Manual labour - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Manual labour manual (American English

American English

American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

) or manual work is physical work done by people, most especially in contrast to that done by machine

Machine

A machine manages power to accomplish a task, examples include, a mechanical system, a computing system, an electronic system, and a molecular machine. In common usage, the meaning is that of a device having parts that perform or assist in performing any type of work...

s, and also to that done by working animal

Working animal

A working animal is an animal, usually domesticated, that is kept by humans and trained to perform tasks. They may be close members of the family, such as guide or service dogs, or they may be animals trained strictly to perform a job, such as logging elephants. They may also be used for milk, a...

s. It is most literally work done with the hands (the word "manual" comes from the Latin word for hand), and, by figurative extension, it is work done with any of the muscles and bones of the body. For most of human prehistory and history, manual labour and its close cousin, animal labour, have been the primary ways that physical work has been accomplished. Mechanisation

Mechanization

Mechanization or mechanisation is providing human operators with machinery that assists them with the muscular requirements of work or displaces muscular work. In some fields, mechanization includes the use of hand tools...

and automation

Automation

Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization...

, which reduce the need for human and animal labour in production, have existed for centuries, but it was only starting in the 19th century that they began to significantly expand and to change human culture

Culture

Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...

. To be implemented, they require that sufficient technology

Technology

Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...

exist and that its capital cost

Capital cost

Capital costs are costs incurred on the purchase of land, buildings, construction and equipment to be used in the production of goods or the rendering of services, in other words, the total cost needed to bring a project to a commercially operable status. However, capital costs are not limited to...

s be justified by the amount of future wage

Wage

A wage is a compensation, usually financial, received by workers in exchange for their labor.Compensation in terms of wages is given to workers and compensation in terms of salary is given to employees...

s that they will obviate.

Although nearly any work can potentially have skill and intelligence applied to it, many jobs

Employment

Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as:- Employee :...

that mostly comprise manual labour—such as fruit and vegetable picking, manual materials handling (for example, shelf stocking), manual digging, or manual assembly of parts—often may be done successfully (if not masterfully) by unskilled or semiskilled workers. Thus there is a partial but significant correlation between manual labour and unskilled or semiskilled workers. Based on economic and social conflict of interest

Conflict of interest

A conflict of interest occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other....

, people may often distort that partial correlation into an exaggeration that equates manual labour with lack of skill; with lack of any potential to apply skill (to a task) or to develop skill (in a worker); and with low social class

Social class

Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...

. Throughout human existence the latter has involved a spectrum of variants, from slavery

Slavery

Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...

(with stigmatisation of the slaves as "subhuman"), to caste or caste-like systems, to subtler forms of inequality.

Economic competition

Competition (economics)

Competition in economics is a term that encompasses the notion of individuals and firms striving for a greater share of a market to sell or buy goods and services...

ensures that businesses will always try to buy labour at the lowest possible cost (for example, through offshoring

Offshoring

Offshoring describes the relocation by a company of a business process from one country to another—typically an operational process, such as manufacturing, or supporting processes, such as accounting. Even state governments employ offshoring...

or by employing foreign worker

Foreign worker

A foreign worker is a person who works in a country other than the one of which he or she is a citizen. The term migrant worker as discussed in the migrant worker page is used in a particular UN resolution as a synonym for "foreign worker"...

s) or to obviate it entirely (through mechanisation and automation).

Relationship to low skill and low social class

For various reasons, there is a strong correlation

Correlation

In statistics, dependence refers to any statistical relationship between two random variables or two sets of data. Correlation refers to any of a broad class of statistical relationships involving dependence....

between manual labour and unskilled or semiskilled workers, despite the fact that nearly any work can potentially have skill and intelligence applied to it (for example, the artisan

Artisan

An artisan is a skilled manual worker who makes items that may be functional or strictly decorative, including furniture, clothing, jewellery, household items, and tools...

al skill of craft production

Craft production

Craft production is the process of manufacturing by hand with or without the aid of tools. The term Craft production refers to a manufacturing technique applied in the hobbies of Handicraft but was also the common method of manufacture in the pre-industrialized world...

, or the logic of applied science

Applied science

Applied science is the application of scientific knowledge transferred into a physical environment. Examples include testing a theoretical model through the use of formal science or solving a practical problem through the use of natural science....

). It has always been the case for humans that many workers begin their working lives lacking any special level of skill or experience. (In the past two centuries, education has become more important and more widely disseminated; but even today, not everyone can know everything, or have experience in a great number of occupations.) It has also always been the case that there was a large amount of manual labour to be done; and that much of it was simple enough to be successfully (if not masterfully) done by unskilled or semiskilled workers, which has meant that there have always been plenty of people with the potential to do it. These conditions have assured the correlation's strength and persistence.

Throughout human prehistory and history, wherever social class systems

Social class

have developed, the social status of manual labourers has, more often than not, been low, as most physical tasks were done by peasant

Peasant

A peasant is an agricultural worker who generally tend to be poor and homeless-Etymology:The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.- Position in society :Peasants typically...

s, serf

Serfdom

Serfdom is the status of peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to Manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted to the mid-19th century...

s, slaves

Slavery

, indentured servant

Indentured servant

Indentured servitude refers to the historical practice of contracting to work for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities during the term of indenture. Usually the father made the arrangements and signed...

s, wage slaves

Wage slavery

Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a negatively connoted term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor, and to highlight similarities between owning and employing a person...

, or domestic servant

Domestic worker

A domestic worker is a man, woman or child who works within the employer's household. Domestic workers perform a variety of household services for an individual or a family, from providing care for children and elderly dependents to cleaning and household maintenance, known as housekeeping...

s. For example, legal scholar L. Ali Khan analyses how the Greeks, Hindus, English

English people

The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...

, and Americans

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

all created sophisticated social structures to outsource manual labour to distinct classes, caste

Caste

Caste is an elaborate and complex social system that combines elements of endogamy, occupation, culture, social class, tribal affiliation and political power. It should not be confused with race or social class, e.g. members of different castes in one society may belong to the same race, as in India...

s, ethnicities

Ethnic group

An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...

, or races.

The phrase "hard labour" has even become a legal euphemism for penal labour

Penal labour

Penal labour is a form of unfree labour in which prisoners perform work, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence which involve penal labour include penal servitude and imprisonment with hard labour...

, which is a custodial sentence during which the convict is not only confined but also put to manual work. Such work may be productive, as on a prison farm

Prison farm

A prison farm is a large correctional facility where penal labor convicts are put to economical use in a 'farm' , usually for manual labour, largely in open air, such as in agriculture, logging, quarrying, etc...

or in a prison kitchen, laundry, or library; intrinsically senseless, with the only purpose being the effect of the punishment on the convict; or somewhere in between (such as chain gang

Chain gang

A chain gang is a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work, such as mining or timber collecting, as a form of punishment. Such punishment might include building roads, digging ditches or chipping stone...

work, treadwheel

Treadwheel

A treadwheel is a form of animal engine typically powered by humans. It may resemble a water wheel in appearance, and can be worked either by a human treading paddles set into its circumference , or by a human or animal standing inside it .Uses of treadwheels included raising water, to power...

work, or the proverbial "breaking rocks"—the latter two of which are almost certain to be economically senseless today, although they sometimes served economic purpose in the preindustrial past).

There has always been a tendency among people of the higher gradations of social class to oversimplify the [partial] correlation between manual labour and lack of skill (or need for skill) into one of equivalence, leading to dubious exaggerations such as the notion that anyone who worked physically could be identified by that very fact

Ipso facto

Ipso facto is a Latin phrase, directly translated as "by the fact itself," which means that a certain phenomenon is a direct consequence, a resultant effect, of the action in question, instead of being brought about by a subsequent action such as the verdict of a tribunal. It is a term of art used...

as being unintelligent or unskilled, or that any task requiring physical work must (by that very fact) be simplistic and not worthy of analysis (or of being done by anyone with intelligence or social rank). Given the human cognitive tendency toward rationalisation, it is natural enough that such grey areas (partial correlations) have often been warped into absolutes (black and white thinking) by people seeking to justify and perpetuate their social advantage.

Throughout human existence, but most especially since the Age of Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

, there have been logically complement

Complement

In many different fields, the complement of X is something that together with X makes a complete whole—something that supplies what X lacks.Complement may refer to:...

ary efforts by intelligent workers to counteract these flawed oversimplifications. For example, the American

American Revolution

The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...

and French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

s rejected notions of inherited social status (aristocracy

Aristocracy

Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...

, nobility, monarchy

Monarchy

A monarchy is a form of government in which the office of head of state is usually held until death or abdication and is often hereditary and includes a royal house. In some cases, the monarch is elected...

), and the labour movement

Labour movement

The term labour movement or labor movement is a broad term for the development of a collective organization of working people, to campaign in their own interest for better treatment from their employers and governments, in particular through the implementation of specific laws governing labour...

s of the 19th and 20th centuries led to the formation of trade union

Trade union

A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...

s who enjoyed substantial collective bargaining

Collective bargaining

Collective bargaining is a process of negotiations between employers and the representatives of a unit of employees aimed at reaching agreements that regulate working conditions...

power for a time. Such counteractive efforts have been all the more difficult because of the fact that not all social status differences and wealth differences

Distribution of wealth

The distribution of wealth is a comparison of the wealth of various members or groups in a society. It differs from the distribution of income in that it looks at the distribution of ownership of the assets in a society, rather than the current income of members of that society.-Definition of...

are unfair; meritocracy

Meritocracy

Meritocracy, in the first, most administrative sense, is a system of government or other administration wherein appointments and responsibilities are objectively assigned to individuals based upon their "merits", namely intelligence, credentials, and education, determined through evaluations or...

is a part of real life, just as rationalisation and unfairness are.

Social systems of every ideological persuasion, from Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

to syndicalism

Syndicalism

Syndicalism is a type of economic system proposed as a replacement for capitalism and an alternative to state socialism, which uses federations of collectivised trade unions or industrial unions...

to the American Dream

American Dream

The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States in which freedom includes a promise of the possibility of prosperity and success. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each...

, have attempted to achieve a successfully functioning classless society

Classless society

Classless society refers to a society in which no one is born into a social class. Such distinctions of wealth, income, education, culture, or social network might arise and would only be determined by individual experience and achievement in such a society.Since these distinctions are difficult to...

in which honest, productive manual labourers can have every bit of social status and power that honest, productive managers can have. Humans have not yet succeeded in instantiating any such utopia

Utopia

Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...

, but some social systems have been designed that go far enough toward the goal that hope yet remains for further improvement.

At its highest extreme, the rationalised distortion by economic elites produces cultures of slavery

Slavery

and complete racial subordination, such as slavery in ancient Greece

Slavery in Ancient Greece

Slavery was common practice and an integral component of ancient Greece throughout its rich history, as it was in other societies of the time including ancient Israel and early Christian societies. It is estimated that in Athens, the majority of citizens owned at least one slave...

and Rome

Slavery in ancient Rome

The institution of slavery in ancient Rome played an important role in society and the Roman economy. Besides manual labor on farms and in mines, slaves performed many domestic services and a variety of other tasks, such as accounting...

; slavery in the United States (which was defeated in 1865); or slavery under Nazism

Forced labor in Germany during World War II

The use of forced labour in Nazi Germany and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in German-occupied...

(which was defeated in 1945). Concepts such as the Three-fifths compromise

Three-fifths compromise

The Three-Fifths Compromise was a compromise between Southern and Northern states reached during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in which three-fifths of the enumerated population of slaves would be counted for representation purposes regarding both the distribution of taxes and the...

and the Untermensch

Untermensch

Untermensch is a term that became infamous when the Nazi racial ideology used it to describe "inferior people", especially "the masses from the East," that is Jews, Gypsies, Poles along with other Slavic people like the Russians, Serbs, Belarussians and Ukrainians...

defined slaves as less than human.

In the middle of the spectrum, such distortion may produce systems of fairly rigid class stratification, usually rationalised with fairly strong cultural norms

Norm (sociology)

Social norms are the accepted behaviors within a society or group. This sociological and social psychological term has been defined as "the rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. These rules may be explicit or implicit...

of biologically inherited social inequality, such as feudalism

Feudalism

Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...

; traditional forms of aristocracy and monarchy; colonialism

Colonialism

Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...

; and caste systems (e.g., Apartheid, separate but equal

Separate but equal

Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified systems of segregation. Under this doctrine, services, facilities and public accommodations were allowed to be separated by race, on the condition that the quality of each group's public facilities was to...

/Jim Crow, Indian caste

Caste system in India

The Indian caste system is a system of social stratification and social restriction in India in which communities are defined by thousands of endogamous hereditary groups called Jātis....

). One interesting historical trend that is true of all of the systems above is that they began crumbling in the 20th century and have continued crumbling since. Today's forms of them are mostly greatly weakened compared to past generations' versions.

At the lowest extreme, such distortion produces subtler forms of racism

Racism

Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

and de facto
De facto
De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning fact." In law, it often means "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established." It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or...

(but not de jure
De jure
De jure is an expression that means "concerning law", as contrasted with de facto, which means "concerning fact".De jure = 'Legally', De facto = 'In fact'....

) inequality of opportunity

Equal opportunity

Equal opportunity, or equality of opportunity, is a controversial political concept; and an important informal decision-making standard without a precise definition involving fair choices within the public sphere...

. The more plausible the deniability

Plausible deniability

Plausible deniability is, at root, credible ability to deny a fact or allegation, or to deny previous knowledge of a fact. The term most often refers to the denial of blame in chains of command, where upper rungs quarantine the blame to the lower rungs, and the lower rungs are often inaccessible,...

, the easier the rationalisation and perpetuation. For example, as inequality of opportunity and racism grow smaller and subtler, their appearance may converge toward that of meritocracy, to the point that valid instances of each can be found extensively intermingled. At such areas of the spectrum, it becomes ever harder to justify efforts that use de jure methods to fight de facto imbalances (such as affirmative action

Affirmative action

Affirmative action refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group, usually as a means to counter the effects of a history of discrimination.-Origins:The term...

), because valid instances can be highlighted by all sides. On one side, the cry is ongoing oppression (ignored or denied) from above; on the other side, the cry is reverse discrimination

Reverse discrimination

Reverse discrimination is a controversial term referring to discrimination against members of a dominant or majority group, including the city or state, or in favor of members of a minority or historically disadvantaged group such as African Americans being slaves. Groups may be defined in terms of...

; ample valid evidence exists for both cases, and the problem of its anecdotal

Anecdotal evidence

The expression anecdotal evidence refers to evidence from anecdotes. Because of the small sample, there is a larger chance that it may be true but unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise unrepresentative of typical cases....

nature leaves no clear policy advantage to either side.

Recognizing the potential for skill

A willingness to recognise that manual labour can involve skill and intelligence can take a variety of forms, depending on how it handles multifaceted questions of dignity and (in)equality.

In its healthier forms, it recognises the dignity and intelligence of blue-collar worker
Blue-collar worker
A blue-collar worker is a member of the working class who performs manual labor. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled, manufacturing, mining, construction, mechanical, maintenance, technical installation and many other types of physical work...

s (that is, that those workers as a group have just as much potential for dignity and intelligence, despite the fact that any individual workers may or may not display such traits), and it recognises their civil (and civic) equality with white-collar worker
White-collar worker
The term white-collar worker refers to a person who performs professional, managerial, or administrative work, in contrast with a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor...

s. Yet it simultaneously leaves room in society for meritocracy, allowing both upward and downward social mobility
Social mobility
Social mobility refers to the movement of people in a population from one social class or economic level to another. It typically refers to vertical mobility -- movement of individuals or groups up from one socio-economic level to another, often by changing jobs or marrying; but can also refer to...

(as a sustainable meritocracy requires).
- An example of such systems is provided by well-run instances of professional sports
  Professional sports
  Professional sports, as opposed to amateur sports, are sports in which athletes receive payment for their performance. Professional athleticism has come to the fore through a combination of developments. Mass media and increased leisure have brought larger audiences, so that sports organizations...
  
  teams, because there is a perennial meritocratic turnover of players, coaches, and staff, both within the sport and as input and output through its boundaries, whereby all participants have dignity even though all of the required talents may not exist in each individual. (For example, the talents of the physical therapists, statisticians, elderly coaches, and young adult players are not equal, but they are complementary from a systems engineering
  Systems engineering
  Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering that focuses on how complex engineering projects should be designed and managed over the life cycle of the project. Issues such as logistics, the coordination of different teams, and automatic control of machinery become more...
  
  perspective.)
In its more pathological forms, it may only admit that there can be a science of manual labour, but not acknowledge or allow adequate social mobility (both upward and downward) between the blue-collar and white-collar classes. On the other hand, and equally pathologically, it may willfully deny the natural differences between individuals, allowing no hope for meritocratic justice, which is not only dispiriting to talented and hard-working people, but also highly injurious to macroeconomic performance.
- An example of the first pathology is that the earliest forms of applying science to the practical processes of industry and commerce fell victim to an incomplete understanding, as exemplified by Frederick Winslow Taylor's version of the "science of shoveling". Taylor correctly recognised that the physical (athletic) talents for shoveling (on one hand) and the mental talents for analyzing and synthesizing best shoveling techniques and workflow
  Workflow
  A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work...
  
  s (on the other) often would not coexist in the same person. Some people would have only the first; others, only the second. Therefore (speaking metaphorically), players usually should not be their own coaches. Unfortunately, Taylor stepped from that valid realisation to envisioning a system of business administration that might easily have failed to filter people into the right roles based on their individual talents (or lack thereof). Taylor's versions of scientific management
  Scientific management
  Scientific management, also called Taylorism, was a theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows. Its main objective was improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to management...
  
  , had they succeeded in persisting, may well have eventually left some smart people stranded in an underclass (crassly equated with draft animals, which was fashionable at the time) at the same time that it let some incompetent but silver spoon
  Silver spoon
  The English language expression silver spoon is synonymous with wealth, especially inherited wealth; someone born into a wealthy family is said to have "been born with a silver spoon in his mouth". As an adjective, "silver-spoon" describes someone who has a prosperous background or is of a...
  
  ed people remain in positions of middle
  Middle management
  Middle management is a layer of management in an organization whose primary job responsibility is to monitor activities of subordinates while reporting to upper management....
  
  or senior management
  Senior management
  Senior management, executive management, or management team is generally a team of individuals at the highest level of organizational management who have the day-to-day responsibilities of managing a company or corporation, they hold specific executive powers conferred onto them with and by...
  
  . Whether Taylor was capable of predicting and preventing that problem is unclear, but it is clear that not all of his imitators and admirers were thus capable.
- An example of the second pathology are 20th-century variants of communism, such as Leninism
  Leninism
  In Marxist philosophy, Leninism is the body of political theory for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party, and the achievement of a direct-democracy dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of socialism...
  
  and Stalinism
  Stalinism
  Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
  
  .
Somewhere between the extremes of health and pathology mentioned above are the realities in most developed economies today, where various themes and tendencies are in constant competition, and people disagree on which ones predominate and what actions should be taken (if any) to try to even the balance or reduce the pathologies.

Relationship to mechanisation and automation

Mechanisation and automation strive to reduce the amount of manual labour required for production. The motives for this reduction effort may be to remove drudgery from people's lives; to lower the unit cost

Unit cost

The unit cost of a product is the cost per standard unit supplied, which may be a single sample or a container of a given number. When purchasing more than a single unit, the total cost will increase with the number of units, but it is common for the unit cost to decrease as quantity is increased...

of production; or, as mechanisation evolves into automation, to bring greater flexibility (easier redesign, lower lead time

Lead time

A lead time is the latency between the initiation and execution of a process. For example, the lead time between the placement of an order and delivery of a new car from a manufacturer may be anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months...

) to production. Mechanisation occurred first in tasks that required either little dexterity or at least a narrow repertoire of dextrous movements, such as providing motive force or tractive force (locomotive

Locomotive

A locomotive is a railway vehicle that provides the motive power for a train. The word originates from the Latin loco – "from a place", ablative of locus, "place" + Medieval Latin motivus, "causing motion", and is a shortened form of the term locomotive engine, first used in the early 19th...

s; traction engine

Traction engine

A traction engine is a self-propelled steam engine used to move heavy loads on roads, plough ground or to provide power at a chosen location. The name derives from the Latin tractus, meaning 'drawn', since the prime function of any traction engine is to draw a load behind it...

s; marine steam engine

Marine steam engine

A marine steam engine is a reciprocating steam engine that is used to power a ship or boat. Steam turbines and diesel engines largely replaced reciprocating steam engines in marine applications during the 20th century, so this article describes the more common types of marine steam engine in use...

s; early car

Čar

Čar is a village in the municipality of Bujanovac, Serbia. According to the 2002 census, the town has a population of 296 people.-References:...

s, truck

Truck

A truck or lorry is a motor vehicle designed to transport cargo. Trucks vary greatly in size, power, and configuration, with the smallest being mechanically similar to an automobile...

s, and tractor

Tractor

A tractor is a vehicle specifically designed to deliver a high tractive effort at slow speeds, for the purposes of hauling a trailer or machinery used in agriculture or construction...

s); digging, loading, and unloading bulk materials (steam shovel

Steam shovel

A steam shovel is a large steam-powered excavating machine designed for lifting and moving material such as rock and soil. It is the earliest type of power shovel or excavator. They played a major role in public works in the 19th and early 20th century, being key to the construction of railroads...

s, early loaders

Loader (equipment)

A loader is a heavy equipment machine often used in construction, primarily used to load material into or onto another type of machinery .-Heavy equipment front loaders:A loader A loader is a heavy equipment machine often used in construction, primarily used to load material (such as asphalt,...

); or weaving uncomplicated cloth (early loom

Loom

A loom is a device used to weave cloth. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads...

s). For example, Henry Ford

Henry Ford

Henry Ford was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry...

described his efforts to mechanise agricultural tasks such as tillage

Tillage

Tillage is the agricultural preparation of the soil by mechanical agitation of various types, such as digging, stirring, and overturning. Examples of human-powered tilling methods using hand tools include shovelling, picking, mattock work, hoeing, and raking...

as relieving drudgery by transferring physical burdens from human and animal bodies to iron and steel machinery. Automation

Automation

helps to bring mechanisation to more complicated tasks that require finer dexterity, decision making based on visual input, and a wider variety of intelligent movements. Thus even tasks that once could not be successfully mechanised, such as shelf stocking or many kinds of fruit and vegetable picking, tend to undergo process redesign (either formal

Business process reengineering

Business process re-engineering is the analysis and design of workflows and processes within an organization.According to Davenport a business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome....

or informal) leading to ever smaller amounts of manual labour.

Relationship to offshoring, worker migration, penal labour, and military service

Many of the methods by which socioeconomically advantaged people have maintained a supply of cheap labour over the centuries are now either defunct or greatly curtailed. As discussed and linked earlier, these include peasantry, serfdom, slavery, indentured servitude, wage slavery, or domestic servitude. But motives to get labour cheaply still remain (and always will). Today, although businesses can no longer get away with using (for example) de jure slavery, economic competition

Competition (economics)

Competition in economics is a term that encompasses the notion of individuals and firms striving for a greater share of a market to sell or buy goods and services...

ensures that they will always try to buy labour at the lowest possible cost or to obviate it entirely (through mechanisation and automation). Various present-day methods of ensuring lowest cost exist, as detailed below.

The first and most basic method is the domestic labour market

Labour economics

Labor economics seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the market for labor. Labor markets function through the interaction of workers and employers...

within one country (or region thereof), in which workers compete with each other for jobs. Within this market, further market segmentation is possible. Businesses try to avoid overtime

Overtime

Overtime is the amount of time someone works beyond normal working hours. Normal hours may be determined in several ways:*by custom ,*by practices of a given trade or profession,*by legislation,...

(when practical). They often try to avoid employing full-time employees (FTEs) in favor of part-time employees (PTEs) or contingent work

Contingent work

Contingent work, also sometimes known as casual work, is a neologism which describes a type of employment relationship between an employer and employee...

ers (for example, temporary work

Temporary work

Temporary work or temporary employment refers to a situation where the employee is expected to leave the employer within a certain period of time. Temporary employees are sometimes called "contractual", "seasonal", "interim", "casual staff", "freelance", or "part-time"; or the word may be shortened...

ers, freelancer

Freelancer

A freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is somebody who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long term. These workers are often represented by a company or an agency that resells their labor and that of others to its clients with or without project management and...

s, cottage workers

Putting-Out system

The putting-out system was a means of subcontracting work. It was also known as the workshop system. In putting-out, work was contracted by a central agent to subcontractors who completed the work in their own facilities, usually their own homes....

, contractors

Independent contractor

An independent contractor is a natural person, business, or corporation that provides goods or services to another entity under terms specified in a contract or within a verbal agreement. Unlike an employee, an independent contractor does not work regularly for an employer but works as and when...

(who may have subcontractor

Subcontractor

A subcontractor is an individual or in many cases a business that signs a contract to perform part or all of the obligations of another's contract....

s), or day labourers

Day labor

Day labor is work done where the worker is hired and paid one day at a time, with no promise that more work will be available in the future. It is a form of contingent work.-Types:Day laborers find work through three common routes....

), all of which usually entail less obligation for employee benefit

Employee benefit

Employee benefits and benefits in kind are various non-wage compensations provided to employees in addition to their normal wages or salaries...

s (compensation beyond the wages themselves). Agencies tasked with enforcing labour law

Labour law

Labour law is the body of laws, administrative rulings, and precedents which address the legal rights of, and restrictions on, working people and their organizations. As such, it mediates many aspects of the relationship between trade unions, employers and employees...

are perennially on guard, as employers find clever ways to make people function like FTEs but carry nominal labels as contractors, freelancers, or PTEs (e.g., dishonest worker classification, unpaid overtime). Other avenues of discount labour are the institutions of apprenticeship

Apprenticeship

Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a skill. Apprentices or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships...

and cooperative education

Cooperative education

Cooperative education is a structured method of combining classroom-based education with practical work experience. A cooperative education experience, commonly known as a "co-op", provides academic credit for structured job experience...

(including work-study programs), and (relatedly) the informal tradition of the "broke college student who works for peanuts". Here, the low wages are often credibly justified by the inexperience and incomplete training of the worker; but it is also true that such forms of employment always have at least some potential to be "milked dry" by those with the upper hand. For example, there has been a long history of 3rd- through 7th-year apprentices performing valuable, competent work at sub-journeyman

Journeyman

A journeyman is someone who completed an apprenticeship and was fully educated in a trade or craft, but not yet a master. To become a master, a journeyman had to submit a master work piece to a guild for evaluation and be admitted to the guild as a master....

rates.

The domestic labour market may also extend beyond "normal" workers to various kinds of employing prisoners (e.g., penal labour

Penal labour

, work release

Work release

In prison systems, work release programs allow a prisoner who is sufficiently trusted or can be sufficiently monitored to leave confinement to continue working at his or her current place of employment, returning to prison when his/her shift is complete...

). Even military employment, most especially by conscription

Conscription

Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names...

or other mandatory national service

National service

National service is a common name for mandatory government service programmes . The term became common British usage during and for some years following the Second World War. Many young people spent one or more years in such programmes...

, is a means of employing labour at lowest cost (compared to costlier alternatives such as all-volunteer militaries

Volunteer military

A volunteer military or all-volunteer military is one which derives its manpower from volunteers rather than conscription or mandatory service. A country may offer attractive pay and benefits through military recruitment to attract volunteers...

).

The next step beyond domestic labour markets (within countries) is the global labour market (between countries), in which all workers on Earth compete with each other, albeit via imperfect competition

Imperfect competition

In economic theory, imperfect competition is the competitive situation in any market where the conditions necessary for perfect competition are not satisfied...

. Differences between regions and countries in standard of living

Standard of living

Standard of living is generally measured by standards such as real income per person and poverty rate. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, income growth inequality and educational standards are also used. Examples are access to certain goods , or measures of health such as...

and (relatedly) prevailing wage rates provide a perennial incentive for businesses to send manual tasks to remote workers (via offshoring

Offshoring

) or to bring remote workers to the manual tasks (via immigration of foreign worker

Foreign worker

s, whether illegal [undocumented workers] or legal [guest-worker programs codified with work permit

Work permit

Work permit is a generic term for a legal authorization which allows a person to take employment.It is most often used in reference to instances where a person is given permission to work in a country where one does not hold citizenship, but is also used in reference to minors, who in some...

s). The nature of the work determines its relative degree of geographical transferability; for example, manual assembly work in factories can usually be offshored, whereas tillage

Tillage

and harvest

Harvest

Harvest is the process of gathering mature crops from the fields. Reaping is the cutting of grain or pulse for harvest, typically using a scythe, sickle, or reaper...

ing are anchored to the location of the crop fields. One characteristic of offshoring and worker migration that is especially useful to businesses is that they can provide employers with (fuzzy-boundaried) subpopulations of inexpensive workers without resorting to biological-inheritance-based rationalisations (such as racial slavery, feudalism and aristocracy, or caste-based division of labour

Division of labour

Division of labour is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and likeroles. Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation...

). Modern businesses in the global economy are quick to point out that they respect the humanity of their offshore or immigrant workers every bit as much as that of their developed-economy-native workers (which may not be that much, in reality, but is equal, and is pretended to be substantial).

Penal labour

Penal labour

is an intersection of the low skill/low social class idea (serfs, slaves, wage slaves) and the class-neutral labour-cost reduction idea (offshoring, foreign workers, contingent workers). Like offshoring and guest worker programs, penal labour is an opportunity for businesses to get cheap manual labour without denying the humanity of the workers—and in some cases even seeming civically responsible ("providing second chances to live right and work honestly"). Thus socioeconomic systems, regardless of their capitalist

Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...

, socialist

Socialism

Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

, or syncretised

Mixed economy

Mixed economy is an economic system in which both the state and private sector direct the economy, reflecting characteristics of both market economies and planned economies. Most mixed economies can be described as market economies with strong regulatory oversight, in addition to having a variety...

ideological bases, need to remain vigilant that they resist any tendency toward the overimprisonment of workers, because it could align with the financial interests of businesses, government, or both, stoking the same human mechanisms of specious rationalisation that justified slavery or wage slavery.

Military enlistment (whether conscription, other mandatory service, or volunteer service) shares some similarities with penal labour when viewed from this perspective, in that it may synergistically provide (1) discount labour for a government or its contractors at the same time that it also provides (2) opportunities to the workers or soldiers themselves (for example, more job security

Job security

Job security is the probability that an individual will keep his or her job; a job with a high level of job security is such that a person with the job would have a small chance of becoming unemployed.-Factors affecting job security:...

, better-quality health insurance

Health insurance

Health insurance is insurance against the risk of incurring medical expenses among individuals. By estimating the overall risk of health care expenses among a targeted group, an insurer can develop a routine finance structure, such as a monthly premium or payroll tax, to ensure that money is...

, better-quality retirement

Retirement

Retirement is the point where a person stops employment completely. A person may also semi-retire by reducing work hours.Many people choose to retire when they are eligible for private or public pension benefits, although some are forced to retire when physical conditions don't allow the person to...

-savings plans, and/or more educational opportunities [most especially technical training, but sometimes also broader university

University

A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...

education as well]). These many benefits cannot accurately be pigeon-holed as all good or all bad. They are inevitably double-edged blades, and must be dynamically managed and monitored to keep them from leaving the healthy range of the spectrum and moving into pathological ranges. For that to succeed, there must also exist some decent level of employment opportunity, compensation, and psychological security in the private sector

Private sector

In economics, the private sector is that part of the economy, sometimes referred to as the citizen sector, which is run by private individuals or groups, usually as a means of enterprise for profit, and is not controlled by the state...

, especially non–defense community businesses.

Paramilitary

Paramilitary

A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....

, police

Police

The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...

, and corrections

Corrections

In criminal justice, particularly in North America, correction, corrections, and correctional, are umbrella terms describing a variety of functions typically carried out by government agencies and involving the punishment, treatment, and supervision of persons who have been convicted of crimes....

(prison guard) service are other segments of employment that reflect the traits of military service in this respect.

External links

Musculoskeletal Disorders
LaborFair Resources (Fair Labor Practices)

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Relationship to low skill and low social class

Recognizing the potential for skill

Relationship to mechanisation and automation

Relationship to offshoring, worker migration, penal labour, and military service

See also

External links