computers divide white collar labor

In class we talked about the division of labor in the white collar workplace and relates to the division of blue collar labor in some ways. In the 70’s there was a trend of isolating people, tasks and jobs, and separating the head of information work from the hands of data processing. More and more tasks, particularly those in clerical areas and in the back offices, were being treated like manual work. Once computers became a common asset in the office they played a large role in the division of labor. For insurance companies computers were a rational step in integrating the handling of policies, cutting down paperwork, and speeding up processing. The company broke down all work tasks down into what they called “work units” and estimated that by the end of the phase-in-period, the decrease in the number of work units would have cut costs in half. The standardization and division of labor that were the mainstays of corporate organization also provided the principles on which the new computer programs were designed. I found this to be interesting because it appears that computers played a part in the division of labor, but it also seems that the division of labor played somewhat of a role in the development of computers. These computer applications continued down a path that supported the management objective of dividing labor and lowering costs. There were even programs developed to separate those who keypunched data from those who entered it on forms, and to separate customer relations specialists from clerical workers doing the record keeping.