Class Struggle, Skill and the Productive Process Today

25. Review of European Affairs, no. 4, 1991.

1988.

Norway.

rather than a federal.

ny in the field of integrated circuits. Le Monde, 4 May 1991.

Beyond. Edited by Dennis Swann. London, 1992.

29. Britain during an entire period and then the United States.

KEITH MANN

Class struggle, skill

and the productive

process today

TRENDS in the development of technology and their effects on skilled labour in the production process are frequently commented on by the most diverse sources. Nearly all of these accounts, from the most superficial journalistic exposés to the most sophisticated post-modernist theorists, claim that technological developments signal the disappearance of the working class, as traditionally understood in advanced industrialized capitalist countries, and with it, its capacity to change society. But with rare exceptions these commentators offer far more in the way of ideologically-motivated polemics, than the sustained analysis required to treat the subject accurately.

An accurate understanding of the shape of the working class in terms of skill in contemporary advanced industrialized capitalist countries is a vital component of the elaboration of a Marxist approach to labour struggles in the coming period. More generally, the question is of interest to Marxists for at least two reasons: as champions of the interests of the working class, we are interested in trends in the labour process as an indicator of the physical and psychological well-being of workers. Secondly, changes in terms of skill and the labour process have effects on workers' capacity to engage in militant industrial action around immediate issues in the short term and revolutionary class-wide collective action in the long term.

The extreme diversity of productive techniques on an international scale, their rapid transformation in the face of the changing needs of capital and the deliberate shroud of obscurity cast over management decisions in general by the employing class, renders extremely difficult the task of assembling repre-

28 International Marxist Review sentative data for a wide range of industries. These practical problems are compounded by theoretical confusion concerning the very terms of the question, particularly involving a useful definition of skill, the role of technology in the labour process and the mechanism of class struggle at the point of production. An accurate view of trends in skilled labour requires both exhaustive empirical studies of changes in the productive process and a rigourous Marxist theoretical framework to interpret them.

Our aim here is to advance our knowledge of contemporary trends in manufacturing technique as expressed at the point of production in advanced capitalist industrialized countries and the ways in which they can be expected to modify relations between various layers of the working class across the skill divide, as well as their effects on the capacity of workers to engage in industrial class struggle. This focus on recent changes in the organization of the productive process should not be interpreted as meaning that working class consciousness and forms of struggle are solely a question of the nature of relations at the point of production. Radical English and American labour historians, particularly in the 1970s, drew our attention to the importance of the broader working class community in shaping modern working class consciousness. In recent years the role of the manufacturing sector in the economies of the advanced industrialized capitalist world has considerably declined. The loss of industrial jobs in the manufacturing sector is driven home on a daily basis with a continuous stream of reports of plant closures and lay-offs. And the fastest growing sectors of most advanced capitalist economies are in the service, as opposed to manufacturing sectors. Nevertheless, industrial production remains an important component of industrialized economies and millions of workers still work in the industrial centres of Western Europe, North America and Japan. Ultimately, any conclusions arrived at here would have to be integrated with - and possibly modified -by studies taking into account trends in manufacturing technique in other societies especially the "Asian tigers" (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea) and Brazil, as well as the transitional societies of the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Skilled workers and class struggle

While changes in the productive process affect all workers, special attention will be given here to skilled workers. What role have skilled workers played in relation to other layers of the working class in terms of the class

Class struggle, skill and the productive process today 29 struggle on both the trade union and broader political plane? Historically, there has been a tension within Marxism, beginning with Marx himself, concerning the effects of industrial change on the skill level of workers. In the Grundrisse and later in Capital, Marx put the full force of his intellectual powers at the disposal of his moral revulsion against the de-humanizing aspects of industrial production. He considered the parcellization of labour as one of the essential characteristics of capitalist production and the progressive loss of the professional autonomy of the craftsmen as among the most fundamental components of the alienation of producers under the capitalist mode of production. On the other hand, the loss of this professional autonomy was considered an aspect of the increasing proletarianization of the premodern working class, and therefore, part of the development of capitalism's gravedigger — the modern working class. The decline of small-scale individual production in favour of large-scale collective, social labour was expected to lead to greater class cohesion, both in terms of consciousness and collective action. The progressive loss of professional autonomy was expected to give rise to a collective proletarian interest in expropriating private property in the interests of the social administration of production.

Revolutionary socialists, especially in the United States of America (USA), have been particularly sensitive to the conservative role that skilled workers and craftsmen have played in the labour movement. Much of the history of the American Federation of Labor of Samuel Gomper's day has been justifiably associated with political conservatism, and the exclusion of women, foreign workers and the unskilled, not to mention open racism against African American workers.

Skilled workers as a whole have often been associated with the "labour aristocracy". This has been understood by Marxists as a privileged layer of the working class bought off by the super-profits accumulated from imperialist plunder and committed to preserving its prerogatives through class collaboration and the renunciation of attacks on the wage system itself. But an actual definition of the labour aristocracy separated from other layers of the working class in terms of skill is quite elusive. Conservatism, reformism, and revolutionary socialism have all characterized workers at every skill level at various times during the history of the modern working class movement. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Engels held that the entire English working class could be considered as an aristocracy of labour. The possession of work-related skills alone cannot, therefore, be directly associated to the labour aristocracy. In spite of the well known examples of skilled worker conservatism, from

30 International Marxist Review the beginning of the modern labour movement, they were also at the forefront of the most militant trade union and political action. In France for example, where the pace, rhythm and very nature of industrial development produced a working class in the main made up of craft and highly skilled workers, the nineteenth century labour movement was virtually synonymous with skilled workers and craftsmen. Craft pride and consciousness coexisted with a broad class consciousness that was hostile to the wage system and the bourgeois state. French craftsmen were the conscious inheritors of the legacy of the French Revolution, and it was skilled workers and craftsmen working in small shops who were both the shock troops and leaders of the Paris Commune in 1871, the world's first proletarian government.' Recent studies of the labour movement at the end of the nineteenth century, in the industrial Stephanois region of France, have shown the indispensable role skilled workers played in co-ordinating class-wide solidarity amongst all workers.? For the USA, David Montgomery has called attention to the radical role that skilled workers have played, particularly around the question of workers' control.? One of the most stunning examples of revolutionary working class militancy in Britain was the British shop stewards' movement in the north of England during World War I. Skilled metal workers or engineers confronted both the employers and the state and after the war went on to found the British Communist Party.+ Recent studies of the Moscow and St. Petersburg working class in the years before the Russian Revolution have shown that it was skilled workers (though not the "labour aristocracy") who were not only the backbone of the trade union movement, but also most likely to engage in radical politics against the autocracy. It was these workers more than any other who streamed into the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties. S

The history of the modern labour movement is full of examples of skilled workers reaching out to the unskilled in order to wage struggles in defence of all. The British shop stewards' movement provides a prime example of this, where they agreed to labour saving machinery that would make many of their skills redundant only on the condition that all workers — both skilled veterans and unskilled new comers — would receive the same wage. This was called "following the work". Such strategies, which have been seen frequently in different forms in many countries, protect workers of all grades and enhance class wide solidarity.

A close look at the trade union and political behaviour of this group of workers reveals that the overall position of the skilled worker amounts to a double-edged sword from the point of view of class-wide solidarity. Many of these come to the fore precisely at the moment when craftsmen and skilled

Class struggle, skill and the productive process today 31 workers are faced with attacks over their control of the labour process. The struggle of the skilled to resist employer-inspired innovations in the organization of production, aimed at reducing the importance of skill, has always been a central feature of industrial relations. What is skill?

The very definition of skill as a way of characterizing the qualities that a worker brings to the productive process is far more difficult than commonly supposed. While most would agree what constitutes very skilled or very unskilled work, actual situations are usually more difficult. Changes in the organization of production can rapidly transform today's "skilled" into tomorrow's "unskilled" worker. What exactly are the criteria that separate a skilled worker in a given industry from an unskilled worker? How can workers in one trade be compared in terms of skill with those in another? Is a lathe operator more or less skilled than a key-punch operator?

The only way to define skill adequately is by viewing it as a social relation dependent on labour market considerations and the balance of forces between labour and capital. Work requiring the simplest repetitive actions can be considered unskilled not so much because of the alleged simplicity of the task or the short period required to master the necessary movements, but precisely because excepting an actual dearth of candidates for these jobs, the ease with which these very characteristics can be learned weights the labour market in favour of the capitalist, who can choose to hire workers on the basis of docility and willingness to accept the working conditions and salary offered, as well as ability to perform the required work tasks.

Likewise, the characteristics that makes a skilled worker skilled, are not only the time required to learn the demands of the job, or other personal or acquired characteristics, but the fact that the very difficulty of learning these tasks often results in the scarcity of labour capable of performing the tasks at hand. To put the same idea differently, this would mean that a highly trained worker in a glutted labour market is in a weaker position vis-a-vis an employer than a less "skilled" but exceptionally physically powerful individual with no specialized knowledge or training whatsoever, but who possesses unusual physical force which is both rare and indispensable for what would otherwise be considered "unskilled" labour. The labour market strength of the skilled worker therefore flows from the scarcity of skills essential to the production process.

32 International Marxist Review

However, these skills themselves do not consist merely of technical knowledge, the very nature of which necessarily requires special aptitudes and/or extended training. Rather, the acquisition of these skills is itself socially mediated. Craft workers have traditionally fought to control and restrict access to their trades through apprenticeship programmes and other methods precisely in order to assure a favourable balance of forces in labour market terms vis-a-vis the employer. Dockers, whose professional tasks involve mostly carting and hauling and for some, the operation of forklifts, have everywhere claimed a special status as part of a strategy of protecting themselves through controlling access to these jobs.

From the end of the eighteenth century when industrial capitalism began to develop, capitalists have fought to strip the skilled worker of as much autonomy in the labour process as possible, both in order to assure a flow of production in accordance with the needs of the capitalist market, and to weaken the bargaining position of workers, both individually and collectively. In fact, early textile factories were conceived of initially as a device to increase capitalist surveillance over spinners and weavers who had hitherto worked in their own cottages, at their own pace. The use of machinery and other techniques today associated with industrial production only later became an integral part of the industrial landscape. These early factories then, were themselves the opening salvo of the capitalist drive to strip workers of as much control over the labour process as possible.

The classic example of sustained "scientific" attention to this matter by capitalists was the time-motion studies of F.W. Taylor at the beginning of this century, and applied on a mass scale in the automobile industry by Henry Ford and others. Taylorism and the Fordist system corresponded to the interest of capital in separating conception from execution of labour tasks and lodging both knowledge and decision making in the hands of the capitalist. The development and application of the theories of scientific management and "Taylorism" can be seen as the quintessential manifestation of the inexorable drive of capital for maximum control over production. The three central principles of scientific management are 1) the disassociation of the labour process from the skills of the worker. Here management gathers all the knowledge concerning the labour process that had previously been the preserve of the worker; 2) the separation of conception from execution in which all "brainwork" and decision making become the preserve of management rather than the workers; 3) management uses this monopoly over knowledge to control each step of the labour process and its mode of execution.

Class struggle, skill and the productive process today 33 Technology and rationalization

An inquiry into current developments in industrial production and their effects on labour in terms of skill requires precision as to what is actually meant by the terms "technology" and "rationalization". Technology proper, in the narrow sense of the application of science to the invention or improvement of automated machinery, must be distinguished from the broader rationalization of the productive process which is often carried out with existing or mildly altered machinery. As will be seen below, the greatest mutations of the productive process and their effects on all aspects of the workers involved, from working conditions and wages, to the capacity of workers to engage in united defence of their interests, are much more a result of rationalization using existing technology than of dramatic changes resulting from the introduction of advanced technology. But, however important the distinction between technology in the narrow sense defined here and broader changes in the productive process there is no Chinese wall between technological change and other forms of reorganization of the labour process.

Technological changes in the narrow manner in which it has been discussed here have of course occurred and had an impact on the workforce of the advanced industrialized capitalist countries and elsewhere throughout the post-war period. But before discussing this aspect of industrial change it is important to call attention to some of the broader aspects in which Marxists should approach the role of technology.

Technology often tends to be considered an independent factor that is leading inexorably towards a totally automated world. This view, which finds its intellectual origins in American positivism, is advanced not only in popular rience fiction but by well known contemporary sociologists. The off-hand comment of French sociologist Edgar Morin in a recent interview given to he French Communist Party daily L'Humanite denouncing the "impersonal and anonymous power of technology..." has long been a virtual banality, a part of contemporary common sense.' But in fact, every aspect of the application of technology to the productive process under capitalism is conditioned by its relationship to the balance of forces at every level of society, from the most general balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the working ¿lass to the specific balance of forces in a given industry, company or plant. For our purposes, this means that the introduction of labour saving technology. while clearly in the interests of the individual capitalist searching to reduce labour costs, has often been resisted in the past, with various levels of

34 International Marxist Review success, by the workers' movement.

Harry Braverman, in his Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, explains the mechanisms of capitalist rationality and its pernicious effect on both the psychological equilibrium of the proud craftsman and the weakening of the labour market position of not only the skilled workers in question, but of entire labour forces. Furthermore, he views the "degradation of labor in the twentieth century" (the book's sub-title) as an inexorable trend driven by the voraciousness of the insatiable capitalist drive for greater profits.

This is however, the central weakness of Braverman's important work. In fact, from its beginnings the history of the industrial working class has not only been that of the interest of capitalists in attacking the skill prerogatives of labour but also worker resistance to attempts to institute labour-saving machinery.

Workers have often been successful in preventing for a time the introduction of such techniques. After an initial phase of "luddism" skilled workers in many countries elaborated a coherent approach to the question of labour technology that expressed forward-looking support for technological change from the point of view of the needs of society as a whole rather than the narrow interests of capital. On the practical plane, the most creative forms of struggle were elaborated. At their best, these took as their starting point the needs of both unskilled and skilled labour. The metal workers who were behind the British shop stewards' movement in the north of England before and during World War I adopted the slogan "follow the work" when faced with rationalizing mechanization. According to this strategy, the tightly organized metal workers or engineers would agree to the introduction of such techniques on the condition that existing wage rates for all workers involved would be respected. This was aimed at preventing the bosses from employing cheap unskilled labour to operate the new machinery, which was simpler to run. By calling for respect for existing wage rates, the engineers were both protecting themselves from redundancy and the potential new workers from super-exploitation. The use of chronometers in Renault's early auto shops in 1912 resulted almost immediately in bitter strikes. In the work referred to above, Michael Hanagan discussed skilled worker strategies that involved fights to slow down the introduction of labour-saving technology until workers could find ways to adapt to new situations. Historically, patterns of industrialization in the world's industrially developed centres produced working classes with clearly recognizable characteristics, the broad outlines of which can be briefly discussed here. The first industrial revolution which is commonly dated as occurring between 1780

Class struggle, skill and the productive process today 35 and 1830 in Britain, and which was based on a dramatic expansion of production and trade in the coal, iron and textile industries, was characterized by modest capital and labour concentration, the persistence of small-scale craft industry and little mechanization. The character of nineteenth century industry contributed to the development of a working class heavily weighted towards artisan and skilled workers widely separated from unskilled factory hands (often women and children) by wage rates, ideological outlook, trade union and political behaviour.

A second industrial revolution, occurring at the end of the nineteenth century in all of the industrialized countries of North America and Western Europe, was characterized by the rise of the steel, chemical and electrical industries, large scale capital concentration, and large scale concentration of production with large labour forces. The implications of this second industrialization for the shape of the working class in terms of skill were considerable. As a whole, the period was characterized by the decline of skilled labour in terms of both real numbers and as a percentage of the labour force. This corresponded to an increase in the semi-skilled factory proletariat drawn from skilled workers whose skills were made redundant through mechanization and rationalization, the unskilled layers of the workforce now drawn into direct production, rural artisans drawn to the cities through rural deindustrialization and finally non-proletarian labouring elements, primarily agricultural workers and small scale farmers forced off the land.

Unlike the many divisions separating workers along the skill divide during the earlier period, the working class in the manufacturing sector during the first four decades of this century was homogenized as never before in terms of working conditions, living standards, and political and trade union organization. Divisions between workers along the skill divide were sharply reduced. An alliance between a minority of skilled and unskilled workers with the great mass of semi-skilled workers, was realized in the form of mass industrial unionism and the growth of Socialist, and especially Communist, political parties.

Post-World War Il developments and their effects on the shape of the working class in terms of skill distribution are far more difficult to summarise. In general there has been far less agreement as to the overall character of industrial capitalism since the war, and its effects on skill and labour in particular, than in relation to preceding periods

However, a number of characteristics can be discerned. The capital concentration seen during the second industrial revolution has dramatically increased. On the other hand, the concentration of production that was so

36 International Marxist Review characteristic of the preceding phase has declined as a result of the conscious decision of industrial capital to decentralize production through transfering production to other countries or parts of the same country where the social climate is more favourable, be it parts of the un-unionized south in the USA, or Asia and Latin America. The increasing spread of home-work is also a part of this effort to atomize labour forces.

As far as changes in the labour process are concerned, the post-World War II period saw the opening of a debate which soon produced an abundant literature concerning trends in the productive process and their effects on the shape of the manufacturing working class. Broadly speaking, this debate can be divided into those who see changes in the organization of production involving a trend towards the en-skilling of labour in the manufacturing sector, and those who interpret current and future trends as involving the deskilling of skilled workers The positions advanced by the protagonists in this debate can be further broken down into pessimists and optimists concerning the revolutionary potential of the fraction of the working class in question.

Academic social scientists like Daniel Bell, Alain Touraine and, to a certain extent, Jurgen Habermas have advanced "Human capital" theories which hold that technological trends require the training of a highly educated working class, bearing little resemblance to the semi-skilled factory hand of the inter-war period. Those holding this position often implied implicitly or explicitly that these changes signaled the end of the working class as it had been known. In its most extreme form this argument held that the embourgeoisement that accompanied all this eliminated both the necessity for socialist revolution and the historical agent charged with bringing about revolution. For example, Alain Touraine argued that changes in the organization of labour were linked to broader social developments which favoured the social "integration" of the working class into bourgeois society?

Other commentators of a similar political and ideological bent read current trends in industrial production as tending in the opposite direction. For them, technological change at the point of production was de-skilling workers. Trends seen during the second industrial revolution were being accelerated and would soon invade the narrow sphere of skilled labour that had until that point been spared the debilitating effects of Taylorism. In its most extreme form, even unskilled workers would be threatened by technology. Robots and other devices would eventually eliminate human labour altogether from the productive process. Though this pessimistic view of the quality of working class life on the job differed radically from the en-skillers, both agreed that the developments they believed they were witnessing signalled the

Class struggle, skill and the productive process today 37 declining capacity of the working class to effect fundamental social change. In general terms, Harry Braverman's work is part of the de-skilling literature. But Braverman's approach differs from the others in its clear Marxist explanation of Taylorism and other forms of the labour process, his passionate defence of the creativity of skilled work and his evident lack of interest in providing arguments for those who would read the working class and the class struggle out of existence.

In the 1950s, the French Communist Party (PCF) advanced the notion of the "absolute impoverishment" of the working class, whose increasing proletarianization would lead to a more combative labour movement. In the early 1960s, Serge Mallet, who had earlier left the PCF, saw technological changes leading towards a more technically competent working class. But unlike Touraine's integrated working class, these new workers, far from constituting a "labour aristocracy" would, in fact, be a politically advanced vanguard who would prepare the whole working class for self-management.®

From quite different quarters came another version of the debate between en-skillers and de-skillers. Marxists identified with the political current founded by Leon Trotsky also discussed the evolution of the working class in terms of skill and the labour process as part of a larger debate concerning the development of the productive forces in the post-war period. The Belgian Marxist economist and leader of the Fourth International Ernest Mandel, viewed what some termed the third industrial revolution as signalling an "acceleration of technical innovation" and a radical increase in the technical knowledge that workers were now trained to possess.? Yet, this was accompanied by increased "division of labour, hyper-specialization and greater and greater parcellization of work tasks". ' 1° Unlike the academic proponents of the en-skilling theory, Mandel saw these changes as leading to enhanced working class cohesion and increased revolutionary potential partly as a result of the stronger labour market position that these highly skilled workers would occupy. Leading members of the French International Communist Party (PCI), including Pierre Lambert, argued that the stagnation of the productive forces, which they saw as characterizing the capitalist system in the post-war period, was inexorably de-skilling all grades of the industrial working class. But, unlike the academic and social democratic version of the debate, the PCI held that the changes would increase the revolutionary capacity of the working class.

To what degree do these competing theories shed light on the character of the technological changes instituted in the manufacturing centres of the postwar period and the effects they have had on the labour force in terms of skill?

38 International Marxist Review Perhaps the most important technological innovation has been the introduction of numerical control systems. In the 1960s, this method was considered as "probably the most significant new development in manufacturing technology since Henry Ford introduced the concept of the moving assembly line. "'' This method, used initially in the field of machine construction was also widely applied to other industries such as the electronics industry. The numerical control system made possible, with a precision never before attained, complex pre-coded metal cutting. The possibilities for further reducing the control formerly skilled metal workers exercised over the production process were fully exploited by management.

The application of numerical control systems to various industrial processes clearly represent an intensified application of Taylorist principles to the work process. Cases where they have been implemented can therefore be considered as promoting the de-skilling of skilled labour. However, in spite of the broad use of these methods, numerical control has not been universally applied to all forms of industrial production. As for the use of robots which were supposed to completely eliminate the need for human participation in the labour process, their use has been extremely limited. According to a French Ministry of Labour report, only five percent of those considered skilled workers and three percent of unskilled workers used numerical controlled tools or robots in France at the beginning of the 1990s!? and PCF economists estimate that there are only about ten thousand robots currently in use in French industry. ' The problem therefore is to ascertain to what degree these developments are representative of technological development in industry as a whole. '4

Some of the most useful work in this field has been carried out by Roger Penn, a British industrial sociologist, who in Class, Power and Technology's expresses the view that the theorists of both the "en-skilling" and "deskilling" schools pose the question at far too high a level of generality, with theoretical propositions that are not matched by a correspondingly serious attempt at empirical research. In Class, Power and Technology, Penn examines the relationship between skilled labour and technological change. In the case of Britain he examines the paper, electrical power, coal and printing industries, in most cases as part of the Skilled Workers Project developed at Lancaster University in the mid 1980s. In the case of the USA trends in the coal, paper, metal, printing, rubber, textile, clothing, shoe and meatpacking industries. Penn chooses to study such a large number of industries in order to avoid the tendency which he sees within the existing literature to "inflate one or two examples and hail

them as the trend of occupational change in modern societies." 16

Not only, and particularly in Britain, is there technological change generating skilling and de-skilling; more specifically "skilling affects maintenance workers whereas de-skilling is concentrated amongst some types of production workers."? He describes this phenomenon as the compensatory theory

Nonetheless, he accepts that this theory does not describe developments in all the industries. For example, in foundry work in the USA and to a lesser extent printing in Britain, technological change has led to en-skilling of workers, while in industries such as shoemaking and meatpacking, Braverman's theory still accurately describes the evolution of labour.

In summary the compensatory theory has five propositions:

• That technological change generates both skilling and de-skilling. In fact, it holds that this dualism is not only a conjectural phenomenon, but is intrintend to deskill direct productive roles but put an increased premium on a range of ancillary skilled tasks that are associated with the installation, maintenance and programming of auto-

• As a result, technological change has an uneven effect on different types of work, both between production and maintenance, and within maintenance

• The uneven nature of these trends presents alternatively advantages and

These are important findings whose value should not be underestimated.

They certainly help give us a far more precise understanding of the status of skill and work in two important industrialized countries today. Penn's findings, coupled with the extremely limited use of robots and the relatively limited use of numerical control systems, suggest that technology per se has had a limited overall effect on the evolution of skill and the productive process.

From a strict technological point of view then, little evidence exists as to whether there is any concerted movement towards de-skilling or en-skilling.

However, the same cannot be said for the various forms of rationalization that have been instituted in the last few years. As we will see below, develop-

S

S d y e

11 of skill.

• Technological changes work itself.

sic to the very nature of capitalism.

• These developments are international.

mated machinery. (author's emphasis)

disadvantages for the labour movement. '8

Class struggle, skill and the productive process today 39

40 International Marxist Review ments in the field of "rationalization" have signalled important inroads into the skill preserve of production workers. It is these forms of rationalization, often implemented with existing technology, which represent the greatest attacks on industrial workers and have the greatest ramifications for workers at all skill levels. While recent rationalization drives involve sub-contracting, home-work, forced overtime for some, part-time work for others, and so on, the focus here is on developments occurring in the labour process itself.

Contemporary forms of capitalist rationalization are directly rooted in the reorganization of Japanese industry after World War II. Following the defeat of the 1950 Toyota strike, Japanese industrial capital was able to institute forms of rationalization aimed at increasing labour production, reducing labour costs and attacking workers' control of various labour processes on the shop floor.

Muto Ichiyo, a respected writer on the Japanese labour movement, has defined Gorika, the Japanese word for rationalization as conceived in Japan, as being characterized by the thoroughness, intensity, and refinement whereby the buildup of new production capacities, the application of new technological methods, and the modification of the organization of labour, and the enforcement of new kinds of labour control designed to pre-empt and decimate worker's power are linked organically. '9

The results in terms of savings on labour costs by these methods were considerable. For example, by 1960, the labour cost fraction per ton of crude steel was a meagre $17 for Japan while that for the US was $103. The low labour cost reflected not only the advantage of scale and advanced technique but also the new labour system that made this low labour cost possible.20 In Europe and North America, Japanese-style rationalization has been a favoured capitalist response to the declining global markets and the resulting increased competition of the 1980s as well as of the need to avoid stockpiling. The team concept has been instituted by management, particularly in the automobile industry but also in steel, bottling and other industries. The motivation has been not only the reduction of labour costs but above all a new stress on quality. This stress, which has become an obsession, particularly in the French automobile industry, involves one of the most sinister aspects of rationalization from the point of view of the workers involved: the quality

Class struggle, skill and the productive process today 41 circles which amount to a system of brainwashing — an attempt to induce workers to identify totally with the company. In a section devoted to quality and competitiveness, the French big business daily, Le Monde recently wrote that "quality demands the participation of the wage workers as much as technical know-how." Pierre Jocou, director of quality control at Renault, explained that "(t)otal quality is more a question of conscience than of science, of behaviour than of technology"?' In France and elsewhere, consultancy firms have sprouted up whose task consists of advising companies on how to institute these schemes.

The actual functioning of quality circles, especially in Japan, takes on aspects of an Orwellian nightmare. Muto Ichiyo cites an example from Nippon Steel's Kimizu mill where workers gather in a 'self-management' rally to listen to their colleagues proposals for higher productivity. The speaker on the stage first flashes a V-sign and shouts 'Are you alright? Are you doing what you should?' The whole crowd must shout back in unison, 'Yes, we are alright. We are doing it.? 22

Such brainwashing methods have been accompanied by selective harassment of those who resist, attempts to divide work forces along race and gender lines and various other carrot and stick methods. For example, Toyota has developed an elaborate bonus plan pegged to a complicated scale of twentyeight categories.

One French industrial group which has been at the forefront of the total quality campaign, has reported a decline in labour costs from forty-five to eighteen percent. At the Sollac steel mill as much steel was produced at the beginning of the 1990s as was produced in 1980 when there were twice as many workers — a one-hundred percent gain in labour productivity. At Citroen, fifty percent more cars were produced between 1981 and 1989 with twenty-two percent less workers. 24

Accordingly, the dramatic cuts in labour costs and increased productivity across the globe cannot be linked simply to the moving of centres of production to Asia and Latin America. Modern-day Taylorism?

Do these methods amount to a further intensification of traditional Taylorist methods with a resulting decline in skill? The answer to this question requires considerable information about, and analysis of, the actual mecha-

42 International Marxist Review nisms of the team concept in practice. Fortunately, at least one such study is already available. Kim Moody and Jane Slaughter, editors of the American rank and file trade union publication Labor Notes, have authored an important book, Choosing Sides: Unions and the team concept. This study involves a close look at the actual functioning of the system on the plant floor. Their discussion of the just-in-time (JIT) system, by which every movement of each worker in a given production team is measured and designed for optimum time efficiency, indicates that this aspect of the new system is wholly consistent with the time motion studies carried out by Taylor and others at the beginning of this century. This and other features of current rationalization campaigns aimed at increasing management intervention in the productive process would seem to support a reading of these methods as modern day Taylorism. However, other aspects of the team concept represent a departure from some of the essential characteristics of Taylorism and in particular its application to the assembly line manufacturing pioneered by Henry Ford and Louis Renault.

One of the essential features of that system was the parcellization of tasks — a frontal assault on the job autonomy of the skilled worker whose skills had hitherto been exercised at every stage of the productive process. The contemporary team concept goes precisely in the opposite direction. Unlike traditional assembly line production, the team concept involves a multiplication of tasks for each worker involved. Each worker must be able to carry out a variety of the various functions required by the various aspects of team production. The French economist Benjamin Coriat has written that "the former division of work (issued from Taylorism), based on the strict separation of conception/execution, and the parcellization of tasks, is largely finished. With it, the traditional structure of 'craft' and 'classifications' has been rendered obsolete". This is part of the need for greater flexibility in the face of uncertain, shifting markets, and a new vision of enterprise social relations now cast in terms of "individuality" and direct links between each separate worker and management — the"return of paternalism". 25 Industrial capitalists and their ideologues and publicists also consider these new techniques as representing a post-Taylorist phase. According to one expert, "total quality, which is the opposite of the Taylorian system must put the wage workers in a situation where they no longer just carry out what they are told to, but must think about what they are doing."26 So far as the question of skill levels is concerned, Coriat reads the new stress on polyvalency as signalling the increased skill level of workers. But closer to the mark is the view of Moody and Slaughter that the multi-skilling

which accompanies the team concept represents a loss of skill in the form of a drastic reduction of classification. This is not so much due to the loss of job classifications, which do not always represent "skills" in the sense of workrelated knowledge, but because these new multiple tasks by themselves require no ability which does not relate to the actual productive process in the enterprise where this work is performed. This has certainly been the case in

Japan where "(t)he standardization of the work process is... carried out in a fashion peculiar to the enterprise, thus depriving the worker of the universal

All of these developments have affected mostly semi-skilled factory workers and in most cases by-passing skilled workers, who remain a significant portion of the labour force both in Britain and the USA (Penn cites figures pointing to an increase in the percentage of skilled workers in the USA from

It is well known that the team concept and other related reorganizations of the production process have amounted to a severe degradation of working conditions for those involved. But are further changes in this direction inevitable? What are the implications of these methods for relations between workers? What impact can they be expected to have on the capacity of workers to resist? Only the unfolding of the class struggle will allow these questions to be answered with any precision, but it is possible to offer several mechanization and the new technical division of labour do not in and of themselves (i.e.

without the medium of the class struggle) lead straight to stronger shopfloor power of workers, just as they do not lead automatically to the loss of shopfloor bargaining power. The new technical processes only renew the terms of the class struggle; the side that first masters the new art of struggle necessitated by these new terms will win. (author's emphasis)

Changes over the last few years have already represented blows to some possibilities for worker resistance. In the name of saving jobs, unions, particularly in the USA, have accepted the quality circle and team concepts, also promoted by labour bureaucrats who identify with the interests of capital in competing with other factories, companies, regions and countries. Acceptance of these methods represents the shop floor expression of the growing trend towards economic nationalism, class collaborationism and protectionism which finds its large scale expression in multi-national trading blocks, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Economic f

S e e y

It applicability of his/her skill... "27

----- pull-quotes on this page -----

11.1% of the workforce in 1940 to 13.0% in 1980). scenarios based on our current knowledge. Muto Ichiyo advances one interesting proposition, that Class struggle, skill and the productive process today 43

44 International Marxist Review Community (EEC) and Japanese-led Asian trading alliances.

The team concept aims at undermining worker cohesion and solidarity and replacing the horizontal links between workers as a whole with vertical relations linking individual workers and management. The flexibility allowed by this system, whereby many workers are capable of carrying out a multiplicity of necessary, but easily learned tasks, permits their increased surveillance by company spies.

The team concept permits management to take advantage of the traditional insensitivity of trade union bureaucracies towards women, oppressed nationalities and youth to divide labour forces as never before. (Indeed cases have been recently reported in the USA where companies have built support for the team concept by appealing to African American workers who have been ignored by their union.?9 The bonus system is a powerful incentive for workers to participate in "voluntary" quality seminars, and only a minority of the most class-conscious workers will refuse to participate.

More generally, sub-contracting has atomized workforces in unprecedented ways. The Citroen automobile corporation sub-contracts portions of their production to some 250 different sites, where the workforce often consists of immigrants and women who have not been adequately integrated into unions and who do not therefore enjoy their protection.

Fightbacks against contemporary rationalization drives encounter many difficulties. This is because unlike the "thirty glorious years" when post-war labour productivity was accompanied by impressive economic growth rates, the current expansion of productivity has coincided with a stagnation or shrinking in national economic growth rates, resulting in massive unemployment, such as in the western European countries of the EEC, where 18.5 million workers officially (as of June 1993) and millions more unofficially, are out of work. Such high levels of unemployment do not inspire labour struggles.

Nevertheless, there is evidence that current trends in industrial production involve features that could encourage worker resistance. On a general level, while the loss of classifications is a blow to the remaining pockets of control by workers of access to certain jobs and therefore a weakening of their position in the labour market, the resulting homogenization flowing from the leveling of work tasks can break down pre-existing barriers between different occupational groups.

As we have seen, the JIT system can be read as an up-to-date version of traditional Taylorist methods of wringing maximum productivity out of workers and reducing their control and labour costs. But this system, as Ernest

Class struggle, skill and the productive process today 45 Mandel explained twenty years ago, also corresponds to the contemporary need of capital to avoid stock-piling. Such need to produce at levels as close as possible to market demands could be its Achilles heel in that a slowing of production would be far more devastating to firms. The nature of team production affords the possibility to coordinate such action. However there would be difficulties in such a strategy; the polyvalency that accompanies the team concept allows the replacement of militant workers with more pliant pro-management workers and the ease with which workers can be transferred from one team to another means that solidarity can be broken. Accordingly sustained slow down campaigns might have to be preceded by a fight for union control over the composition of the teams. None of this will be possible without an educational campaign aimed at educating workers about the dangers of the team concept together with a campaign to fight race and sex discrimination both on the shop floor and in the unions. Economic nationalism and protectionism — one of the pillars in the drive towards greater efficiency — must also be fought. The dramatic increases in labour productivity recorded in recent years, coinciding with high levels of unemployment, provide ammunition for a campaign for the reduction of the working week without loss of pay. More generally, the international working class has at its disposal an extremely rich body of theory and practice of workers' control. This militant heritage can serve workers struggling against today's forms of rationalization.

It remains to be seen what effect current transformations of the productive process will have on relations between the increasingly homogenized workers involved with team production and the skilled workers who have not been directly affected by these developments. Will skilled workers, as they have many times during the last hundred and fifty years, play the progressive role of leaders of militant class-wide industrial action or will they retreat into the myopic egotistical, narrow defence of craft privilege which has also been part of their history? Whichever occurs will have far reaching implications for all workers. Notes 1. See Bernard Moss, 'The Origins of the French Labour Movement 1830-1914', in The Sociialism of Skilled Workers, University of California Press, 1976. 2. Michael Hanagan, Logic of Solidarity, University of Illinois Press, 1980. 3. David Montgomery, 'Worker's Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century, in Labor History, no. 17, Fall 1976, pp. 485-509.

46 International Marxist Review

4. See James Hinton, The first Shop Stewards' Movement, Allen & Unwin 1973.

5 Victoria Bonnel, 'Roots of Rebellion' in Worker's politics and organizations in St. Petesburg and Moscow 1900-1914, University of California Press 1983.

6 Interview in L'Humanite, 22 May 1993.

7 Alain Touraine, 'L'evolution de la classe ouvriere', in Espirit, May 1956.

8 Serge Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvriere 1963, Editions du Seuil 1969, pp. 98-99.

9 Ernest Mandel, Controle nuvrier, conseils ouvriers, autogestion, Anthologie, Francois Maspero 1970, p. 19.

10 Mandel, ibid, p. 41.

I1 Quoted in Harry Braverman, 'Labor and Monopoly Capital, Monthly Review Press, 1974, p. 197.

12 See Maxime Durand, 'Chomage et force de Travail' in Quatrieme International, no. 42,

November 1991.

13 L'Humanite, 23 February 1993.

14 It must be remembered that the focus here is on the effects of these methods on skill, not on unemployement. But even as far as unemployement is concerned, and in spite of the impression given by several well-publicised cases, it is likely that robots and computers have had a minimal effect on eliminating skilled labour. The French CP estimates that robots are only responsable for 3% of those currently out of work in France.

15 Roger Penn, Class, Power and Technology, St Marten's Press, 1990. For a more detailed discussion of this work see Keith Mann, 'Whither the Skilled Worker?', Sociological

Forum, vol. 8, no. 1, 1993.

16 Penn, Class, Power and Technology, p. 24.

17 Penn, Class, Power and Technology, p. 117.

18 Penn, Class, Power and Technology: pp. 73-74.

19 Muto Ichiyo, 'Class Struggle and Technological Inovation in Japan since 1945', in Notebooks for study and research, no. 5, International Institute for Research and Education,

1987, pp. 31-32.

20 ibid.

21 Le Monde, Initiatives, 9 September 1992.

22 Ichiyo, Class Struggle and Technological Innovation in Japan, p. 1.

23 Le Monde, 9 September 1992.

24 Durand, 'Chomage et force de Travail', p. 42

25 Benjamin Coriat, extract from article in Problèmes économiques, reprinted in Quatrieme

International, no. 42, September 1991.

26 Le Monde, 9 September 1992.

Class struggle, skill and the productive process today 47

27 Ichiyo, Class Struggle and Technological Innovation in Japan, p. 35.

28 ibid, p. 31.

29 See Mary Hollens, 'Speaking for ourselves: How "Teams" affect people of color', Labor

Notes, April 1993.

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