The Clock Watchers: Americans at Work

By Daniel Bell

The following Bicentennial Essay is the third in a series that will appear periodically into early 1976 and will discuss how we have changed in our 200 years.

"Remember that time is money," Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Advice to a Young Tradesman in 1748. "Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on ... He that kills a breeding sow destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation."

For Max Weber, in his famous essay, these sentiments were the essence of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. They sum up an ethos that is against the profligacy of a court life or the indifference to time of a Mediterranean culture. Franklin defends as just an attitude that in medieval life would have been condemned as avaricious.

The maxim time is money had a double meaning: first, it was an injunction against idleness; second, it was a view of time as something methodical, a set of divisions into hours and minutes whose very measure could regulate a calculus of utility and the allocation of energies. It was a view that, in its own way, was radically new. As Lewis Mumford observed, "The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age." After consulting Gulliver on the function of his watch, the Lilliputians came to the conclusion that it was his god.

Though the clock now rules the industrial universe, it is a mechanical chronos that has been foreign to most human experience. All organisms have "circadian" rhythms (from circa, about, and diem, day), whose periodicity is a response to biological needs. The psychological sense of time is one of duree, of bleak moments and moments of bliss, of the agony of time prolonged and time eclipsed; memory is not the function of a "length" of time, but of its intensity. Most important, in the area of work--the experience that shapes character--time was long considered a function not of the clock, but of the sun and the seasons.

Until a century ago, most people in the Western world worked on the soil or on the sea. Time was measured not by the abstract division of matter and motion but by the exigencies of wresting one's livelihood from nature. In 1790 (the year Franklin died) more than 90% of the population of the then United States (a total of almost 4 million people) worked on the land. The rhythm of life was shaped by the feeding of the animals, the sowing of the soil, the lambing of the ewes, the harvesting of the crops in a daily cycle that went from the crowing of the cock at dawn to the sleep of the chickens at night, and in a yearly cycle of the changing seasons. Today, less than 5% of the population live on farms, and the rule of the clock has become almost absolute.

The transformation of time did not begin, however, with the factory, but with a more surprising, yet obvious source--the railroad, and the exact coordination that railroading demanded.

The heart of the railway system was the timetable, the matrix of coordination for the system as a whole. On single-track roads, a 30-second delay meant that one of two trains would be almost half a mile away from a siding or a passing track when they were scheduled to pass each other. Railroading was organized to move thousands of tons of goods at extremely high speeds and split-minute timing, the exactness or inexactness of which spelled increased savings or costs for shippers. Everyone who had a direct responsibility for the operation of trains--engineers, conductors, trainmen who moved cars to sidings and dispatchers--had to carry a fine timepiece that would not gain or lose more than 40 seconds in two weeks, and had to be cleaned and regulated twice a year by a railroad watch inspector.

The English word clock is related etymologically to, among others, the French word cloche, meaning bell. In the United States in the 19th century, as in Europe, people were called to work by a bell in a bell tower. Then a clock was hung in the tower or steeple, and its loud chimes rang out the hours. In other, drabber places, there was the factory whistle. But such devices were not possible in big noisy cities. Thus, the coordination of work could be established only if men and women were ruled directly by time; in effect, modern industrialization became possible only after the mass production of clocks and watches.

The principles of mass production were laid down in 1799 by that largely home-taught genius Eli Whitney, when he set up a factory to make muskets. Whitney established the American vernacular: economy, simplicity and flexibility, which, in industrial terms, were translated as quantity, standardization and interchangeability of parts. Watching clumsy workmen fumble the parts of the cotton gin, which he invented, Whitney realized that he had to put his own skill into every untaught hand, and to do this he had "to substitute correct and effective operations of machinery for that skill of the artist which is acquired only by long practice and experience." In that single principle, Whitney created the largest single segment of industrial civilization--the semiskilled worker.

To eliminate guesswork by eye, he invented jigs, or guides for tools, so that the outline of the product would not be marred by the fallibility of a shaky hand or imperfect vision. He made automatic stops that would disconnect the tool at the precise depth or diameter of a cut. He made clamps to hold the metal while the guided chisels or milling wheels cut it. By dividing his factory into departments--one for barrels, one for stocks, one for each lock piece--the parts could be brought into an assembly room and put together in one continuous, uninterrupted process.

Whitney's method, which became known as "the American system," was the prototype for hundreds of manufacturing centers round the country. It also became the model 50 years later for the mass production of watches. The fine, precise machine tools used by watchmakers to create the cheap timepieces that eventually sold for a dollar were directly descended from the Whitney musket factory. By 1876 the American wind-up alarm clock had been invented at the Seth Thomas Clock Co. in Connecticut. The morning would never be the same again.

Chronological time rules the work economy, its very rhythms and motions. The prophet of modern work was Frederick W. Taylor, and the stop watch was his rod. If any social upheaval can ever be attributed to one man, the logic of efficiency as a mode of life is due to Taylor. With "scientific management," as formulated by Taylor in 1895, we pass far beyond the old, rough computations of the division of labor and more into the division of time itself.

Taylor's essential idea was to organize the work unit along the same lines that Eli Whitney had organized production. Traditional management had little exact knowledge of the time a job should take, the tools best adapted to a task or the pace at which a man should work. Taylor's innovation--time-and-motion study--was based on a painstaking analysis of work: the exact number of elementary operations or motions, the time required to do these, the elimination of waste motions and the recombination of these times and motions into a mathematical formula for the "one best way" to do a job. Out of Taylor's innovations came the incentive and bonus system, differential rates of pay based on distinct skill classifications, the standardization of tools and equipment and, most important, the shift of all planning and scheduling from the work floor to a department new in the history of work--that of the industrial engineer.

There is no little irony in the fact that one of Taylor's chief admirers was Lenin. In a notable speech in June 1919, Lenin urged "the study and teaching of the Taylor system and its systematic trial and adaptation." The logic of efficiency knows no social boundaries.

It was Henry Ford, of course, who combined Whitney's system of interchangeable parts and Taylor's concept of elementary operations to create a sequential system of chained work organized on mechanical conveyors or power-driven assembly-line manufacture. On Ford's assembly line, work was conveyed past files of semiskilled workers, and what began with the bare frame of the chassis ended, 300 feet and 93 minutes later, as a complete automobile. Man, time, pace and machine had become a unified whole.

American workers have rarely vented their rage on the machine in the manner of English Luddites. Nor, surprisingly, have American trade unions ever shown serious interest in redesigning jobs or in "humanizing" work. From the start, what the American worker did seek was a reduction in the hours of work.

In the early decades of the 19th century, the hours of work customarily were, as on the farm, from "sunrise to sunset." When 600 Boston carpenters organized the first great strike for the ten-hour day in 1825, the Master Carpenters denounced the effort. They warned of the "unhappy influence" of change on the apprentices "by seducing them from that course of industry" and of the "many temptations and improvident practices" from which the journeymen were happily secure when working from sunrise to sunset.

In the years following the Civil War, the eight-hour day became the central issue for the trade unions. The Eight-Hour movement produced a passionate surge of feeling among workers that was reflected in dozens of songs characterized by the promise of the millennium once the goal had been achieved. One song, appearing in the monthly magazine of the American Federation of Labor, was entitled Hip! Hip! for Eight Hours. The chorus proclaimed:

As fierce as the tempest, as fixed the pole,

Despising obstruction and mocking earth's powers

The Toilers, oppressed long in body and soul,

In thunder tones take up the cry for eight hours.

On May 1, 1886, some 40,000 workers in Chicago went out on strike for an eight-hour day, and their ranks almost doubled in four days. On May 4, at a meeting in Haymarket Square to protest a shooting by the police near the McCormick reaper works, a bomb was hurled at the police. A sergeant was killed and about 60 other policemen injured. Eight anarchists were tried in what became the most celebrated case in American labor history. Four were hanged, one committed suicide, and seven years later the remaining three were pardoned by Governor John P. Altgeld, an action that ended his career.

By 1890, however, the struggle for shorter hours had established the ten-hour day and six-day week in the majority of industries and occupations. After the turn of the century, the hours of work began to decrease in steps. By 1930 the 48-hour week had become the norm. By 1940 the 40-hour week had been established.

The trend toward a shorter work week has slowed since 1950. In that year, a worker averaged 41.7 hours a week, as against 39.6 hours in 1970. The real change has come not in the shorter work week but in longer vacations. Before 1940, few non-managerial workers received paid vacations. By 1970, two-thirds of all nonfarm workers were guaranteed paid vacations, and the average for all workers was almost two weeks' vacation a year. If one includes paid holidays and sick leaves, the shrinkage in the work year has been more than three weeks in the past three decades.

The work week today seems to have reached a plateau, and it is unlikely that it will be reduced substantially in the next decade. But in the past 20 years or so, there have been four striking transformations in the character of work and the work force.

1) The rise of the organization man. In 1940 about 26% of the male labor force was self-employed. By 1960 the figure had shrunk to 16%, and by 1970 to about 10%. Of the self-employed, about 1.7 million people are independent farmers; there are also 9.4 million small businesses. In all, about 75 million Americans today are wage-and-salary employees.

2) The increase in Government employees. In 1947, shortly after the war, slightly under 5.5 million people worked for the Government; by 1970, 13 million people worked for the Government, or one in every six in the labor force. The major increase has not been in the Federal Government but mainly in state and local government--in large measure because these are the instruments that carry out federal programs. Between 1947 and 1970, federal employment went up by about 25%, but state and local employment went up more than 250%.

3) The growth of part-time work. In the past decade the number of people holding part-time jobs increased from 9.8 million to 12.4 million. Much of this reflects the rise in the number of women returning to work. On the other hand, between 3 million and 4 million people "moonlight," that is, hold second jobs on some regular or substantial basis. Many millions more do occasional "extra" work.

4) The onset of a post-industrial society. Perhaps the most portentous change, however, is the relative decline of manufacturing and the rise of a service economy. Just as a century ago, one began to see the change from an agrarian to an industrial society, so one can now see the lineaments of a post-industrial society. Today in the U.S., 64 out of every 100 people are engaged in services; by 1980 about 70 out of every 100 will be employed in that sector. And these are new kinds of service, not those characteristic of an agrarian society (largely household servants) or an industrial economy (largely the auxiliary services of transportation and utilities, as well as some banking), but "human services" (the expansion in medical care, education and social welfare), professional technical services (research, planning, computer systems), and the like. This has meant that the fastest growing segment of the American labor force has been the professional, college-educated people. Today the professional, technical and managerial occupations make up 26% of the labor force, clerical workers 18%, semiskilled workers 17% and skilled workers only 13.5%.

But even within the industrial sector, there has been an extraordinary change as automation has begun to replace both unskilled and semiskilled workers. The man on the production line is giving way to the man who watches the dials or the man who comes in, as a skilled worker, to repair the machine. Repairmen and foremen accounted for 75% of the growth in skilled jobs since 1940.

Behind these statistics is a change of greater psychological meaning--as great in its import, perhaps, as some of the first experiences of work that coded man's behavior. A pre-industrial world--whether one hunts animals or tends flocks, cuts wood or digs coal, cultivates the soil or fishes the seas--is primarily a game against nature. One's experience of this world is conditioned by the vicissitudes of the seasons, the character of the weather, the exhaustion of the soils. The forces to be overcome are tangible, if capricious. An industrial world is a game against fabricated nature. It is a world where man is hitched to the machine, overpowered by the size and power of the machine, yet also enlarged by the sense of the quantum jumps of energy that pulse through the industrial process. The forces are tangible, yet methodical and metrical. A post-industrial world, because it primarily involves services--doctor with patient, teacher with student, Government official with petitioner, research team with experimental designer--is largely a game between persons. In the daily experience of a white-collar world, nature is excluded, things are excluded. The world is entirely a social world--intangible and capricious--in which individuals encounter and have to learn how to live with one another. Not, perhaps, an easy thing.

What makes the game all the more important is that work, as Freud said, is the chief means of binding an individual to reality. The insight gains deeper meaning in modern society. In previous times, most people believed in an afterlife, in a heaven or hell. With the rise of a this-worldly attitude, the sense of death became overwhelming; work was one of the means whereby individuals staved off that consciousness of finality. The most nagging of all questions, in a world where religious beliefs are foundering, is what would happen if man lost his sense of a relationship to work.

The clock, with its pulsed seconds and minutes, is the symbol of the industrial economy. The computer, equally, is the symbol of a post-industrial world. Nanoseconds are the most minute portion of computer time. Electric impulses go through computer circuitry almost at the speed of light, about 1,000 ft. per microsecond or 1 ft. per nanosecond. One billion nanoseconds--or about the same number of clock seconds as there are in 30 years--make a single clock second. In large computers, it takes about 50 nanoseconds for a bit of information to be processed.

We may have reached the end of time in our social networks as well. In 1890 the frontier ended, and the country, banded from one coast to the other in a geographical unity, became a national economy. By 1970 the basic "spacetime" scheme that frames the country had already been laid down; because of the revolutions in transportation and communications, we had become a truly national society. Jet planes now cross the country coast to coast in about 5 1/2 hours, whereas 30 years ago, it took about 13. And even that may be surpassed. When the Concorde begins its twice-daily flights from London to Washington some time next year, a traveler will leave Heathrow at 6 in the evening and arrive at Dulles at 4:30 the same afternoon. There is now telephone dialing from any one of 114 million telephones in the country to any other almost instantaneously. Three national television networks provide common cultural fare for the 97% of American families that possess television sets. And there is even a national daily, the Wall Street Journal, which arrives by mail (itself no less than a small miracle) on the day of its date mark.

But the greatest paradox, perhaps, is that in a post-industrial society, time becomes one of our scarcest elements. In economic terms, there is a limited "supply" of time, and like any limited supply it has its cost.

The poorest societies are those in which individuals have the most time on their hands. Where productivity is high, the allocation of time becomes a pressing problem. The consumption durables we buy--a house or a car--have costs in the form of time required for maintenance. An individual can take the costs out of his own time (e.g., paint the house himself) or engage a service firm to do it for him. The pleasures of consumption take time. If he wants to go to a concert, he may have to rush through dinner, and since cooking takes time, he may buy frozen food to cook in a microwave oven. If he goes to the concert and eats dinner afterward, he may lose sleep in order to get to work on time the next day. Unless one is very wealthy and does not work, the varieties of consumption involve trade-offs in time.

It was once thought that the realm of production created "economic man," who had to calculate the best way of allocating resources. But in a consumption economy, where goods cost time or money, utility has been introduced by the back door. Man, now having to calculate the various allocations of "leisure," has become, in the realm of consumption, Homo oeconomicus and reckoner of time.

Daniel Bell is professor of sociology at Harvard and co-editor of the quarterly The Public Interest. Among his books are The End of Ideology, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, to be published in January 1976.

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