This concluding section on The (Hawthorne) Club is long. My argument for the significance of leisure-time at the Hawthorne Works as opposed to work-time has, I believe, wide implications. I first contest the assumptions about home faber, or homo laborans, as popularly understood, here. These labels are further questioned throughout the essay, not so much in theory, as with historic examples.
[I skipped a section describing Pullman, Illinois, a village built by George Pullman, the founder of the Pullman Palace Car Company. His company manufactured the luxury dining and sleeping cars used on trains beginning in the latter half of the 19th century. Pullman began building his town in 1880s and by 1893, 12,000 people lived there, though only half that number were counted among the 15,000 workers in his factory. I contrast Pullman’s brand of paternalistic welfarism to the managerialism of the managers at the Hawthorne Works.]
Pullman’s brand of “welfare capitalism” had little in common with the Western Electric plan to provide services and recreational opportunities for its workers. The main goal of both projects may have been similar—to prevent unionization—however the implementation differed considerably. The thirty years that separated these schemes represented the transition in America from an ubercapitalist-like Pullman to the “progressive” managerialism implemented at Western Electric.
Of significance too, was that the composition of their respective workforces differed majorly; the all-male workforce at Pullman stood in contrast to the thousands of women who occupied Western Electric’s factory floor. At Pullman, the traditional skills-based hierarchy of production enabled a military command structure to dominate the workers. Whereas at Western Electric, at least among the women, that hierarchy of skills was almost completely absent. The specific skills needed to do a job in a timely way took only a few weeks to acquire for the entry-level positions and a few months for the more complicated tasks. Of course, in both situations there was the usual surveillance of production that comes with capitalism’s DNA. At Western Electric supervisors tempered discipline by supporting conformity through peer pressure; this system of moderation was absent at Pullman.
Photos of the Western Electric factory floor depict hundreds of women doing the same job and all performing that task at approximately the same speed as monitored by the piece rate protocol. Slackers were encouraged to keep up, but there was also no incentive to excel since all the tasks were essentially the same and there was no avenue to a better position for the women. This also meant that no supervisor could exercise abusive authority without precipitating discontent as manifested in “go-slows” as retaliation across a large segment of the workforce.
. . .
Western Electric assembled, over a few decades, a culture of leisure with little financial expenditure on its part, beyond paying for staff time and sports equipment and keeping the lights on at night and heat flowing in winter. The Western Electric managers, steeped in the pragmatism of engineering methods, simply calculated that the modest investment in employee’s well-being penciled out as economic sense compared to the costs of suppressing their frustrations due to performing monotonous daily tasks. It helped that the company had the profits and the space to allocate to their program of leisure activities, but the essential factor was the technocratic élan of the managerial class. Though not unique in the development of modern US capitalism, the size of this enterprise gave their so-called enlightened managerial orientation legitimacy a smaller industrial operation lacked. There were other embryonic technological companies in America, but none had the confluence, and therefore the impact, of a workforce of thousands of young women and men, a large industrial footprint that provided space for dedicated leisure-time buildings and enthusiastic workers eager to support expanding after-work leisure.
The Hawthorne Works secured a place in the social sciences because of its role in the formation of the field of Human Resource Management; however, its history in the creation of a culture of workers’ leisure is absent in academic research. It’s not clear why this is the case. It may be due to Western Electric’s exceptional circumstances, as noted above, which could not be generalized but only treated as an anomaly; or maybe Western Electric’s institutional leisure was quickly eclipsed by the rise of consumerism and privatization, major social developments, that attracted the attention of academics. Whatever the reason, the coincidence of leisure and consumerism seems to have displaced the critical study of early industrial relations beyond its most contentious aspect – the class struggle.
In other words, the assumed primacy of work as the central experience for all, but the richest among us, discounted any reason to delve into leisure activities except as ancillary events in the lives of workers. If researched and analyzed at all, leisure was perceived suspiciously as detrimental to the workers’ best interests. Critics of capitalism characterized the rise of leisure as a mass phenomenon and nothing more than a new territory for commodification and the manipulation of class-consciousness.
While the partial validity of this view cannot be dismissed, ultimately however it suffers from lack of nuance. For instance, when bowling leagues expanded in the post-World War II era, after years of hibernation when the population was employed in the war effort, we cannot proclaim that they were a corrupting influence on worker militancy when that was precisely a period of peak labor protest. On the contrary, one might make the case that the high level of worker socialization enforced that militancy. And likewise, when the atomization of the working class into personal pursuits, especially of the passive kind, occurred in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the level of labor unrest diminished. It would be an error to establish this correlation as causation, but valid to add it to the complex of causes that saw the defeat of the labor movement in that period.
Western Electric’s expansion of leisure may be unique in American capitalism as mentioned previously, but that nonetheless does not prevent us from speculating on its implications. And the most significant conclusion that we arrive at is that for many of the workers, both men and women, their after-work time engaged them more than their repetitive job—or work-time. At work, they functioned as a cog in a huge machine-like enterprise, even though, unlike many typical workers of their era, they saw their jobs as contributing to the progress of society, nevertheless their workplace was, at best, a benevolent dictatorship. After work, however, they could retrieve themselves. They had an opportunity to regain their humanity.
The fact that this pleasurable activity resulted from a management scheme to ensure conformity and obedience of the workforce does not diminish this conclusion. The bosses’ scheme may have been a success, but so what? We need to recognize what was stated previously about working at Western Electric—good wages and pride in useful work—while important would not compensate for ogres dominating the factory floor and stalking the offices striking fear in the clerks. Under such work-floor oppression there would have been rebellion at Hawthorne like that at Pullman. The adoption, however, of after work pursuits coupled with a soft approach to job discipline manifested a holistic approach that submerged the class struggle beneath the veneer of corporate “welfare.” If awards for “socially responsible” business were distributed in the 1920s the company would have won one.
No surveys can be retrieved from the Hawthorn Works archive to demonstrate that at Western Electric leisure-time took precedence over work-time. Nevertheless, commonsense tells us this was true. If we look through company bulletins, we see that leisure activities provided drew a large number of workers to all sorts of after-work activities—sports competitions and dances brought out thousands.
As a thought experiment, let us consider a Hawthorne worker’s choice between the two periods of her daily life—work-time and after-work-time. What would happen if the balance were skewed towards longer hours at work? Or, if the work day was reduced? In the first case, assuming higher pay, wouldn’t longer hours raise a problematic situation regarding quality-of-life issues leading to burnout and rapid turnover of the work force? In the second case, a diminished paycheck might be tolerated for access to greater time to pursue company-sponsored leisure activities. The history of Kellogg’s six-hour work day leads to this speculation.8
A more compelling implication of leisure of the sort Hawthorne workers enjoyed raises the issue of leisure supplanting work as a more relevant aspect of life and questions the argument that work is central to how we create our identity as homo faber, much less homo laborans. Marx and countless others throughout history contended that making is embedded in our nature. But is this so? If it is, then what are the consequences of the predicted increase in unemployment due to the introduction of more automation? And how would a Marxist interpret the significance of work when it is done only three hours per day as some believe would solve the problem of technological unemployment?Will those three hours fulfill the expectations that the concept homo faber posits as basic to our species? Or can there be non-work “work”—let’s say with hobbies or volunteering—that fulfills the expectation that we are “making animals?”
The nature of production defines society in a definitive way as Marx maintained, but that doesn’t establish our species as homo faber. Hunter-gathering characterize a very long period of human existence. And archeologists generally agree that the actual work of feeding the group took less time than today’s average weekly commute. Were these hunter-gathers primarily makers? What were they making when they spent the day in other pursuits, or maybe none at all? Anthropologists have noted idling as a pastime in many societies.
Returning to Morris. He assumed, like Marx and like almost all the revolutionaries of his time, that work was essential for human development on both the personal level—as craftpersons, let’s say—and on the collective level, as in a workshop where skilled individuals collaborated to produce useful products. There’s a beautiful section in Richard Sennett’s book, The Craftsman, where he describes the ballet several craftsmen perform to avoid each other as they use the machines in their shop. Such finely tuned motions not only depict a relationship of bodies in space, but also a mutual recognition, if not a celebration, of their skills.
With the emergence of the factory, craft collapsed threatening Morris’ concept of the meaning of work. His vision of the socialist factory as a large workshop in a garden, with a bountiful selection of amenities, was his attempt to retrieve work as a vocation. His goal was to reduce the distance between work and leisurely pursuits—or, in other words, pleasurable work, and not too much of it! Other activities in the accepted realm of culture needed to be integrated into one’s life.
There is a certain appeal to this approach. The notion of homo faber assumes useful work for the individual, or the collective, or ideally both, otherwise we would be talking about homo miserabilis. Work must satisfy our intrinsic needs as a species to be considered integral to the expression of our natures. Today, however, we contend with work debased in context—that is working conditions. And in substance—that is the content of the labor performed for wages9. A recent Gallup poll indicates that 85% of workers are not engaged in their jobs.
The proposed promise of artificial intelligence and automation to eliminate menial tasks and therefore elevate the content of work is questionable. It is more likely that humans will continue to be put in service of increasingly “intelligent” machines. Anyway, that is the precedent. And so, we have work as toil, which returns us to the position of seeking leisure over toil. However, contemporary, commodified leisure is escapist, and not all that pleasurable unless you like crowds and spending money. In contrast to this debased leisure, the Hawthorne workers enjoyed their after-work-time, when their leisure added pleasure to their lives because it was engrossing.
The definition of homo faber assumes that humankind’s main interaction with Nature is through work—transforming the natural environment to feed, clothe and shelter the group. A quick tour of an archeological museum should dispel any notion that our early ancestors were deprived of the time to create the most fantastic objects, granted that some were tools. Along with these practical, everyday items, which were functional and exquisitely crafted, one will find elaborately designed clothes and jewelry and many items, which archeologists and anthropologists obsessively refer to as ritual or spiritual implements. These are spectacularly beautiful items that took many hours, days, or even months to create. It is a stretch of the term to incorporate these items of fine craft as simply products of the human desire to make things—this expands the concept beyond usefulness.
These artful objects (what else to call them?) reveal, however, only the most rudimentary sense of the life associated with early material culture. The ceremonies of traditional societies that have survived through the ages, despite the genocidal encounters with emissaries of western civilization, give us only the faintest clue of their non-material culture. To ignore these aspects of humankind’s encounters with Nature, or to relegate them to lesser significance, is to diminish our view of the diversity and creativity of our species. To appreciate these aspects of our ancestral heritage means either expanding the definition of homo faber beyond recognition, or severely limiting it to specifics, or eliminating it altogether for a term that encompasses those aspects of our nature that celebrate individual and collective creativity. I opt for this choice.
1. William Morris (1884) A Factory As It Might Be. First published in Justice, April-May 1884. https://infed.org/mobi/william-morris-a-factory-as-it-might-be/
2. AK Press, 2011. https://www.akpress.org/righttobelazyak.html
3. The Albion Mill (see Wikipedia)
4. From a company brochure (1915) “Hawthorne was the “Hub of Life” for many employees and their families.”
5. Ibid.
6. In 1922, a small-circulation magazine – The Flapper, located in Chicago – celebrated the flapper’s appeal. On the opening page of its first issue, it proudly declared flappers’ break with traditional values. Flappers contrasting themselves with earlier generations of women whom they called “clinging vines”. They mocked the confining fashions and demure passivity of older women and reveled in their own freedom. They did not even acknowledge that the previous generation of female activists had made the flappers’ freedom possible. (See Flapper entry at Wikipedia)
7. http://www.historic-leclaire.org/leclaires-history
8. Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, (1996). A 1932 worker-opinion survey by the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor concluded,
“[L]ittle dissatisfaction with lower earnings resulting from the decrease in hours was expressed [by female workers], although in the majority of cases very real decreases had resulted.” Plant-wide votes in the 1930s and ’40s also showed clear majorities of male workers in favor of the six-hour day. Workers of both sexes, when interviewed by Benjamin Hunnicutt several decades later, recalled almost total worker support for six-hour shifts at the Battle Creek factory.
9. As Hannah Arendt defined work as homo faber, as making a work of utility or art, and homo laborans as the labor that consumes its product. The farmer and the cook epitomize the endless repetition of work—the fields are replanted after the harvest and another meal follows the last. So too much of modern work is a process that never ends. This is especially true in the digital realm where change to the product of labor continues ad infinitum, or until another app appears. There is nothing left after hours of toil to hold in one’s hand and marvel at.