It was over a century ago that Dr. Ernst Abbe conducted his observations on working time and output at the Zeiss Optical Works in Jena, Germany. Dr. Abbe, director of the plant, reduced the daily hours of work from 9 to 8 and kept careful records of daily output per worker before and after the change. What he found confirmed observations from throughout the 19th century: a moderate reduction in working time increased total output. In The Economics of Fatigue and Unrest, Philip Sargant Florence summed up the accumulated evidence to the 1920's:
"Reduction from a 12-hour to a 10-hour basis results in increased daily output; further reduction to an 8-hour basis results in at least maintaining this increased daily output; but further reductions while increasing the hourly rate of output, seems to decrease the total daily output."
Furthermore, the empirical evidence was consistent with Sir Sydney Chapman's theory of the hours of labour, delivered in 1909 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as his presidential address to the Economics and Statistics section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. During the early decades of the 20th century, the relationship between human performance and human physical and psychological limits was coming to be understood. There was even a name for it: psychophysics.
There is a widespread illusion that learning is cumulative and once something has been learned by a culture, it stays learned, especially when it is something of great value. There is also a conceit by economists and employers that they are the most resolute opponents of Luddism. But what is it, except Luddism, when economists and employers wilfully dismantle one of the greatest and most humane technological advances of the industrial revolution: the hard fought discovery that reduced hours of work could increase total output?
The ironies are abound when a post-industrial industry, devoted to creating products to occupy the customers' leisure hours, compels its workforce to clock Dickensian hours of labour. Or as one computer game developer complained "You shouldn't be able to ask a person to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week for months on end. You really fry a person working like that." There's only one conclusion that can be reached. Management in these companies doesn't know dick about the efficient management of human resources. Which is to say they don't know dick about technology.
There's a reason for such egregious ignorance. In today's corporate world, the only technology that counts is technology that can be hoarded and licenced for a fee. Knowledge about human capacity is "open source;" so it doesn't pay. As long as the collective corporate mind agrees to march along in lockstep, no one will be the wiser; no one will have to pay for the immense waste they create. The "bottom line" is that such bottom line technology depends on a fraudulent book-keeping system in which all entries represent the firm's perspective. No loss is too painful if it can be externalized; no gain is worthwhile unless it can be capitalized.
Posted by sandwichman at November 18, 2004 10:18 PMI'm posting this anonymously, because I'm terrified that some future Human Resources apparatchik will Google me when I put in a job app and find all my online expressions of "bad work attitudes."
You're entirely right that management don't have a clue.
I used to work on a hospital ward that was chronically understaffed--well, actually that's pretty much every hospital ward I've ever worked.
The ward supervisor, "Judy," was always leaning on people to work overtime, either by staying over or coming in on their day off. The common sense thing would be to hire enough people until they had enough staff to keep the place covered without such bullying. Instead, she scheduled just enough people to get by if everybody showed up; then if anyone got fired, quit, or was sick, it was a disaster. It was even a disaster when people went on scheduled vacations.
Since it was a veterans hospital with a union, they couldn't force us to do overtime. But there was a lot of pressuring, like telling you in front of an entire group of coworkers that "everyone's doing their part to cover the gaps, so can you work this shift?"
As the president of the union local told me, whenever they find a conscientious person who actually cares about patients, that they can guilt into working long hours, they "ride 'em like a $10 whore" until they burn out. And once people are burned out, they can't be unburned.
I wasn't shy about encouraging people to refuse, saying that it was management's job to do a competent job of hiring enough people, instead of getting by on overtime.
What's really funny was that we were constantly being warned not to tell patients they weren't getting this or that aspect of care because of understaffing. See, they wanted US to be the ones who looked bad, and take the blame for their incompetent management. So I made a point of engaging in lots and lots of Wobbly "open mouth sabotage," always telling the patients how understaffed we were. "The director can get in front of the news cameras and talk about how 'veterans come first' as much as he wants," I'd say. "But if they gave a shit about you, we'd be adequately staffed, wouldn't we?"
In early 2003, a bunch of people were hired on our ward just before the JCAHO (accreditation agency) inspection--and then afterward, they let the work force go down by attrition even as the patient load went up.
Early this year, the hospital director emailed us a self-congratulatory statement about how our ward was being authorized to hire a bunch of new people, since the patient load was up by 23% from last year. But when I figured the number of hires authorized, it only amounted to a 14% increase in staff.
To put things in perspective, the VA is nothing but a featherbedding operation for middle management. The place has a higher ratio of middle management on quality committees, etc., to actual production workers, than any place I've ever seen in my life. There were actually three doors side by side with the word "quality" in some part of the job title.
If the VA fired only half of all the people sitting on quality committees, doing "process improvement," or writing mission statements, and put the money saved into hiring nurses, we'd have had staff falling out our assholes.
I switched jobs over the summer. On my job app, I put my reason for leaving a couple of places as "chronic understaffing." The HR person who checked out my app at the hospital where I work commented that one "area of concern" on the application was that I'd complained of understaffing. "That sounds awfully negative--we really emphasize patient care, and we want people who care."
I wanted to respond, "Well, don't you think staffing levels have something to do with quality of care, you stupid cunt? Do you think maybe, just maybe, the understaffing I complained of interfered with my ability to provide adequate care?" I don't know where this twat thinks she's gonna get all those Stepford workers who just go around with a robotic smile, repeating the company mission statement and never having a critical thought. But I've sure never seen any of them since I started working there.
On a humorous note, I had an inservice on "team building" that included a handout on how flocks of geese work as a team. One of the questions was "Think of some slogans you can use to encourage your fellow team members." I mean, this stuff was such dumbed-down prolefeed, it made "Who Moved My Cheese" look like Aristotle.
I'd like to add: management theory fads like TQM, that emphasize "empowering" workers, are all the rage these days. But in practice, they turn out to be another form of sugar-coated Taylorism. The reason? they're implemented by bosses.
Posted by: Disgruntled Human Resource at November 19, 2004 04:14 PM