25 25. O’Toole, Work in America, pp. 16 and 23. This was the promise of ‘human resources management’: a better use of ‘the capacities of a major natural resource – the labour force’ (Walton, ‘How to Counter Alienation in the Plant’, p. 81).
26 26. This ‘participation’ allowed subordinates to wield a certain influence over the decisions affecting them, even if ‘upper-level managers continue[d] to run the company [and] handle major financial transactions’ (O’Toole, Work in America, p. 85).
27 27. Walton, ‘How to Counter Alienation in the Plant’, p. 74.
28 28. O’Toole, Work in America, p. 84. Walton also concluded that this model had ‘economic superiority’ (Richard E. Walton, ‘Work Innovations at Topeka: After Six Years’, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Vol. 13, no. 3, 1977, pp. 422–31 [p. 423]). See also Richard E. Walton, ‘Explaining Why Success Didn’t Take’, Organizational Dynamics, vol. 3, no. 3, Winter 1975, pp. 3–22.
29 29. See William S. Paul, Keith B. Robertson and Frederick Herzberg, ‘Job Enrichment Pays Off’, Harvard Business Review, March–April 1969, pp. 61–78. As André Gorz puts it: ‘Wherever an enlargement or enrichment of tasks has been tried out, the results have almost always been convincing. Does this prove […] that the abolition of factory despotism and the introduction of “industrial democracy” might become possible in the interest of capital itself? […] Put this way, the question does not make much sense. There are controlled experiments of this kind, carried out in vitro. But there is no example of a workers’ rebellion being recuperated by this kind of procedure. On the contrary, where (as at Fiat), struggle leads to forms of autonomous organization, management does all it can to destroy them. The meaning of new forms of non-despotic labour organization therefore depends – as does the meaning of any reform – on the power relationship that presided over their introduction. When imposed from above, on the employers’ initiative, to defuse resistance, they can be profitable for capital and consolidate its hegemony. Imposed from below, through actions organized by the workers, they are irreconcilable with employers’ authority. The ambiguity of the “democratization” of the labour process is therefore that of any reform: it is capital’s reformist recuperation of worker’s resistance if it is instituted from above; it opens a breach in the system of capital domination if it is imposed from below during a show of force’ (André Gorz, ‘Le despotisme d’usine et ses lendemains’, in Critique de la division du travail (Paris: Seuil, 1973), pp. 91–102 (pp. 99ff.).
30 30. John Storey, Managerial Prerogative and the Question of Control (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 138). In this virtuous circle, we are promised, it will be possible to ‘simultaneously enhance the quality of work life (thereby lessening alienation) and improve productivity’ (Walton, ‘How to Counter Alienation in the Plant’, p. 70).
31 31. It is necessary to distinguish here between the position of certain reformist theorists of management and the position of the ordinary practitioners of management, who are not generally ready to give in when it comes to their prerogatives.
32 32. Watson, ‘Counter-Planning on the Shop Floor’, p. 84.
33 33. Ibid.
34 34. ‘Stonewalling plant democracy’, Business Week, 28 March 1977, pp. 78–82 (p. 78).
35 35. Bosquet, ‘Les patrons découvrent “l’usine-bagne”’, p. 64.
36 36. Stephen A. Marglin, ‘Catching Flies with Honey: An Inquiry into Management Initiatives to Humanize Work’ (1979), in William H. Lazonick (ed.), American Corporate Economy: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management, vol. 3 (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 280–93 (p. 289).
3 SOCIAL INSECURITY
What cause have they to fear, when they are assured, that if by their indolence and extravagance, by their drunkenness and vices, they should be reduced to want, they shall be abundantly supplied, not only with food and raiment, but with their accustomed luxuries, at the expense of others. […] In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger.
Joseph Townsend1
In 1970, a Wall Street Journal reporter visited a factory. At the assembly belt, he saw long hair, beards and, sometimes, pinned to a T-shirt, a peace badge. And then, ‘above all, young faces, curious eyes. Those eyes have watched carefully as dissent has spread in the nation’. He scrutinized these eyes; he found their expression surprising and concluded: ‘They do not look afraid’.2 This, for employers, was the main problem.
Where did this new intrepidity come from? These young people knew nothing of ‘the harsh economic facts of earlier years’.3 Previously, even if they had not lived through the dark years of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, they had heard about it in their families. But this social memory, some theorized, had finally dried up: ‘It took that long – almost two generations – for the motivation by economic fear to fade’.4 Many current workers ‘have never experienced economic want or fear – or even insecurity. In the back of their mind is the knowledge that public policy will not allow them to starve, whatever may happen’.5
The source ‘of our present difficulties with the workforce might be termed a general lowering of employees’ frustration tolerance’, as one Ford executive, Malcolm Denise, put it’.6 This idea that there are variable levels of ‘frustration tolerance’ came from the psychology of behaviour. At the end of the 1930s, American researchers had conducted experiments on chimpanzees, from which it emerged that, in individuals with little experience of frustration early in their life, ‘insufficient frustration tolerance will be developed for meeting the frustrations of later years’.7 These psychologists concluded that the cardinal task of education properly understood was not so much to enable a young person to blossom as the ‘building up of frustration tolerance’ through discipline. This theory of punitive disciplining by an ogre figure explained ‘deviant behaviour’ in a similar way. An indocile individual is a subject whose level of tolerance to frustration is pathologically low. To cure him, he must be taught to rein in his desires: ‘Re-education or psychotherapy is […] a process of building up frustration tolerance by allowing the patient, […] to experience small or tolerable doses of frustration until resistance is gradually developed and the areas of low frustration tolerance disappear’.8
Applying this interpretation to worker revolts boiled down to presenting them as manifestations of psychological immaturity, like the whims of spoiled children. To state that the problem lay in subjects having too low a degree of tolerance to frustration was to deny that the relevant question was one of too high a degree of dissatisfaction inflicted by alienating forms of work. The workers, the general conclusion ran, had become just too comfy.
As one executive from General Motors said, ‘absenteeism occurs not because the jobs are dull, but because of the nation’s economic abundance, and the high degree of security and the many social benefits the industry provides’.9 The problem was nicely reproblematized: rather than remedying blue-collar worker blues, it was seen as advisable to take an interest in the advantageous social conditions that afforded them the luxury of appearing so bold. The problem was not that work was too hard, but that society was too soft.
From the end of the 1960s – well before the famous ‘oil shock’ of 1973, which is often taken as a historical turning point – the profit rate began to fall in the United States.10 The business community realized this, and worried about it. How could this slump be explained? The mainstream economic press hastily pieced together a theory, or rather an ideology of the crisis in profitability.
In March 1969, Fortune reported a drop in profit.11 In July, the magazine found the culprit: rising labour costs,12 themselves fuelled by worker militancy. In a context of galloping inflation, faced with rising prices, unions