Describe the Degradation of Work: Social Division of Labour

Degradation of Work
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Degradation of Work
Human labor is used to create value out of commodities so as to accumulate capital, an idea behind capitalism. Capitalists revolve around expanding their capital through purchasing labor at the lowest possible price to add value to commodities which can then be sold at a higher price and earn a higher profit. Capitalists want to exploit labor for their benefit, minimize cost on labor and maximize output for higher profits. The idea of maximizing labor gave rise to the division of labor in the industrial revolution during the 18th century. The idea was proposed by, among others, Charles Babbage who argued that huge amount of labor could be saved by assigning workers specialized tasks. The capitalists further argued that it would take a short time and cost less to train a worker to accomplish a given task than training him or her to be fully skilled in the entire process of production. Capitalists have accumulated capital over the centuries through the division of labor. However, in the turn of 20th century, it is argued that division of labor has led to degradation of work, a position that this paper takes. Braverman has been instrumental in demonstrating this phenomenon by examining the antagonism that has arisen between the employers and the employees upon the realization by the workers that the employers were after exploiting them for higher profits. Workers have also been dissatisfied by the alienation of ownership of the products from them. The paper also argues that capitalists' organization of production has led to negative social consequences such as reduced cohesion in the society. The paper shall demonstrate degradation of work from the 20th century by first describing the aspects of the division of labor such as social division of labor and detailed division of labor as articulated by Braverman. It shall then demonstrate Babbage principle (capitalists' organization of work) and how it leads to degradation of work. The paper will then highlight the social consequences of the capitalists' organization of production and finally employ Rice's play to illustrate the effects of work degradation as described by Braverman (Rice, 2013).
The social division of labor refers to specialization in the production of goods through the social structural division of labor by firms, industries or occupations of workers. For example, in the traditional societies, men and women specialized in a given task such as pottery making, but each person could participate in all the steps of gathering clay, molding to finalizing (Knights & Willmott, 2016). Detailed division of labor, on the other hand, involves the actual breakdown of the process of production into fragments of tasks which are accomplished by each or groups of individuals. For instance, in the pottery industry, a group of women would specialize in gathering clay only while another group specializes in molding only and another group would specialize in finalizing the pot making process (Knights & Willmott, 2016). In the social division of labor, an individual would be equipped with a necessary and complete set of skills needed in making a pot, but in the detailed division of labor, a worker does not get an opportunity to develop complete skills of making a pot since he or she only specializes in a part of the process (Braverman, 2011). Braverman describes this as de-skilling meaning that employees are deprived full skill development so that they are denied full knowledge development of the entire process of production. Each step of production would constitute of simpler tasks to be performed by a worker repetitively without proceeding to the next step to develop a further skill. This would result in numbing, declining thought and initiative and devoid of variety (Braverman, 2011. The capitalist was not bothered about this; in fact, it would give him full control of a less creative worker and fully exploit by rewarding poorly knowing that they would not sell the less developed skills anywhere. Numbness, lack of kill saves and initiative or creativity among the workers are some of the aspects that led to Braverman conclusion of degradation of work in the 20th century terming the labor as unskilled (Braverman, 2011).
The idea of division of labor was founded by Charles Babbage in what has been termed as Babbage principle of division of labor. Babbage suggested that production be divided into sub-tasks according to the level of difficulty so that a worker or group of workers are assigned each sub-task in which they would be fully equipped with the necessary skills and attributes for accomplishing such a given task (Braverman, 2011). This implies that each worker focuses on a specific task assigned and suited for a while the other sub-tasks of the entire production system would be handled by individuals suited at each step. Babbage's principle of organizing workers and job with respect to the level of skills was a nice idea of his time (Braverman, 2011). However, Braverman would argue that capitalists utilized the ideas of Babbage to employ what is known as scientific management (Durkheim, 2014). While a craftsman in the traditional set up would be equipped with complete knowledge of entire production process,...