‘I Would Prefer Not To’: The Origins of the White Collar Worker

http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/24/i-would-prefer-not-to-the-origins-of-the-white-collar-worker/

by pepys • 11 years ago

103 36 11 years ago

blog.longreads.com

Animats• 11 years ago

That's a delightful read, the story of the rise of the "clerk", and the growth of office work.

A useful question today: when do we hit "peak office"? At some point, the demand for office workers and office space should max out. More of that work is being done by computers, of course. In particular, new companies tend to have much smaller office staffs than older ones.

We passed "peak paper" a few years ago, much to the annoyance of the paper industry. (Packaging usage is up, but paper documents are way down.) Why hasn't "peak office" been reached yet?

mesozoic• 11 years ago

Hopefully with the rise of remote work and software to support it "peak office" will be soon.

nl4• 11 years ago

That's missing the point. Remote work means you are always "in the office".

Increased flexibility in working arrangements is good, but it doesn't change the nature of the work that is done.

ams6110• 11 years ago

It took decades longer than most technologists thought for the "paperless office" to become anything close to a reality. In fact for a long while it seemed like technology was only making it possible to produce and manage more paper, not less.

I would guess that office work will grow and be around for quite a good while yet. Nothing really substitutes for having a team of people face-to-face together in one place.

mtbcoder• 11 years ago

Working face-to-face is wonderful, however, the rigid need to have "bodies in chairs" 8+ hours a day seems quite antiquated. It's simply a gross inefficiency when you consider that realistically an office worker is able to provide, at maximum, 4 to 6 hours worth of output a day.

saalweachter• 11 years ago

Just out of curiosity, what do you imagine happening in the "post-peak-office" world?

The "post-peak-paper" world was well known and forecast for decades before it actually happened: people would replace paper documents with electronic documents.

The post-peak-office question is trickier. There's a general feeling that "computers" will replace most jobs, eventually. But then what? Do only some people work, in either a Star Trek utopia or a "Beggars in Spain" dystopia? Do people do something else, that doesn't involve offices?

Right now, while you might argue that automation and productivity gains reduce the need for office work to "get things done", the savings are ultimately just spent on more office work: advertising and the financial sector.

brianberns• 11 years ago

I think you're describing a "post-peak-employment" world, not just a "post-peak-office" world. Automation is reducing the need for human labor, and at some point there will simply not be enough jobs to go around. I believe governments will then have to provide a basic income to everyone, whether they have a job or not. People who want more money than that will have to find a way to earn it.

pfalke• 11 years ago

The low-wage service sector (household services, personal care, ...) may take up those people how previously would have done low-skill office work.

However, that may be taken over by robots at some point. Then, I don't know.

grey-area• 11 years ago

If everyone and every object in the world is connected to the network continuously with high bandwidth, why would they need to visit a building in the middle of a city in order to work with others?

That's a post-office world, and one which will come before our concept of work as the necessary foundation of an existence is eliminated (though on a long enough time frame, that's probably coming too).

tjradcliffe• 11 years ago

Why hasn't "peak office" been reached yet?

Because most offices are staffed by people working for arrogant old people who can't imagine getting through life without staff, because they themselves are not actually capable of doing anything. [Disclaimer: I am both arrogant and an old person, but do not fulfill the requirements for "arrogant old person" because I actually know how to do stuff.]

This is a generational shift. I'm old enough to remember when a certain class of older executive would become enraged when they saw a scientist or engineer in their business unit typing at a keyboard. In their world, secretaries typed up the long-hand notes that scientists and engineers wrote. It wasn't so long ago.

Likewise, the notion that an executive today might book their own travel, or pay their own bills (because really, it's all a couple of mouse-clicks and hardly a significant distraction from thinking the Deep Thoughts[tm] that execs are paid to think) is still anathema to many executives older than their late 40's.

As they retire we will hit "peak office", but not before. My bet is somewhere in the 2025-2030 range.

VLM3• 11 years ago

There is analogy with open office. Only non-management unthinking drones sit in the open, all mgmt and all "thought workers" have offices with doors because we pay them to concentrate, you can't concentrate in a noisy environment, and if you don't have a door you can close you aren't suppose to be thinking, you're supposed to be laboring (even if the labor is paper shuffling or talking on a phone). Also a significant sign of social status, the idea that a member of management wouldn't have an office with a door is unthinkable. To be honest I think the only thing that has changed with the open office fad, is the unthinking drones are very aspirational and refuse to think of themselves the way management thinks of them.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

While I agree more work is done by computers there is quite a bit which involves making judgment calls that computers have not been coded to make. There is also a lot of busy work, unnecessary work, and the like, done in offices daily.

Still I find that in many areas the amount of office work needing to be done is related to the amount of regulation the industry is burdened with. I know what because of SOX deal with two sets of auditors quarterly whose staff size alone is dozens of people. There is still a great deal of paper work that is required to be in the files of overlapping government agencies in different forms and even at specific times of the year. All that takes people. People to create, people to review, people to certify, people to validate the certification, and people to validate a process that creates the documents is all observed. Then we can add in all the outside agencies which act on or in parallel.

So, pare down regulation and you will pare down office

ThrustVectoring2• 11 years ago

One does not simply pare down regulation. There's a reason it grew in the first place - even if it's nothing more than bureaucrats giving themselves a reason to get a paycheck. You have to strike at the root cause of the regulation, otherwise you'll get pushback or it'll come back if you don't constantly expend effort on it.

malka• 11 years ago

Because it is deeply ingrained in our society that people MUST work.

nl4• 11 years ago

in 1853, when the story was written, the term “office”—and the sort of labor that was performed there—had nowhere near the universal significance it has now.

This is a nice piece of writing. It's a pity that it's technically wrong. While it's true "clerks" have become less significant, "office" has pretty much always been at a fairly high level of use[1]. There's a quote that seems accurate here[2].

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=clerk%2Coffice...

[2] When Geldermans told me that Anquetil always moved his water bottle to his back pocket during climbs, so his bike would be lighter, I began paying attention. I noticed that in all the old pictures of Anquetil climbing, his bidon is always in its holder. That’s straining at gnats. Geldermans’ story strikes to the soul of the rider, and is therefore true. Those pictures are inaccurate.; "The Rider" - Tim Krabbé.

_delirium• 11 years ago

As usual it's tricky to conclude things from Google Books ngrams due to polysemy. If you look at the actual results for "office" in e.g. 1800-1820, the majority of them are for other words that happen to be spelled identically, not for "office" in the sense of "I work in office 802b". From a rough spot-check I'd guess only about 10% of the uses refer to offices in the sense of a place with a desk in which clerical work is done (or related senses, like "office building").

Examples of other, more common uses:

    Sermons on the Person and Office of the Redeemer
    Lectures on the Nature and End of the Sacred Office
    If a coroner be remiss in coming to do his office...
    The Office of Holy Week in Latin and English
    And, though it be the office of Bishops and Presbyters to instruct...
    ...shall not be obliged to serve the office of sheriff.

nl4• 11 years ago

It's a fair point.

It does seem interesting that the level of usage stays so similar even if the actual way the word is used changes, though.

nl4• 11 years ago

I love this:

In a piece for the New-York Enquirer in 1848, he wrote, “It is particularly recommended to those of sedentary habits, to undergo the training which is to be found [on Crosby near Bleecker].” As if responding to the satire of people like Walt Whitman, Tailer argued that after regular exercise “narrow and contracted chests are soon turned into broad and expansive ones, and the puny limbs of him who is not accustomed to exercise are soon changed into well developed and finely formed ones, and he imperceptibly finds himself re-established in health and strength.”

CrossFit, 1850 style.

markvdb• 11 years ago

Read "The overcoat", by Nikolai Gogol. Synopsis at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat .

leonroy• 11 years ago

Can't beat Russian literature for amusingly depressing tales of the proletariat. The summary was enough for me!

oracle2025• 11 years ago

I enjoyed reading that article while secretly substituting "tech worker" for "clerk" in my mind.

‘I Would Prefer Not To’: The Origins of the White Collar Worker

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