standpoint of the
outsider presents itself as the most tiresome possible. As soon as I
found it, I had a full frank talk with the man or woman who performed
it and earnestly tried to get self-observational comment. My chief aim
was to bring out how far the mere repetition, especially when it is
continued through years, is felt as a source of discomfort. I may
again point to a few chance illustrations. In an electrical factory
with many thousands of employees I gained the impression that the
prize for monotonous work belonged to a woman who packs incandescent
lamps in tissue paper. She wraps them from morning until night, from
the first day of the year to the last, and has been doing that for
the last 12 years. She performs this packing process at an average
rate of 13,000 lamps a day. The woman has reached about 50,000,000
times for the next lamp with one hand and with the other to the little
pile of tissue sheets and then performed the packing. Each lamp
demands about 20 finger movements. As long as I watched her, she was
able to pack 25 lamps in 42 seconds, and only a few times did she need
as many as 44 seconds. Every 25 lamps filled a box, and the closing of
the box required a short time for itself. She evidently took pleasure
in expressing herself fully about her occupation. She assured me that
she found the work really interesting, and that she constantly felt an
inner tension, thinking how many boxes she would be able to fill
before the next pause. Above all, she told me that there is continuous
variation. Sometimes she grasps the lamp or paper in a different way,
sometimes the packing itself does not run smoothly, sometimes she
feels fresher, sometimes less in the mood for the work, and there is
always something to observe and something to think about.

This was the trend which I usually found. In some large machine works
I sought for a long time before I found the type of labor which seemed
to me the most monotonous. I finally settled on a man who was feeding
an automatic machine which was cutting holes in metal strips and who
simply had to push the strips slowly forward; only when the strip did
not reach exactly the right place, he could stop the automatic machine
by a lever. He made about 34,000 uniform movements daily and had been
doing that for the past 14 years. But he gave me the same account,
that the work was interesting and stimulating, while he himself made
the impression of an intelligent workingman