Auto Workers and Their Machines: A Study of Work, Factory, and Job Satisfaction in Four Countries

Abstract

Social scientists have warned about the deadening effects of increasing mechanization and job routinization on the lives of industrial workers. Three areas of work satisfaction were studied for four operations which varied in amount of worker control. Respondents were auto workers in four countries which varied in extent of industrialization. Most workers believe that their work integrates their lives, they prefer to work in the industrial sector, and they report that their jobs are satisfying. Nowhere did assemblyline workers dwell upon monotony. Small and inconsistent differences were found in the three areas of satisfaction according to the degree of worker control over the job and degree of plant mechanization. From Marx to Marcuse, ideas about the deadening impact of mechanized and routinized work need serious reconsideration. Intellectuals hate machines. While they acknowledge that machines lighten the burden of labor, they see machines unnaturally intruding upon work life. In a golden past, people enjoyed their work because they controlled it, were skilled at it, and did it in the bosoms of the family and community (Durkheim, 1964: 10-8). Today, only craftsmen who operate machines as hand tools can still enjoy their work (Mills, 1956:211). Robbing workers of their skills, machines have isolated workers from one another, their families, and communities. Most important, machines have so estranged workers from themselves (Fromm, 1955: 110; Marcuse, 1964:19-49; Marx, 1963:120-34) that they can only hate their work (Ellul, 1967: 320). In contrast to this image, most industrial workers in countless studies in the United States say they are satisfied with their work (Blauner, 1960:341). Yet researchers who usually accept survey findings have not been content with the data on work satisfaction. They keep designing studies to demonstrate that industrial employees are in fact dissatisfied, and they point to the American automobile assemblyline workers as the classic case of dissatisfaction (Blauner, 1964; Chinoy, 1955; Kornhauser, 1965). Assembly workers are most dissatisfied because their work is the most meaningless, most subdivided into small and repetitive tasks, and least subject to personal control. The contradiction between the findings on worker satisfaction and the theorizing about it raises certain fundamental questions. Do auto workers hate working and seek to escape it? Do they despise the factory environment? Do they find their jobs so monotonous as to deprive them of their sense of human worth? Does increasing mechanization in advanced industrial societies make automobile workers more discontented with their jobs? Do workers with equal skills evaluate their jobs in the same way irrespective of the recency of industry in the country? This research attempts to answer these questions by studying automobile workers in four countries (the United States, Italy, Argentina, and India) which vary in extent of * I should like to thank the following agencies for supporting this research: The Social Science Research Council, The National Science Foundation, The American Fulbright Commission, International Programs (Ford Foundation) at Michigan State University, and the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois. I am also grateful in many ways to the field directors of this study: Paolo Ammassari, Steven E. Deutsch, Richard P. Gale, and Baldev R. Sharma. Camille Legendre helped prepare the data for analysis. Finally, I am indebted to Joan Huber for critically reading the manuscript.

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