Arbeit Macht Frei?

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, I would work temp jobs during breaks from school, some of them in blue collar positions. In one job, I worked at a bindery near my home in Seattle for a couple of months. One of my tasks was to assist the operator of an elaborate folding machine and to box up finished product. The bindery had gotten a major contract to print up and package materials for the launch of a new iteration of software, and temp workers were needed to augment the permanent cadre. The folder operator was a twenty-something slacker type, the kind of guy you might see at an anti-globalization rally or in a grunge band. His work at the bindery supported his real vocation, independent film, and he ran a web magazine that contained reviews and such.

On occasion he would show up at work in a tee shirt that contained the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” imposed over a pile of human skulls. I interpreted this as his way of saying that he realized that the message was a lie just as it had been at the concentration camps in Europe a half century earlier. His work at the bindery did not make him free, although it paid the bills. In fact, it interfered with his real work, and it was mindless and repetitive. He approached it, I think, in a kind of Zen fashion, embracing the boredom and routine and performing the work to perfection. Everyone in the bindery was a cog in a machine, doing the same repetitive task day in and day out. We temps had it somewhat better in that we got moved around from task to task on an ad hoc basis. Lunch and other breaks were timed to the minute and regulated much as I recall being regulated in grammar school.

I also worked at a factory that assembled truck parts. Each work unit was set up to build a repertoire of about 10 parts. The unit had a quota of parts to get out in a day, and the optimal movements for accomplishing the quota had all been worked out. You had to use these movements even if they were uncomfortable for you, and the quotas were so high that it took almost all your energy and attention to meet them. Again, every break was timed and regulated. And workers made little more than minimum wage and had to exceed quota by a considerable margin for the chance to earn an extra $1.00 per hour. I left at the end of each day exhausted and with considerable pain in my back and hands. I worked there about a month and considered myself lucky that I had other options.

In each of these places (less so at the bindery) and in others I have worked, a sick child could cost you your job. You could not readily take time off for medical care or to go to a meeting with your child’s teachers. You would never make much money no matter how hard you worked, and management was always looking for ways to automate your job and to make sure that each task could be performed by a completely unskilled worker such that you could be easily replaced. The company owned you and your time while you were at work, and you traded these for a pittance.

Work did not make my fellow laborers free under the circumstances in the plants. As a temp, I was somewhat freer than my fellows because it was understood that I might be signed up with several agencies and that I could easily walk away from any position that I could not tolerate. Whenever I have been self-employed in my life, although I was much less secure financially, I always felt more freedom. Even if I was doing the same work as an employee, I always preferred to work as an independent contractor or consultant and found much more satisfaction when I owned my own time. Now I am a wage slave again, but as an executive and a professional in a company with little accountability, I have quite a bit of freedom and can tolerate my situation. I am not entirely sure why it matters to me, but I reckon that it has to do with power and personal sovereignty.

What if the bindery and assembly workers were organized differently with more freedom to control the pace and method of their work? I would rather be paid by the piece and have control over how I got the job done. I suspect that workers would, under such circumstances, come up with ways to increase their productivity while allowing for greater comfort and individual autonomy. If the plant housed groups of independent contractors rather than employees, the company should be able to rationalize labor costs without exercising so much dictatorial control over the workers. In the business I am currently in, we see quite a bit of contracting in which formerly internal functions of companies are now performed by independent contractors, eg all of distribution is handled by a separate company. In some cases, sales, maintenance, security, distribution, packaging, accounting and assembly are all done by contractors with the principal business limited almost entirely to coordination and administration. Each of these contractors works through employees, however, they work for much smaller entities.

I used to work in the commercial construction industry (as a lawyer, not a skilled worker), and I saw that huge and complex projects were built, not by a single company with lots of employees, but by tiers of independent contractors. My company did electrical work and depended on skilled electricians, most of whom preferred to be subcontractors and to be paid based on work done rather than by the hour. This helped us rationalize labor costs and helped the workers retain considerable control over their own lives. This practice was not uncommon in other building trades. Huge projects were built in this manner, and I find it hard to believe that simple assembly or bindery work could not be similarly organized to good effect.