Division of Labor

Essay # 69209

History
Labor Studies
Political Science

Division of Labor

Explains the importance of the concept of the division of labor.

1,386 words () | 4 sources | APA | 2006 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the division of labor is a significant concept which involves both the process itself and the effects of the process on laborers. More specifically, the paper explains that the division of labor is a fundamental theoretical and practical principle that involves the actual process of separating labor into distinct roles which do not let the worker manufacture a completed product, but rather separates the work into dissociated roles which are picked up by different skilled and semi-skilled workers, each completing a part of the process.

From the Paper:

"The result and goal of this process is ultimately profit. And it follows that the capitalists running the production operation will use the division of labor to separate their working pools into skilled, highly-paid labor and semi-skilled, low-pay labor. Barbara Garson, realizing this conclusion, calls even the efficiency of the division of labor into question: "The main advantage of the auto assembly line to an employer is not speed but control... the requirement for control over unwilling workers shapes the division of labor at least as much as any straightforward calculation of the most efficient methods." The workers are perhaps thus unwilling because the division of labor has rendered the satisfaction possible and perhaps inherent in making a whole product from its individual parts to a more mechanistic process of manufacture in which one worker is responsible solely for a monotonously repeated process of sub-manufacture in which the worker feels naturally dissociated from the end product of his/her labors."