Muensterberg. Cyril Burt, an Englishman, might be called the father of industrial psychology. During World War I he studied aptitudes, that is, the relationship between the demands of specific manual work and the physical skill, motor coordination, and reactions of individual workers. Finally, in the early nineteenth century, Australian-born Elton Mayo, working primarily at Harvard, developed human relations, that is, the study of the relationship between people working together—though in human relations work itself, that is, the task to be done, received almost no attention.
The totality of “worker” and “working,” the totality of task and job, perception and personality, work community, rewards and power relations, has received practically no attention. It may be far too complex ever to be truly understood.
The manager cannot wait till the scientists and scholars have done their work. Nor can the worker. The manager has to manage today and to put to work the little we know. The manager has to try to make work productive and the worker achieving. It might, therefore, be appropriate to put down what we know about work and working.
Analysis, Synthesis, and Control
The most important thing we know is that work and working are fundamentally different phenomena. The worker does, indeed, do work; and work is always done by a worker who is working. But what is needed to make work productive is quite different from what is needed to make the worker achieving. The worker must, therefore, be managed according to both the logic of the work and the dynamics of working. Personal satisfaction of the worker without productive work is failure; but so is productive work that destroys the worker’s achievement. Neither is, in effect, tenable for very long.
Work is impersonal and objective. Work is a task. It is a “something.” To work, therefore, applies the rule that applies to objects. Work has a logic. It requires analysis, synthesis, and control.
As with every phenomenon of the objective universe, the first step toward understanding work is to analyze it. This, as Taylor realized a century ago, means identifying the basic operations, analyzing each of them, and arranging them in logical, balanced, and rational sequence.
Taylor worked, of course, on manual operations. But Taylor’s analysis applies just as well to mental and even to totally intangible work. The “outline” which the budding writer is being told to work out, before starting to write, is in effect scientific management. And the most advanced, most perfect example of scientific management was not developed by industrial engineers during the last hundred years. It is the alphabet, which enables all words in a language to be written with a very small number of repetitive and simple symbols.
But then—and Taylor did not realize this—work has to be synthesized again. It has to be put together into a process. This is true for the individual job. It is, above all, true for the work of a group, that is for a work process. We need principles of production which enable us to know how to put together individual operations into individual jobs, and individual jobs into “production.”
Some of Taylor’s fellow pioneers, especially Gantt, saw this clearly. The Gantt Chart, in which the steps necessary to obtain a final work result are worked out by projecting backward, step by step from end result to actions, their timing and their sequence, though developed during World War I, is still the one tool we have to identify the process needed to accomplish a task, whether making a pair of shoes, landing a man on the moon, or producing an opera. Such recent innovations as PERT chart, critical path analysis, and network analysis are elaborations and extensions of Gantt’s work.
But the Gantt Chart tells us very little about the logic that is appropriate to given kinds of processes. It is, so to speak, the multiplication table of work design. It does not even tell us when to multiply, let alone what the purpose of the calculation is.
Finally, work, precisely because it is a process rather than an individual operation, needs a built-in control. It needs a feedback mechanism which both senses unexpected deviations and with them the need to change the process, and maintains the process at the level needed to obtain the desired results.
Those three elements, analysis, synthesis into a process of production, and feedback control are particularly important in knowledge work. For knowledge work by definition does not result in a product. It results in a contribution of knowledge to somebody else. The output of the knowledge worker always becomes somebody else’s input. It is, therefore, not self-evident in knowledge work, as it is in making a pair of shoes, whether the work has results or not. This can be seen only by projecting backward from the needed end results. At the same time, knowledge work, being intangible, is not controlled by its own progress. We do not know the sequence of knowledge work in the way we know—at least since Taylor and Gantt—the sequence of manual operations. Knowledge work, therefore, needs far better design, precisely because it cannot be designed for the worker. It can be designed only by the worker.
The Five Dimensions of Working
Working is the activity of the worker; it is a human being’s activity and an essential part of humanity. It does not have a logic. It has dynamics and dimensions.
Working has at least five dimensions. In all of them the worker has to be achieving in order to be productive.
Machine Design and Human Design
There is, first, a physiological dimension. The human being is not a machine and does not work like a machine.
Machines work best if they do only one task, if they do it repetitively, and if they do the simplest possible task. Complex tasks are done best as a step-by-step series of simple tasks in which the work shifts from machine to machine, either by moving the work itself physically, as on the assembly line, or, as in modern computer-controlled machine tools, by bringing machines and tools in pre-arranged sequence to the work, with the tool changing with each step of the process. Machines work best if run at the same speed, the same rhythm, and with a minimum of moving parts.
The human being is engineered quite differently. For any one task and any one operation human beings are ill-suited. They lack strength. They lack stamina. They get fatigued. Altogether the human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels, however, in coordination. A human excels in relating perception to action and works best if the entire person, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged by the work.
If confined to an individual motion or operation, the human being tires fast. This fatigue is not just boredom, which is psychological; it is genuine physiological fatigue as well. Lactic acid builds up in the muscles, visual acuity goes down, reaction time slows and becomes erratic.
The human being works best at a configuration of operations rather than at a single operation. But also—and this may be even more important—the human being is singularly ill-equipped to work at an unvarying speed and a standard rhythm. People work best if capable of varying both speed and rhythm fairly frequently.
There is no “one right” speed and no “one right” rhythm for human beings. Speed, rhythm, and attention span vary greatly among individuals. Studies of infants strongly indicate that patterns of speed, rhythm, and attention span are as individual as are fingerprints and vary fully as much. Each individual, in other words, has his or her own pattern of speeds and his or her own need to vary speeds. Each individual has his or her own pattern of rhythms, and has his or her own pattern of attention spans. Nothing, we now know, creates as much fatigue, as much resistance, as much anger, and as much resentment, as the imposition of an alien speed, an alien rhythm, and an alien attention span, and above all, the imposition of one unvarying and uniform pattern of speed, rhythm, and attention span. That is alien and physiologically offensive to every human being. It results speedily in a buildup of toxic wastes in muscle, brain, and bloodstream, in the release of stress hormones, and in changes in electrical tension throughout the nervous system. To be productive the individual has to have control, to a substantial extent, over the speed, rhythm, and attention spans with which he is working—just as an infant, learning to speak or to walk, has to have substantial control over learning speed, learning rhythm, and learning attention span.
While work is, therefore, best laid out as uniform, working is best organized with a considerable degree of diversity. Working requires latitude to change speed, rhythm, and attention span fairly often. It requires fairly frequent changes in operating routines as well. What is good industrial engineering for work is exceedingly poor human engineering for the worker.
Work as Curse and Blessing
The next dimension of people at work is psychological.Work, we know, is both a burden and a need, both a curse and a blessing. Whether this is genetic or culturally conditioned, we do not know—and it does not greatly matter. By the time human beings have reached the age of four or five, they have been conditioned to work. To be sure, child labor is outlawed in most countries, but learning the fundamentals of being a person, especially learning to talk, is work and creates the habit of work. Unemployment we long ago learned creates severe psychological disturbances, not because of economic deprivation, but primarily because it undermines self-respect. Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself or herself, measures his or her worth and humanity.
“Loafing” is easy, but “leisure” is difficult. For younger people especially, it is likely to mean frantic activity—or the hard work of bucking traffic on overcrowded highways—rather than philosophical repose. “To be an aristocrat one has to start learning dignified idleness in early childhood,” was a common saying in that most snobbish of all Western societies, the Whig society of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. And, “The devil finds work for idle hands,” says an even older proverb.
The peculiar characteristic of the work ethic of the West—which goes back all the way to Saint Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century rather than to Calvin in the sixteenth—is not that it glorified and sanctified work. That was neither new nor particularly Western. It sanctified the “calling”; it preached that all work was service and contribution and equally deserving of respect. The Benedictine monks made manual work in field and workshop equal to the work of praying and teaching. This was a deliberate break with the earlier beliefs of antiquity which held that the “gentleman” or the “free man” had to be freed from manual chores to have time for higher work, for learning, for statecraft, for civic duties, and for military service. As a result, antiquity—but also most non-Western civilizations—ordered different kinds of work in a hierarchy of personalities, with manual work pertaining to the ignoble, whether slave, peasant, or artisan, and soldiers’ and knowledge work pertaining to the full personality. Neither Socrates nor Cicero believed in idleness; on the contrary, their full personality was working harder than the ignoble or obscure—and did more demanding, more responsible work. When the Chinese Mandarin retired to his ancestral estate after a successful government career, he was not supposed to lead a life of leisure. He was supposed instead to take up other but even more productive work, calligraphy and painting, music and writing. And the justification of these activities was above all their social contribution; in the Confucian social ethic, these pursuits are necessary to maintain the social harmony on which all else depends.
There is little doubt, however, that the commercial and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought a sharp stepup in the hours worked by farmers, machine tenders, merchants, and industrialists alike.
In large measure this reflected a sizable improvement in living conditions and, above all, in nutrition, which greatly increased the physical energy available for work (just as the eighteenth-century English draft animal, whether horse or ox, could do far more work in the course of a year than its grandsire a hundred years earlier had been able to do, because the invention of the silo provided adequate food during the winter months). No matter how horrible living conditions were in the nineteenth-century slums of the industrial towns—or today in the slums and shanty towns that ring Latin America’s cities—they were better with respect to food than the living conditions under which the landless laborer or the weavers and spinners in the cottage industries had subsisted. If anyone doubts this he need only note the food on which seamen in the sailing vessels were supposed to live and work; there are abundant records in such literary classics as Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, Melville’s Typee and Moby Dick, or in the once widely popular naval stories of Captain Marryat. Yet sailors, by all reports, were the best-fed workers, both because the work was hard and made great physical demands and because of the ever-present danger of mutiny.
The great increase in working in these centuries also represented a shift in values. Economic rewards became more meaningful—mostly, perhaps, because economic satisfactions became more generally available. The “proletarians” in the nineteenth-century slums of Liverpool or Manchester could not buy much even if they had a job and received a wage; they lacked purchasing power. But purchasing power would not have helped their grandfathers, the landless laborers; there wasn’t anything much around to buy in 1750 or so.
The rejection of the work ethic—if there is such a phenomenon outside of the headlines—therefore does not represent hedonism. In part it represents a reaction against long decades of overworking, and a righting of the balance. In larger part it may, however, represent a return to earlier elitist work concepts which relate certain kinds of work to nobility or to baseness of the person. What lends support to this hypothesis is the strong, positive value which the educated young people who supposedly repudiate the work ethic give to the work of teacher and artist. Teaching and art, however, are far more demanding taskmasters than tending machines or selling soap.
The workless society of the futurist utopia may, indeed, be ahead. Should it come, it would, however, produce a major personality crisis for most people. It is perhaps fortunate that so far there is not the slightest fact to support the prediction of the imminent demise of work. So far the task is still to make work serve the psychological need of humanity.
Work as Social and Community Bond
Work is social bond and community bond. In the employee society it becomes primary access to society and community. It largely determines status. For someone to say, “I am a doctor” or “I am a plumber” is a meaningful statement. It tells us something about that person’s position in society and role in the community.
Perhaps more important, work, since time immemorial, has been the means to satisfy our need for belonging to a group and for a meaningful relationship to others. When Aristotle said that man is a zoon politikon, i.e., a social animal, he said in effect that we need work to satisfy our need for community.
To be sure, few people are determined in their social and community functions solely by and through the work group to which they belong. Most people have other societies and communities. It is by no means unusual to find someone who ranks low socially in a work group but who is a “big shot” elsewhere; the inconspicuous engineer who is a big man in the Boy Scouts or in his church, for instance. But even for this man, work will provide much of his companionship, group identification, and social bond.
Work is for most people the one bond outside of their own narrow family— and often more important than the family, especially for the young not-yet married and for older people whose children have grown up. This is exemplified strongly by the experience of companies who hire mature women. The work place becomes their community, their social club, their means of escaping loneliness, with their husbands at their own jobs and the children gone.
The Bell Telephone Company, for instance, has many women employees who leave the job to raise a family but a dozen years later become available for part-time work. They are hired to handle clerical peak loads, especially in such large-scale financial work as new stock or bond issues, mailing dividends or annual reports, and so on. The work, when available, is usually rushed and high-pressure, the hours long, and the pay far from exceptional. Yet the competition for a place on the roster is intense, and the morale of the group exceptionally high. When, for whatever reasons, a few months go by without such work, the women will start to call in and ask, “How soon can I come in again? I want to see my friends; I want to know what they are doing; I miss their company.”
Similarly every company that has polled its retired employees has found the same reaction. “What we miss isn’t the work; it’s our colleagues and friends.” “What we want to know isn’t how the company is doing but what the people do with whom we worked, where they are, how they are coming along.” “Don’t, please, send me the annual report,” a retired senior vice-president of a big company once said in a burst of candor, “I’m no longer interested in sales. Send me the gossip. I miss even the people I couldn’t stand.”
This last comment puts the finger on the greatest strength of the work bond and its singular advantage compared to all other bonds of community. It is not predicated on personal likes or dislikes. It can function without making emotional demands. People can work very well with somebody whom they never see away from the job, and for whom they feel neither friendship nor warmth nor liking. People can even function well in a work relationship with somebody whom they cordially dislike—if only they respect the other person’s skills and ability to work. But the worker can also be a close friend with whom one spends as many hours away from work as possible, with whom one goes hunting or fishing, spends one’s vacation, spends one’s evenings, and shares much of one’s life. The work relationship has an objective, outside focus, the work itself. It does make possible strong social and community bonds that are as personal or as impersonal as one desires.
This may explain why, throughout man’s history, and above all, among primitive peoples, work groups have always been sexually differentiated. Men work together and women work together. But we rarely hear, either in history or in cultural anthropology, of work groups of mixed sex. Men hunt and women tend the village. Men build boats and women grow yams. In Europe women have traditionally milked the cows, in America men; but on neither side of the Atlantic has milking been done by sexually mixed groups. That in modern society men and women increasingly work side by side in the same work groups—a process that began around 1880 when typewriters and telephones first took women out of homes and small shops and into large-scale organizations—thus represents a major social change. “Women’s Lib” may thus be something far more important than a reaction to “sexual inequality.” It may be a response to the increasing disappearance of the age-old separation of the sexes at work.
The Economic Dimension
Work is a “living.” It has an economic component the moment a society adopts even the most rudimentary division of labor. The moment people cease to be self-sufficient and begin to exchange the fruits of their labor, work creates an economic bond that connects them, but also an economic conflict.
There is no resolution to this conflict. One has to live with it.
Work is living for workers. It is the foundation of their economic existence. But work also produces the capital for the economy. It produces the means by which an economy perpetuates itself, provides for the risks of economic activity and the resources of tomorrow, especially the resources needed to create tomorrow’s jobs and with them the livelihood for tomorrow’s workers. There is need in any economy for a wage fund and for a capital fund.
But the capital fund is in direct competition with the workers’ need for a livelihood here and now. Marx tried to deny the need for a capital fund. The great appeal of Marxism to the workers was precisely that it presented capital accumulation as exploitation and as unnecessary. The great appeal of Marxism was its prophesy that the capital fund would disappear once the workers owned the means of production. This very soon was seen as a total misunderstanding. No matter how bitterly Lenin attacked the German “revisionist socialists” who pointed out in the early years of this century that the capital fund was an objective necessity and not founded in social or power structure, every communist regime, most of all the Soviet Union, has put the capital fund into the center of its economic planning. In other words, they all have realized that profit is not a result of power, let alone exploitation, but objective necessity.
Still, it does little good to argue, as the classical economists did, that there is no conflict between the demands of the capital fund, that is, the demands for a surplus, and the demands of the wage fund. The classical economists argued that, in the long run, these two harmonize. The worker needs the capital fund fully as much as the wage fund. The worker needs more than anyone else, to be protected against the risks of uncertainty. The worker, more than anyone else, needs the jobs of tomorrow.
The rapid improvement in wages and living standards of the American worker has in large measure been the result of steadily increasing capital investment, that is, the capital fund. The researches of Simon Kuznets (first at the University of Pennsylvania and later at Harvard) into capital formation in the United States, have demonstrated this. But “the worker” is an abstraction. The beneficiary of the capital fund is rarely the same worker who has made the contribution to the fund. The capital accumulated in one industry, e.g., the American textile industry in the 1890s, went to finance a new industry such as the chemical industry, rather than to create new jobs in the textile industry. Also, the capital fund creates jobs and incomes tomorrow, whereas the contribution to it has to be made today.
There is, in addition, the tremendous problem of comparative gains and sacrifices among different kinds of workers. It is probably true, as labor economists have argued (e.g. Paul Douglas [1892–1976], originally an economist at Chicago, and later for many years a prominent U.S. senator), in their studies of real wages, that trade-union activities do not—and cannot—much influence the total level of real wages in an economy. It is still true, however, that one group of workers, e.g., workers in the building trades, can and do obtain sizable wage advantages at the cost of other groups of workers.
In other words, it is true that there is no ultimate conflict between wage fund and capital fund but this is largely irrelevant for the individual. For him there is a real and immediate conflict.
Work as Living and Work as Wage
There is an even more fundamental conflict between wage as living and wage as cost. As “living,” wage needs to be predictable, continuous, and adequate to the expenditures of a family, its aspirations, and its position in society and community. As “cost,” wage needs to be appropriate to the productivity of a given employment or industry. It needs to be flexible and to adjust easily to even minor changes in supply and demand in the market. It needs to make a product or service competitive. It is determined, in the last result, by the consumer, that is, without regard to the needs or expectations of the worker. Again, here is a conflict which cannot easily be resolved and can at best be assuaged.
No society, no matter how designed, has been able to eliminate these conflicts. Expropriating the capitalist, the traditional Marxist formula, does not change the situation. All it might do is to make possible a larger capital fund because the state has absolute control. But even this Russia could achieve only by outlawing labor unions. Japan has traditionally been able to minimize the conflict between wage as living and wage as cost but rising living standards threaten the Japanese accommodation. The conflict between wage fund and capital fund rages as fiercely in Japan as any place else. The Yugoslavs, by vesting ownership of a plant in the worker’s plant community, rather than in the state, hoped to abolish the conflict. Under the Yugoslav system, the needs of the capital fund should be more clearly apparent to the plant community than under any other system known so far, but they are being resisted just as much. The Yugoslav experiment is in danger of collapsing because of the inflationary pressures generated by workers’ demands for more wages than the enterprise can afford to pay either under the aspect of wage as cost or in consideration of its own and the economy’s need for the capital fund.
Worker ownership has been the alternative to both capitalism, that is ownership by the providers of capital, and nationalization, that is ownership by the government. It has a long—though not a very distinguished—history.
It may be highly desirable that workers have a financial stake in the business. But wherever tried—and we have been trying worker ownership for well over a century—it has worked only as long as the enterprise is doing well. It works only in highly profitable businesses. And so do all the variants of workers’ participation in profits. As soon as business profits drop, worker ownership no longer resolves the conflict between wage as living and wage as cost, or that between the wage fund and the capital fund.
A financial stake in the business must always remain a secondary interest to the worker compared to his or her job. Even in the most prosperous business, profit, that is, the contribution to the capital fund, is never more than a small fraction of wages. In manufacturing industries, wage costs typically are 40 percent or so of gross sales. Profits after taxes are rarely more than 5 or 6 percent, that is, one-eighth of wage costs. In the total economy the wage and salary bill runs around 70 percent of gross national product, profits fluctuate from zero to 7 percent or so—they are at most one-tenth of the wage bill.
Profits, at their lushest, can, therefore, rarely contribute more than a very small additional bonus—welcome but not fundamental.
It is also highly debatable whether worker ownership is in the worker’s own financial interest. No enterprise will be profitable forever. And if the workers then, as in the typical worker-ownership plan, are dependent for their future, e.g., for their retirement benefits, on investment in the company they work for, they are exceedingly vulnerable. Workers should no more than any other investor have all their financial eggs in one basket. In that respect, the approach to pensions adopted in the United States in the last twenty-five years— development of a pension fund which invests broadly, and typically does not invest at all in the business that employs the future beneficiaries—is financially far sounder and far more in the workers’ own financial interest than worker ownership in the enterprise that employs the workers.
From a theoretical point of view, the developments in the United States during the last twenty or thirty years would seem to represent the optimal approach to the resolution of these conflicts. The employees of American business are gradually becoming the true “owners” through their pension funds and mutual funds, which have become the dominant investors in the American economy. By now these institutional investors, i.e., the trustees for the employee’s savings, control, in effect, the large publicly owned American corporations. America, in other words, has socialized ownership without nationalizing it. Yet this has by no means resolved—or even lessened—the conflict between wage fund and capital fund and between wage as living and wage as cost.
It would help if we learned to think and speak of the costs of capital and of the costs of the future rather than of profit. But it would only help; it would not make the conflicts go away. They are built into this situation, whether business operates in a market economy or in a government-run one, whether it is privately owned, government-owned, or plant community-owned.
The Power Dimension of Working
There is always a power relationship implicit in working within a group, and especially in working within an organization.
The farmer of old who tilled his own stony acres had to impose on himself a very strict discipline. What he wanted to do was not very relevant, if haying had to be done. But the forces to which he was subordinated were impersonal. They were wind and weather, season and frost, or the impersonal forces of a market. But in any organization, no matter how small, there has to be a personal authority. The organization member’s will is subordinated to an alien will.
The imposition of the clock on the lives of people which forces them to come to work at a given hour might appear a trivial exercise of power, and one that affects everybody equally. But it came as a tremendous shock to pre-industrial people, whether peasants in developing countries, the former craftsmen in the mills of England in the early years of the industrial revolution, or Blacks from the ghettos of the American city today. In an organization jobs have to be designed, structured, and assigned. Work has to be done on schedule and in a prearranged sequence. People are promoted or not promoted. In short, authority has to be exercised by someone.
Anarchists are right in their assertion that “organization is alienation.” Modern organization theorists such as Howard University’s Chris Argyris who hope for organization without alienation are romantics (though many of their concrete proposals for “participation” are highly constructive, and needed). Modern society is an employee society and will remain one. This means power relationships that affect everybody directly and in his or her capacity as a worker. Authority is an essential dimension of work. It has little or nothing to do with ownership of the means of production, democracy at the work place, worker representation at the board of directors, or any other way of structuring the “system.” It is inherent in the fact of organization.
The Sixth Dimension: The Power Dimension of Economics
In all modern organization there is what might be called a sixth dimension of working: a need for authority with respect to economic shares.
Power and economics are inextricably tied together in the modern organization, whether business enterprise, government agency, university, or hospital. Apportioning the economic rewards of the members of the institution demands a central organ of authority with power of decision. The reason is not capitalism or any other “ism.” It is the fundamental fact that the modern institution is an organ of society, existing to provide satisfactions outside of itself. It, therefore, must obtain its revenue from the outside—either from a customer in the marketplace, from the taxpayers through a budget-making authority, or from preset fees paid by users such as patients in a hospital, patrons of the post office, or students in a college. At the same time, the contribution of the individual member of the institution cannot be directly related to the revenue. It is impossible to say, even approximately, how much of the sales of a business an individual employee contributes, whether chief executive or lowliest sweeper. The same is true of hospital or university. Does the great scholar in ancient Chinese who has six graduate students contribute more or less than the graduate assistant teaching English composition to a freshman class of 150? And what about the dean? All one can say is that everybody’s contribution is, in theory, indispensable, although not everybody’s contribution enters into every single product or performance, nor is everybody’s contribution in any way equal in importance, skill, or difficulty.
An authority is, therefore, needed which divides the revenue available among the members. The institution itself, whether business enterprise or hospital, is necessarily a redistributive system.
Where the contributions are simple, similar, and few in number, redistribution on the basis of complete equality is possible. This is, for instance, the case in the Israeli kibbutz, where everybody works on the farm, producing a very few products, most of them for internal consumption, that is, for basic self-sufficiency. But the moment the kibbutz went into industrial production, as a good many did, it had to abandon the principle of primitive socialism on which it had been founded and under which everybody receives exactly the same. It had to become an employer.
The simple fact that the results of a modern institution always lie outside of itself and that, therefore, the economic rewards for its members always come from the outside and are not determined internally, inescapably leads to power and authority. In fact, it creates two power relationships. There is a power relationship between management and labor. But the various groups within the work force, while in a common power relationship to management, also stand in sharp and intense competition to each other with respect to their relative shares in the total “product” available for internal distribution.
If the last hundred years have taught us anything, however, it is that the distribution problem is generic rather than historical. It cannot be manipulated away. There has to be a decision how to divide the revenue available from the outside among the members inside the enterprise. The moment the institution, business, hospital, or other, produces more than a very few simple commodities, meant mostly for consumption within the group, the relationship between the individual input and the institution’s output can no longer be determined “impersonally” or “scientifically.” At this moment also, equality of reward becomes at once impossible—as Russians learned in the thirties, and as all other socialist experimenters, e.g., the Yugoslavs and the Chinese, have learned since.
There has then to be a redistribution and an authority to make the redistribution decisions. Redistribution, however, is in effect a political rather than an economic decision. It is influenced and restrained by a great number of forces: supply and demand, social convention, traditions, and so on. But in the last analysis, a decision by authority and a decision based on power structure and power relationships has to be made somehow by somebody. And this decision, no modern institution—and least of all, the business enterprise—can escape.
The Fallacy of the Dominant Dimension
These dimensions of working—the physiological, the psychological, the social, the economic, and the power dimension—are separate. Each can—and, indeed, should—be analyzed separately and independently. But they always exist together in the worker’s relationship to work and job, fellow workers and management. They have to be managed together. Yet they do not pull in the same direction. The demands of one dimension are quite different from those of another.
The basic fallacy of our traditional approaches to working has been to proclaim one of these dimensions to be the dimension.
Marx—and most other economists—saw the economic dimension as dominating everything else. If only economic relationships could be changed, there would be no more alienation. Marxism became bankrupt when it became apparent that the “expropriation” of the “exploiters” did not fundamentally change the workers’ situation and their alienation because it did no change in any way any of the other dimensions (and did not indeed even change the economic problem).
Elton Mayo, to give another and radically different example, saw the dominant dimension as the interpersonal relations within the work group, that is, in psychological and social aspects. And yet it is not only true that one cannot “hire a hand; the whole person always comes with it”; the work itself matters and affects group relations. And neither the economic nor the power dimension were seen by Mayo and his associates.
These dimensions stand in highly complex relationship to each other. They are a true “configuration” but one that changes rapidly as the worker’s circumstances change.
The late Abraham H. Maslow, the father of humanist psychology, showed that human wants form a hierarchy. As a want of a lower order is being satisfied, it becomes less and less important, with a want of the next-highest order becoming more and more important. Maslow applied to human wants what might be called “marginal utility”—and his was a profound and lasting insight. Maslow put economic want at the bottom and the need for self-fulfillment at the top. But the order is not of first importance. What matters is the insight that wants are not absolute: the more one want is being satisfied, the less its satisfaction matters.
But what Maslow did not see is that a want changes in the act of being satisfied. As the economic want becomes satisfied, that is, as people no longer have to subordinate every other human need and human value to getting the next meal, it becomes less and less satisfying to obtain more economic rewards. This does not mean that economic rewards become less important. On the contrary, while the ability of the economic reward to provide a positive incentive diminishes, its capacity to create dissatisfaction, if disappointed, rapidly increases. In Herzberg’s words, economic rewards cease to be “incentives” and become “hygiene factors.” If not properly taken care of—that is, if there is dissatisfaction with the economic rewards—they become deterrents.
This, we now know, to be true of every one of Maslow’s wants. As a want approaches satiety, its capacity to reward and with it its power as an incentive diminishes fast. But its capacity to deter, to create dissatisfaction, and to act as a disincentive rapidly increases.
Two vice-presidents in the same company whose salaries are only a few hundred dollars apart are equals economically. At that salary level, the income tax is so high as to make the pay differential meaningless. Yet the vice-president with the lower salary, no matter how good it is, may be eaten up by frustration and envy. The same applies all the way down the organization. Every trade-union leader knows that his biggest problem today is not absolute pay scales. It is the pay differentials among various kinds of workers within the union. There is no way of satisfying either the skilled worker who insists on receiving 20 percent more than the semiskilled worker, or the semiskilled worker. They are equally dissatisfied. If the pay differential is being narrowed, the skilled worker will feel deprived. And if the differential is not being narrowed, the semiskilled worker will feel deprived.
But also, contrary to what Maslow seemed to imply, the various dimensions of people at work change their character as they approach being satisfied. Pay, as we have just seen, becomes part of the social or psychological dimension rather than the economic one.
The opposite can also happen; power and status can become the basis for economic demands. In Yugoslav industry, for instance, the worker representatives on the workers’ council, who hold positions of great social prestige and considerable power, almost immediately want more money as well. At the least, they want perquisites—housing, an office, a secretary, preferential prices at the company store, and so on—which are, as they see it, economic rewards befitting their new rank.
We need to know much more than we now know about the dimensions of working and about their relationships. We are dealing with a configuration likely to defy analysis.
Nevertheless, managers have to manage now. They have to find solutions—or at least accommodations—which will enable them to make work productive and the worker achieving. They have to understand what the demands are. They cannot expect to succeed by continuing the practices of the last two hundred years. They will have to develop new approaches, new principles, and new methods—and fast.