The Labor Question
And then, of course, there was the ever present "Labor Question". The answer to this question was central to the recipe for success or failure in the new business environment.
All the new machines bought with those loans didn't run themselves. Workers had to be hired to run them. And this labor force was an unknown quantity which it wasn't easy to figure into the formula for business success. There were constant problems.
For example, there were high turnover rates among the workforce caused by the introduction of new technology, such as the assembly line. There was massive absenteeism. There was worker incompetence, as the unskilled immigrant workers just didn't know how to work the machines. And there was also deliberate sabotage by discontented workers. There was a lot of potential for disaster.
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Only management saw the big picture of how a product was produced. Each individual worker saw only a small part of the whole, such as twisting a nut on a bolt, and knew nothing of how that nut and bolt related to the whole.
What is more, it wasn't even up to the worker to decide how, and how fast, to screw that nut onto that bolt! Management told him how to do his job and how much time he had in which to do it.
This completely eliminated worker control over the job. It meant a total alienation of the worker from the job, from production stages, and any final conception of how the product was made. It meant the ideal worker was a mindless machine which didn't think about the job at hand, but just did what management programmed him to do. If the worker could've been replaced by a robot, management would've done so, because it essentially turned workers into robots.
Uit "American Labor History made easy! door Eric Leif Davin
robot (n.) 1923, from English translation of 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "slave" from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery" from robotiti "to work, drudge" from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave," from Old Slavic *orbu-, from PIE *orbh- "pass from one status to another"