Office Quandries
Peter Rachleff
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PUNCHING OUT page 2 of 3 | |||||
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Weekly Answers to Office Quandries |
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Professor Peter Rachleff |
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It's called "working to rule." Every workplace, hospitals included, have detailed rules which shape workers' behaviors. At the same time, workers are usually expected to go beyond those rules, around those rules, and even wink at those rules in order to get their jobs done properly. Early in the 20th century, a labor organization called the Industrial Workers of the World (the "IWW" or the "Wobblies") perfected a useful approach to labor-management relations. Most of their members were low-paid, so the union collected little in the way of dues and could not afford to pay strike benefits. They needed to find ways to put pressure on their employers without costing themselves a paycheck by going on strike. "Working to rule" became their answer.
"Big Bill" Haywood, a leader of the Wobblies, explained the strategy as resting on the reality that "the boss's brains are under the worker's cap." Workers needed to withhold their brains, then, by refusing to exercise any judgement or initiative on the job. Just as they were in the early 20th century, many American workplaces are now being organized according to the principles of "scientific management" or "Taylorism" (named for Frederick W. Taylor, its originator). This system seeks to divide the "mental" and "manual" parts of work by centralizing the "mental" work in the office and providing detailed orders to the "manual" workers or "hands." Haywood and the Wobblies realized that despite this system, supervisors really needed the cooperation of the leagues of unskilled workers of the time-the early 1900s saw the most intense period of Southern and Eastern European immigration to the U.S. -- in order to keep production up. |
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