Production Regimes — Producers’ Pride

Abstract

When we researched the impact of automation on workers’ qualifications, horizontal cooperation, hierarchies, and work content in the 1970s and 80s we were alerted to the way in which workers spoke about their work, about the loss of old qualifications, but also about gaining new qualifications within an automated system, where they were less immersed in specific parts of the immediate manufacturing process but had more responsibility for, and needed more knowledge of, the process as a whole. We called this relationship towards work ‘producer’s pride’ and found that it could work in different ways: it could put workers in conflict with the profit orientation of capitalist production, where the quality of the product is often sacrificed to cost-effectiveness; on the other hand, management was also able to use the workers’ interest in their work as a means of identifying with the company and alienating them from the trade unions, who were not expecting that workers would develop an interest in the content of their new work.