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by Gregg
Shotwell
Auto
companies shield their low-tech exploitation of workers behind high-tech
displays of mechanical prowess. The less a consumer knows about the blood and
guts of manufacturing, the easier it is to buy the dream. So how does America
think all this crap gets built?
Last
summer in a desperate attempt to entice young viewers to buy grandpa's dream
car, General
Motors ran a TV ad that featured a
chorus line of robot arms dancing to techno music around a series of Cadillacs
strutting like runway models on chrome plated wheels.
Fascination
with robotic fabrication isn't new. Fiat glamorized the magic of manufacturing
with a video of a Strada built entirely by robots in 1979. The only
human touch was the baritone bellowing Rossinni's, "Largo al
Factotum," triumphantly in the background. Never mind the film crew had to
cross a picket line to access the factory. Advertisers
can't hope to fulfill our dreams if we're troubled with the comfort of workers.
Therefore, automation, not brawn or bravado, is the vaunted paramour.
Don't
let yourself be seduced and deluded. The auto industry's master talent isn't
robotics, it's the ability to automatize humans — including drivers.
GM
teamed up with the space team at NASA to create the next generation of humanoid robots. The purpose of GM's collaboration with
NASA may assist astronauts, but more significantly, it will enable the next
generation of autos to relieve drivers of the task of attention. Travelers will
be conveyed to their work and consumer stations in a bubble of uninterrupted
complacency. Punch in your destination, sit back, and relax. Auto ambiance will massage both body and mind
with a gravity-free experience which will tranquillize resistance and maximize
pliability.
For
the masters of neoliberalism, it's not just about the money, it's about
control: a monopoly not only of the market — where consumers serve the investing
class — but of the mind, where class is demolished by trivial choices beneath a
blank mask of individuality.
Slaves didn't drive pickups to
the pyramids, but the law of rulers hasn't changed: to maximize power,
dehumanize labor. For the master class servants should be invisible and workers
should be subhuman, or better yet, inhuman.
Behind
every portrayal of vehicular luxury is a factory where profit is measured on a
ticker tape of minutes, not stock prices. When engineers set a picnic table
full of free snacks in a work area, it's not an amenity, it's a bait pile, a
time study contrived to reveal how many extra minutes are available to cram with tasks[1]. Every idle minute ticks a profit lost or a
nick of time for the boss to wring another bead of sweat.
Fredrick
Taylor, who invented time and motion studies in 1881, was a rube by current standards[2]. Taylor treated humans like machines without
consideration for wear and tear, let alone the yoke of mental anguish wrought
by automation. Taylor broke up the craft style of work — in which a skilled
artisan fabricated a complete product independently at his own pace — into
incremental functions which dumb-downed the craft into simple, duplicable,
mechanical motions.
Under
Taylorism any worker could be replaced at a moment's notice with any available
body. Leave your brain at the door wasn't a joke, it was a survival tactic.
Work was monotonous, but mastery of the task allowed workers time between
strokes to smoke and sip and shoot the shit. Today's factories treat the brain
like a muscle. Every worker is expected to be computer savvy and happily able
to multi-task adroitly. New auto plants absorb fifty-seven seconds of every
ambidextrous minute and the goal is sixty-one.
Back
in the day, engineers hid behind pillars with clipboards and stopwatches
striving to catch a worker with time on his hands. Today, they're slyer than a
Dale Carnegie grad working on commission. They come bearing gifts and
award-winning grins.
At
the GM warehouse where I worked in 2008, management set up televisions in the
break rooms with access to NBA playoffs. Young workers raced to get done in
time to catch the last half. Engineers didn't sneak and snoop. They were
patient as hunters hiding in deer blinds.
The
conversion of humans into automatons demands absolute control, on the job and
off. Henry Ford monitored workers' leisure as well as their labor. Random but
regular inspections of workers' homes enforced Ford's moral authority: no
drinking, no smoking, and church attendance, among other decrees.
Nowadays,
all new hires undergo a drug test which imposes the old autocrat's behavioral
conditioning with lab coats rather than thugs with morals and matching suits.
New controls in auto world — Alternative Work Schedules — are even more
psychologically insidious. The company exerts dominance over sleep patterns
through work schedules that subvert normal human behavior. Ten hour shifts
rotate between days and nights and alternate weekends. Workers subjected to
shifts that oscillate from day to night never develop a regular sleep pattern
and must warp their lives to orbit the job rather than the family.
The
nineteenth century movement for the eight-hour day — time "for rest"
and "what we will" — is a quaint relic of working-class aspirations.
After ten or twelve hours of work, an unpaid lunch, and a long commute, all
time off is dedicated to recovery and preparation for return to work.
Compulsive consumption becomes the mandatory reward because leisure time is a
luxury only the investing class can afford[3]. Compelled to cram as much fun as they can into a
short span, workers yearn to spend as fast as they earn which is a boon to
Capital and a bust "for rest" and "what we will."
Management's
quest for absolute control respects no bounds. The peer pressure Toyota exacted
to eliminate any movement that didn't add value to the product not only reduced
bossing time, it pinched pee time. The Barking Dog, a collection of rank-and-file newsletters
(1997-2006) from the GM-Toyota venture in Fremont, CA which introduced lean production to North America, describes how team leaders
controlled how much workers urinated by discouraging hydration.
An
urge spurned is a penny earned. Last summer, a Chicago company unable to induce peer pressure tactics
installed a badge swipe system that clocks bathroom breaks and penalizes workers who spend more
than six minutes of work time in the washroom.
In
the 1980s, my fellow workers and I gunned our engines and raced to the bar for
a beer and a burger at lunch, but these days, the cafeteria, let alone the
tavern, is too far away. So cafeteria workers at the GM plant in Lansing, MI
deliver food direct to work stations. The Lean Production System, which
strives to eliminate all unnecessary steps or expenditures of energy has turned
the social pleasure of lunch into a pit stop. Food is not only fast, it's past
before the next task is ready.
In
old photographs of factory life we see workers elbow to elbow, face to face, a
hive of frenzied activity. The UAW was born in a mosh pit of mechanized
emotion. Crowded conditions gave rise to collective action[4] — slow downs, strikes, sabotage, sitdowns.
Today,
masterminds of efficiency have atomized interpersonal communication. Auto parts
manufacturing is organized into cells where a worker is surrounded by machines,
not coworkers. The manual laborer pivots like a robot from one machine to the
next in a clockwork of continuous motion without an idle second. But
autoworkers aren't the only humans forced to behave like computer numerically
controlled robots. You know why the UPS guy runs to your porch and back?
Because
the computer at HQ tracks time lapsed between scanning a barcode and getting
the truck rolling again. Airline maintenance and cleaning crews get half the
time they need to turn a plane around, because the schedule is in the computer
not on the ground where the real world sweats and breathes and breaks down.
Letter carriers are harassed by a GPS which shaves seconds off seconds already
sliced and diced into nano-fractions. Amazon prefers humans to robots because
they are more flexible and when they break you don't have to fix them. Meat
packers are deported when they can no longer feel their hands. Nurses skip
lunch and run between patients they don't have time to know, let alone care
for. Teachers who love their students get caught juking the stats on Race to
the Top test scores. Social workers are presented with human needs they don't
have the resources to meet and at the end of the day they can't lift their
heads off their hands until they shut off their emotions and drive home like
automatons.
Televised
images of automatic ease camouflage massive low-tech exploitation. Sometimes we
can't see the river through the debris or perceive the allegory in the story
for all the glitz and sparkle, but evidence hides, if we dispel our dreams, in
plain sight.
In
2007, GM produced a commercial for
the Super Bowl which featured a cute yellow robot on the assembly line. The
robot drops a screw and the line stops. Everyone turns and stares. The robot is
shamed and ejected from the plant. He struggles to find new employment but
fails at every menial venture. He has one skill and one purpose. He is unfit
for life on the outside. He feels lonely and alienated. In despair he jumps off
a bridge and commits suicide. Then, he awakens from his anxious dream relieved
to be back on the line and lucky to have — not just a job — but a place in
life.
In
the ad GM humanized a robot to the schmaltzy tune of Eric Carmen crooning
"All By Myself." Like most commercials the video conveyed a text
and a subtext. The stated message was: quality is built not only into the
product, but also into the mind of the employee. The unstated message was:
workers are inhuman and we can program them.
The
overt message of the ad was: autoworkers are incompetent, but they are
dedicated to the perfection of a minute task and grateful to hold a trivial
role in the corporation. The covert message was: GM sucks the blood out of
autoworkers and reduces them to mindless mechanical factotums who feel
"All By Myself."
Auto moguls have an
obsessive-compulsive drive to control markets by micromanaging the brains of
consumers, as well as workers. Today's scientists have invented
drones that can replace bees, pollinate plants, and
make honey, but long ago Henry Ford had "a better idea." With the
help of Frederick Taylor and a crew of violent gangsters he
manipulated humans to behave like drones, labor in mechanized hives, and create
for his highness oodles of money.
Ford, the exalted hero of
capitalists, was a ruthless, racist, fascist tyrant, but America has always
felt enamored of a gentleman with the means to manufacture her dreams[5].
Gregg Shotwell
retired auto worker, author of
Autoworkers Under the Gun, Haymarket Press
First published in May 2015
issue of Monthly Review
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