Samuel Bostaph wrote:
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>But the English common law was a legal "spontaneous order," as are all
>common law systems.
>
>And, I don't understand Peter's deeming the division of labor in the pin
>factory part of "a vast hierarchical command system." The division of labor
>in any economy is an example of an absolute economic law--more can be
>produced by employing the division of labor than can be produced in its
>absence. It works in a command economy or a laissez faire market economy.
>
>Perhaps Peter could explain what he means by "command system."
See Steven Marglin's "What do Bosses Do?" The
misnamed division labor is not an efficient
production technique, and any "efficiency" it
gains is lost in the inefficiency of added
management overhead. I call it misnamed because
it is really the "specialization" and
"de-skilling" of labor, which also means that
labor losses any political and economic power.
The division of labor simply means that one man
is a carpenter and another a cobbler. In Smith's
pin-factory, men who were pin-makers are now
confined to a few simple tasks, or to one. Smith
himself backtracked on this and recognized the
problem in the second edition of the Wealth of
Nations. Current trends in job design, by the
way, abandon the specialization of labor in order
to give wider scope and greater freedom to
workers, thereby improving productivity while reducing management overhead.
When our work is confined to one or two simple
operations, then there is little opportunity for
growth and development. Smith himself came to
recognize this problem; in the second edition of
his great work, he added the following qualification to his theory:
"In the progress of the division of labour, the
employment of the far greater part of those who
live by labour� comes to be confined to a few
very simple operations, frequently to one or two�
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a
few simple operations� has no occasion to exert
his understanding or to exercise his invention in
finding out expedients for removing difficulties
which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore,
the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes
as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."[1]
This loss of innovative spirit leads to a third
difficulty. As men cease to be �pin-makers� and
become instead �wire-pullers� or �sharpeners� or
one of the other eighteen jobs involved in the
process, then knowledge of the process is lost
among the workers. This means, in turn, that a
new function is required, that of the
professional manager. When men had knowledge of
the whole process, then �management� was a minor
consideration, and any one of the workers could,
in theory, manage the process; management was a
negligible expense. But with the loss of
knowledge, management becomes the decisive factor
and a huge overhead cost. Any gains in efficiency
from the division of labor is lost to the need
for increased management overhead.
Smith placed a dichotomy between minute
specialization and the crafting of each separate
pin. But this is a false dichotomy; it was never
a case of one person making one pin at a time
versus a group of specialists making thousands.
Rather, it is a question of the sequencing of the
tasks, whether by a few craftsmen or by a group
of specialists. The real efficiencies come from
properly sequencing the tasks. Thus, a single
craftsman who draws out all the wire for a batch
at one time, then straightens the whole batch,
then cuts the wire, etc., will achieve the same
efficiencies as does the division of labor.[1]
The division of labor succeeds not because of the
specialization of jobs, but because it also
sequences the tasks. This sequencing eliminates
the set-up times between tasks, one of the three
reasons that Smith claimed for the superiority of
the division of labor. The other two were the
dexterity that a worker acquires when doing a
single task and the amount of innovation that
specialized labor brings to the assembly line.
The argument for the former is unconvincing; a
craftsman becomes accomplished at the various
tasks of his trade without being forced to specialize.
As for the latter argument, innovation brought
about by specialization, the opposite seems to be
the case: specialization decreases innovation, as
Smith himself came to recognize when he noted
that the specialized worker loses the habit of
innovation and becomes �as stupid� as it is
possible for a human being to become.� A
craftsman might, for example, notice that the
pulling, straightening, and cutting of the wire
might be combined, with a few mechanical changes,
into one operation. The specialist either doesn't
notice this, or if he does, he fears it because
it means the elimination of two jobs. This is
borne out by the history of industry in the 19th
and 20th centuries, when workers opposed or even
sabotaged machinery precisely because they
perceived, often quite correctly, that such
innovations were not in their best interests. Of
course, there has been a great deal of innovation
in industry, but it does not ordinarily arise
from the division of labor. Rather, it depends on
the fact that inventors are granted a monopoly
for a period of time in the form of a patent.[2]
Recognizing the true source of industrial
efficiency gives us tremendous freedom in job
design. The division of labor concentrates on
separation and isolation, reducing the worker to
a �cog� in the assembly line. It therefore loses
most of the values that the worker can
contribute, save for the value of his
muscle-power. Thus it throws away one of the most
important assets of a firm. The separation of
tasks, on the other hand, allows us to design
jobs that call for a greater development of the
worker and hence for more productivity.
Management overhead can be greatly reduced, and a
workforce more knowledgeable about the process
can contribute more in the way of innovations.
The shop floor workers can be the authors of
their own jobs. And with such �authorship� comes
a kind of authority. We can begin, at this point,
to see the outlines of possible solutions to the problem of low wages.
In short, the "division of labor" is one of those
"absolute economic laws" which turn out to be,
upon inspection, absolute nonsense.
[1] Ibid.
[1] Stephen A. Marglin, "What Do Bosses Do? The
Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist
Production," The Review of Radical Political Economics 6, no. 2 (1974): 70.
[2] Ibid.: 90. Monopolies are not necessarily the
best way to ensure the flow of inventions. As
Stephen Marglin notes, �An invention, like
knowledge generally, is a �public good�: the use
of an idea by one person does not reduce the
stock of knowledge in the way that consumption of
a loaf of bread reduces the stock of wheat. It is
well understood that public goods cannot be
efficiently distributed through the market
mechanism; so patents cannot be defended on
efficiency grounds.� Two counter-examples to
patents suffice to make the point. For the first,
recall the revival of agriculture in the 9th and
10th centuries, a revival which depended on an
explosion of innovation, none of which was
patented and all of which were freely shared. But
the wealth of the high Middle Ages and the
expansion of trade and urban life depended on
these innovations. A second example comes from
our own time with the success of open systems
software, such as Linux, where nobody has an
exclusive right and any improvements to the
system must be offered free of charge.
John C. Medaille
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