Reviewed by Arthur B. Shostak, Ph.D
If, like me, you have students bewildered by the gains, toll, and prospects of modern office technology, this engaging, insightful, and constructive volume merits candidacy for a course text (I am adopting it for my Industrial Sociology courses).
Joan Greenbaum processes nearly a half-century of office work turmoil, a wide swath of history she makes clear and revealing. Her thesis is that employers have zealously (if also clumsily) pursued ever-greater control over their employees and ever-greater profits, commonly without conscience or foresight.
She is especially effective at refuting the exonerating mis-impression that somehow office technology has advanced on its own, and we are fated merely to grin and bear it. Instead, she puts responsibility where it belongs - in the Executive Suite and Board Room (to which I would add, the offices of the very few labor leaders with a toehold in office work unionism who meekly went along).
Readers inclined to see through a glass darkly will find much to support a dire assessment of the (employer-led) evolution of modern office work. Greenbaum spares no one in relating its cost to the self-esteem, the craft, and the earnings of office workers. While no tears are shed over the passage of the faceless typist pool, widespread sexual harassment, and the servility that has long characterized office work, the record overall warrants far more sighs than smiles.
As if in response, Greenbaum pays useful attention to the reform options we have to protect against a workplace future "not designed for or by us." Attention, for example, is briefly paid to on-going union reform efforts here and abroad to educate office workers about their rights. Greenbaum, however, believes some American adaptation of European worker councils and non-workplace-based unions may actually be a sounder respon-se than conventional trade unionism - this a provocative notion well-worth open-minded consideration by progressive unionists.
Sobering and vexing, this book underlines our need to collectively question the drift and consequences of modern office work. Greenbaum teaches that only such action can assure our ability to influence this central component of 21st century existence.
Windows on the Workplace: Computers, Jobs, and the Organization of Office Work in the Late Twentieth Century. By Joan Greenbaum. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995. 149pp. $22, cloth; $12, paper.
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