Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [27]
According to the University of Chicago philosopher Richard Weaver, the author of Ideas Have Consequences, they felt shocked.6 For the first time in their lives—and in the lives of their parents and grandparents—they could not see or control the final result of their work. Before, the peasant farmer would determine what was necessary to bring the harvest in and saw everything through to the end. The craftsmen—who acquired their skill through years of apprenticeship—decided how they needed to work to make the perfect product. Now, the simple act of following one task through to fruition was neither possible nor expected of the factory worker. It was not possible because he was in charge of a small, specific part of the production process. It was not asked of him because there were procedures—and foremen to enforce them—that determined how to do things. All the worker was asked to do was to arrive at a specified time, to execute specified operations for a specified number of—long—hours, and to leave. Indeed, in overcoming an independence that stretched back centuries, Wedgwood’s main difficulty was not training people to do this repetitive work, but to stop them from wandering around, taking unauthorized “holidays,” and even drinking on the job.7 The new division of labor, as Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations, had great advantages for productivity. But it came at a cost that was harder to measure than was output in terms of pins per hour. Lack of control over one’s work, over its purpose—and, as a consequence, lack of involvement in the final results—led to a loss of respect for the procedures. This, in turn, led to more supervision from the foremen, the introduction of time clocks, and other control mechanisms. The result: even greater disengagement of the worker from his work’s final purpose. The seeds of the “how” bureaucracy had thus been planted.
Over the past two centuries, that apparatus of control has been tuned, adjusted, and updated. But its basic form and underlying assumptions would be recognizable to Wedgwood even today, were he around. In fact, there are factories in England right now in which Wedgwood would feel very much at home. Northampton, England, is fifty-four miles southeast of Birmingham and looks for all the world like so many nineteenth-century industrial towns in England. More important for Northampton, though, is that it is only sixty-seven miles from London, the main market for its traditional industry—shoe making. The town’s association with shoe making predates industrialization: Its artisans made boots for Oliver Cromwell’s army in the seventeenth century. The local folklore has it that Cromwell thanked Northampton’s cordwainers for all those boots by never paying his bill. By the early nineteenth century, more than a third of the men in Northampton worked as cordwainers, the traditional term for those who make shoes—unlike a cobbler, who repairs shoes. At that time, cordwainers still worked as artisans in their own homes, even if they worked for a larger concern. But beginning in the 1850s shoe making became industrialized. By the late nineteenth century, it employed half of the town’s working men.8 The Northampton tradition of shoe making continues today; if you’re fortunate enough to own a pair of “Made in England” men’s shoes, with its model and size still written by hand on the inside, there is a strong chance they were made in Northampton.
In 2008, we visited one of these factories, housed in a nineteenth-century redbrick building that seemed little changed since it was built.