Office workers and the crisis

facing immense changes in office organization and working methods which are equally as drastic as anything being undertaken among industrial The Labour government, having set out to impose productivity deals with associated rationalization and speed-up at factory level, now attempts to set the same methods to work on all clerical staffs.

At the same time the capitalist press digs up examples of so-called time-wasting by clerks, typists and secretaries in an effort to whip up a campaign in support of the government's proposals.

Following this, insurance, banking, finance and manufacturing houses hire the office equivalents of work-study consultants to link up automated equipment, computers, office re-organization, and time-andmotion methods in an all-out attack on the numbers of clerical workers required.

The basic aim of these consultants is to put office work onto an industrial productionline basis.

remendous upheavals of lite vorking and outlook follow The acceptance of staggered hours, shift-work, and weekend working is demanded.

Already, with modern office methods many members of lower management and some sections of clerical staffs who previously regarded themselves as 'middle class'—perhaps because of their separation from industrial labour their closer association with higher management — rapidly take a different view when faced with a tight working-time schedule complex than that modern factory workshop.

It soon becomes clear that their existence depends entirely on their ability to labour and not on any friendly relationship with this or that employer.

The key to these developments is to be found in the Labour government's policy of solving the economic crisis at the workers' expense.

The plan has been to give profits an enormous boost and cut labour costs through wage freeze, faster working, and a 'shake-out' of employees.

Selective employment tax was said to encourage employers of 'non-manual' workers to cut back on stafi, who would find work instead in industry. This is simply a lie.

A major aim of MeasuredDay Work schemes in industry is to get more work from fewer workers and to • lessen the shortage of skilled labour. No plans exist to create more jobs for an influx of workers from an entirely different working sector.

The Prices and Incomes Board, a body set up by the government to carry out its policies, recently made it quite clear that productivity bargaining should be used everywhere.

Report No. 123 (August 1969) states:

'It applies.. • as much to the public services, distribution, banking and insurance as in the motor manufacturing or textile industries. And it clearly applies to all activities, manual and non-manual.' The same report makes it ear exactly what sort of nefits the employer can pect:

'Most firms of consultants which implement workmeasurement schemes for non-manual workers, quote to their prospective clients increases in productivity of around 20 to 25 per cent; that is, if the work load remains the same a reducHand Process Chart LEFT HAND Picks up envelope Holds envelope Holds envelope Holds envelope Puts envel into baskel Idle PART ONE Flow Chart Process POSTAL DELIVERY ENTRANCE Distance Time in mins.

25ft.

Total 25ft.

Post Receiving Room tion in the number of staff required by 20 to 25 per cent is possible. Such forecasts are often conservative; indeed, our case studies have shown that the gains achieved can range from around 15 per cent to as much as 50 or 60 per cent.' The changes now taking ace in offices broadly follow e following sequence:

Re-organization of the office.

Introduction of various business machines.

Introduction of a computer.

The use of work-study to set time standards every job.

Overlapping of these four stages occurs and in some cases two or three stages may be combined. In some firms reorganization departments have existed tor many years and in others a high percentage of machines is already is use.

However, the consultants claim that further rationalization is always possible whatever the firms' existing level of efficiency.

In order to fully understand the attacks being made on the office worker it is essential to look at these measures in some detail.

Rationalization BEFORE any modernization or timing of office work can be AIN SORTING ABLE SORTING BOX made by an employer some form of rationalization of the Often the existing methods have been dictated by space available or by the need to fit in extra work.

New departments have been set up in a hurry and made to fit by trial and error. To introduce stop-watch timing or a computer into this state of affairs would be simply to speed up the chaos, probably ending with more workers producing more muddle at greater speed.

The main technique streamlining the office known as Organization and Methods (O and M).

It aim is to simplify office procedure into a productionline flow. In many ways this can be paralleled to car manufacture with various subassembly lines running into the main stream at different stages.

Hired O and M consultants, or a special re-organization department (or both), get free run of the firm to bring about the changes. At this early stage denials of eventual redundancy or job-timing can safely be made, as these are, as yet, nowhere in sight.

The O and M department sets out to examine the existing office lay-out and working methods.

The existence of every invoice, form, file, requisition, RIGHT HAND Picks up letter opener Slits open Holds letter Opens out letter in tray

TROLL

desk and clerk will be challenged with a view to elimination from the work process.

Forms are re-designed to give more information in a simplified lay-out, flow charts are : drawn up to show how employees, materials and equipment are processed at present and how they can be treated under a simplified system, and string diagrams are constructed.

These are scale drawings of an office and its furniture on which string is stretched and pinned between work places to represent distances walked during a part of the day.

On a simple scale model of the office the furniture is then moved about in an attempt to minimize the distances, i.e. reduce the length of the string on the diagram.

At a later stage process charts are made up. These reflect the arm, hand and finger movements made by a worker during a given operation.

After close analysis of these, the O and M people will rearrange the working surface (desk, table, etc.) so as to cut out all 'wasted' movement. It is on the basis of this type of saving that a clerk may be told that she has sufficient time to do someone else's job as well as her own.

For process and other charts a set of five symbols are used as a kind of shorthand to represent different activities. These are:

OPERATION This represents an actual working activity - typing, writing, filing, etc.

INSPECTION An examination for quality and/or quantity.

TRANSPORT Indicates the movelent of workers, materials or equipTEMPORARY STORAGE OR DELAYS This represents work waiting for attention, hold-up of working PERMANENT STORAGE Involves any material withdrawn from the work process until required. WIDESPREAD re-organization in offices could put thousands of clerks out of their jobs within a very short time, Intensifying the work of the few people left. Today and tomorrow BERNARD FRANKS outlines four main aspects of this attack-three of them today, with the final one and a conclusion tomorrow.

Another O and M is the micromotion With this a worker is filmed carrying out a particular operation. The film is then examined frame by frame and the movements made in the operation are charted.

This system also gives times for the job, as the camera used is synchronized with a timer registering to the nearest twothousandth of a minute.

The cyclograph is also used sometimes, though not very often, in office work.

This is a record of movements which is made by the operator wearing a small light attached to his wrist, which appears on an exposed photographic plate as a continuous line.

This technique is sometimes used in packing and dispatching departments and with postal sorting work.

One aim of O and M is to kill the friendly atmosphere which may exist in an office. Clerks sitting in groups or facing each other are put into lines one behind the other.

The need for any conversation or for one worker to visit another is cut out by ensuring that a continuous fiow of work comes to the worker with a conveyor-belt regularity.

(In the bigger offices conveyor belts may actually be installed for this purpose.)

It is a poor argument against the rationalization and speedup to say that it is unfair because the management is not being re-organized. In all probability it will be; sections of management will get the push as well.

PAPER STORE Diagram Although O and M may initially bring about some advantages to the workers involved — less walking about, simplified procedure and freedom from the traditional stultified conventions of attitude and dress—this is purely incidental to its long-term aim and is quickly lost as the workers become enmeshed in the production-line atmosphere.

INTENSIFIED competition and a shortage of clerical staff has encouraged a massive drive to invent and develop business machines of all kinds.

Introduction of microfilm filing, photocopying, electronic desk calculators, punch-card equipment and accounting machines is taking place alongside improvements in standard office machinery — duplicating and printing, sorting and collating, book-keeping and stenographic.

One of the few industries to run at near-boom proportions over recent years, the office equipment sales figure currently stands at around £400 million a year.

Work-study in the office aims to step up the existing trend towards replacing staff by machines.

Certainly, office machinery is expensive, but to a certain extent the cost is offset by:

increased simplification leading to reductions in cost.

increased use of hired equipment.

rationalization and attempts to speed up and cut costs on the production side.

(The attempt to push through a productivity deal at Gestetner's is an example of a manufacturer's determination to make sure that high profits and increased output are not reflected in "labour costs', Fi.e. in the wage packet.

String quickly 'called up' without difficulty on a desk-viewing unit.)

THE COMPUTER is the monster job-swallower • • • and the number of operations outside its scope dwindles almost daily.

Just a few of its applications are in factory production control, pure science calculations, medical diagnosis, teaching aids, racing forecast calculations, power station and grid control, telecommunications link-ups, air, road and rall traffic control and many banking and insurance operations.

Some of the major advances gramme, and from war research (guided-missile control, etc.).

Just a few of the firms recently announcing that they are turning to use of computers in a big way are the Midland Bank, which aims to computerize its branches at the rate of 100 a month at a total cost of £12 million; the Co-operative Permanent Building Society, which plans to process more than one million mortgage and investment accounts through an IBM 360; eight of Britain's largest motor industry firms (Ford, Vauxhall, Rover, Rootes, Firestone, Joseph Lucas, Ferodo and General Motors of Scotland) which have signed contracts worth f6 million to lease computers from Leasco Ltd. to carry out a variety of tasks in the industry.

Simplification and consequent reduction in size and price has paved the way for the smaller firms to consider buying a mini-computer, while, at the same time, hiring services have expanded with links between an office and a central computer being made on an ordinary STD telephone system.

Present estimates put the number of computers being used in Britain at 4,000, as opposed to around 500 in 1964.

Firm set up in 1968, combining International Computers and Tabulators with Plessey's and English Electric's computer sections — or by International Business Machines.

An American firm, IBM is one of the biggest companies of any sort in the world.

Its recorded profits for 1968 were £362 million from a colossal sales figure of £2,860 million.

A third major undertaking in the computer industry is Leasco Ltd., the American firm which first introduced computer leasing — as opposed to renting—in Britain and which has signed contracts worth more than 40 million dollars since commencing operations here in January 1968.

The cut-back in staff with the introduction of computers could be staggering.

In some cases, 100 per cent of conventional office workers could be replaced by a handful of computer and data-processing operators.

Direct links between computers could eliminate almost all present paper-work systems.

The second part of article will appear in morrow's Workers Press.

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