The Changing Nature of Work

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The Changing Nature of Work

• Automation of manufacturing helped create new
  jobs and dramatically changed the work
  environment in both factories and offices.

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Henry Ford

• Henry Ford was one of the first industrialists to
  act on the realization that each worker is also a
  consumer. Ford raised worker wages so they could
  buy more goodsparticularly carsand reduced
  hours to make workers more accepting of their
  boring jobs on the assembly line.
• Because assembly line work required few special
  skills, Ford hired workers from all backgrounds,
  which also created a more loyal workforce.

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Assembly line

• The mechanized plants introduced by Ford seemed
  to turn humans into robots, with workers doing
  only one phase of production. While assembly line
  work required few specialized skills, it required
  great discipline, which was enforced through
  limited worker contact.
• Breaking down skilled work into tiny jobs
  increased production and profits, raised the
  wages of laborers, and provided jobs for
  thousands of people in need of work. However, it
  also threatened to turn workers into machines.

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Scientific management

• Frederick Taylor argued that developing more
  efficient working methods would heighten workers
  productivity, raise their wages, and profit the
  company.
• Taylor suggested that time-study experts reduce
  jobs into their simplest possible components and
  then analyze each work operation to find ways to
  minimize the time necessary to do a job. He also
  suggested that employers offer cash incentives to
  workers who produced more than the minimum
  quantities established for their jobs.

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White-collar jobs

• Scientific management affected the layout of
  offices, which began to resemble assembly lines.
• The industrial transformation created more
  white-collar jobs in insurance, banking, sales,
  and advertisingall of which were indispensable
  to big business.

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White-collar jobs

• Sales became a science taught in a variety of
  books and schools. Salespeople learned consumer
  psychology and devised new marketing techniques
  such as contests. Companies, in turn, rewarded
  successful salespeople and sometimes humiliating
  unsuccessful ones.
• Advertising became big business. Most advertising
  workers were young, white college graduates or
  former newspaper writers. If an advertising
  worker could stand the pace, he or she could earn
  3 times what an automobile maker earned.

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Women in the workplace

• The invention of the typewriter created new jobs
  for middle-class, high-school educated women.
  Even if typing paid no better than operating a
  machine in a factory, the new office work allowed
  an educated young woman to work in a clean,
  attractive environment.
• Women, who did not command high wages or look
  forward to promotion, found themselves assigned
  to pools in which they operated all the new
  office technologytypewriters, dictaphones, and
  telephones.

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Operators and clerks

• In the same way that secretarial work provided an
  alternative to nursing or teaching for female
  high-school graduates, telephone companies and
  the new department stores offered women without a
  high-school diploma a pleasant alternative to
  factory work or domestic service.

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Gender segregation

• By the 1920s offices and stores had two distinct
  cultures, neatly divided by gender.
• Women dominated in the clerical, unskilled
  professions that involved simple, repetitive
  routines. Womens jobs provided little chance for
  advancement except to positions of cashier or
  executive secretary, or perhaps marriage.
• Men, on the other hand, found jobs as managers,
  senior cashiers, chief clerks, head bookkeepers,
  floorwalkers, salespeople, or advertising
  workers. Energy, initiative, and creativity paid
  off and could lead to better jobs.