once their stomachs are full, then it is the turn of their minds to cry famine, as Abraham Maslow explained, pointing to his famous diagram of the ‘pyramid of needs’.8 Beyond their salaries and their careers, new generations aspired to something else, to more intense human relationships, as we see from reports in the Harvard Business Review, ‘as provided by commune living experiments’.9 Similarly, workers’ expectations were being fleshed out, taking on a more qualitative dimension. They were demanding of their jobs something more than an income: interpersonal relationships, something substantial, a ‘meaning’. A transition to a ‘post-materialist’ state of mind.
It is clear that the more such subjectivity asserts itself, the less it will tolerate being subjected to alienating work. Max Weber had warned: ‘The capitalistic system […] needs this devotion to the calling of making money’, to that ‘incomprehensible’, ‘mysterious’ idea that a human being ‘should be able to make it the sole purpose of his life-work to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods’.10 If other appetites take over, the ‘work ethic’ suffers. ‘Who Wants to Work?’ was the headline in Newsweek in March 1973.11 The question answered itself.
In this analysis, it was relative material prosperity, of the very same kind that Bell claimed had endorsed an enduring consent to the exploitation of wage-earners, that was identified as the source of new dissent. This entailed a major shift in theories of revolt. Why does anyone rebel? One answer had been: out of necessity. But now people started saying: because it was a luxury they could afford.12
The factory is one of the sites where new aspirations collide most brutally with old structures. But we need to be careful, as ‘an anachronistic organization of work can create an explosive and pathogenic mix’.13 According to Management Professor Richard Walton: ‘In some cases, alienation is expressed by passive withdrawal-tardiness, absenteeism and turnover, and inattention on the job. In other cases, it is expressed by active attacks – pilferage, sabotage, deliberate waste, assaults, bomb threats, and other disruptions of work routines’.14 But ‘dramatic increases in these forms of violence are taking place at the plant level’.15 The danger is political: the worker may resort to ‘displacement of his frustrations through participation in radical social or political movements’.16
Echoing the Lordstown strike, the question of ‘quality of life at work’ became central, for a time, in American public debate. In 1972, using the terminology of the young Marx, the Harvard Business Review asked: ‘How to counter alienation in the plant?’ And Congress, the same year, organized senatorial hearings on ‘worker alienation’.17 But if alienation is problematic, this is above all for economic reasons, because of its negative impact on productivity. If there is a lesson to be learned from the Lordstown episode, it is that it showed a ‘disregard for the interaction of human resources with capital and technology’.18 What advantage is it for a manager ‘to have a perfectly efficient assembly-line if […] workers are out on strike because of the oppressive and dehumanized experience of working on the “perfect” line?’19
If you could start your professional life again from scratch, would you choose the same job that you are currently doing? To this question, in the middle of the 1960s, 93 per cent of the university professors and 82 per cent of the journalists canvased replied ‘yes’, compared to 31 per cent of textile workers and 16 per cent of automobile workers.20 The authors of the study concluded that, in addition to the least physical demand, autonomy was the main factor in job satisfaction. Conversely, ‘alienation exists when workers are unable to control their immediate work processes’.21
Lauding the virtues of ‘autonomy and self-control’,22 and judging that ‘industry today is over-managed and over-controlled’,23 the managerial reformers of the 1970s recommended stimulating the ‘participation’ of workers to increase their productivity as well as their satisfaction. Instead of the old strategy of ‘control’ they recommended a strategy of ‘commitment’.24 While the previous, intensive strategy had still aimed to pressure workers by submitting them to intensified discipline, the later, extensive strategy proposed to ‘use effectively the capacities of a major natural resource – namely, the manpower they employ’.25
Several pilot projects involving participative management thus emerged in the United States.26 If the French Left had, as fuel for its ideas about self-management, the experience of the Lip factory (occupied by its workers in Besançon in 1973), American managers, for their part, could assess the benefits of participation by pointing to the case of the General Foods dog kibble factory in Topeka (Kansas) in 1971. This was the countermodel of Lordstown: the rules were set collectively and the activity was organized into ‘autonomous working groups’, with ‘self-managed’ teams responsible for large swathes of production.27
The conclusion was very definite: ‘productivity increases […] when workers participate in the work decisions that affect their lives’.28 The enrichment of tasks, said psychologist Frederick Herzberg, pays.29 With this in mind, the good news could finally be announced: there was a ‘a felicitous congruence between worker satisfaction and the securement of managerial objectives’.30 For the workers, more satisfaction; for capital, increased productivity. In the end, it was win-win.
However, there was at least one social group that felt it had something to lose: management, which feared being deprived of a significant number of its prerogatives.31 Activist worker Bill Watson recounts the following anecdote: in the factory where he worked, the management had, during a period of high lay-offs, planned to make an inventory of their stock, planned to last six weeks. The task had been entrusted to some fifty workers. To save time, they cobbled together a system of their own, a self-organized inventory, which proved more effective than the original procedure provided by the management. The management abruptly ended this spontaneous experience, on the grounds that ‘the legitimate channels of authority, training, and communication had been violated’.32 ‘Management’, says Watson, ‘was really determined to stop the workers from organizing their own work, even when it meant that the work would be finished quicker and, with the men quickly laid off, less would be advanced in wages’.33 Managers could therefore set the preservation of their own power higher than strict considerations of economic efficiency.
As Business Week also put it: ‘Attempts to introduce plant democracy at one model General Foods (GF) plant in Topeka, Kansas have failed because managers felt their positions threatened by the success experienced when workers started taking some initiative in making decisions’.34 ‘In reality’, says André Gorz, ‘the hostility of the employers was not based on essentially technical or economic factors. It was political. The enrichment of tasks marked the end of the despotic authority and power of bosses great and small. […] In short, once they went down this road, where would it all end?’35
Could the productivity gains associated with participation be assured without losing control, without triggering dangerous new trends? The reformers were betting that one could give workers a limited autonomy without things going bad; others were much more sceptical. The problem with autonomy is that, once granted, it is not satisfied with half measures. There was fear of a ‘domino effect’.36
In fact, from the employers’ point of view, the room for manoeuvre was narrow. What were the options available? One strategy involved keeping the status quo, and even hardening the existing disciplinary regimes, but at the risk of intensifying indiscipline and social conflicts, with the shortfall this implied. The second option was to introduce ‘participation’, with the promise of a harmonious convergence of interests, less alienation and more productivity – except that in this irenic picture, it was feared that even limited forms of empowerment might bring the wolf into the fold.
This was the dilemma: either to renew a disciplinary
