High ceilings and small
windows with bars way up at the top of gray walls, stale air, ear-piercing din:
a vast warehouse resembling a prison where you find yourself at nineteen. Short and slim, you look more like twelve. Everything about the situation frightens you. You’ve never been inside a factory before in your
life. Only a few months before you were attending
the university, studying philosophy and literature. You were going to be a journalist. You were going to write stories about the
downtrodden, the exploited, exposing the abuses of power, and calling for
justice and equality. Suddenly you’re a
factory worker. Because you’re young and
speak English, you get a job before your parents do. You’re a wiring technician at Western
Electric's Clearing Plant in the Southwest Side of Chicago. What are you doing here? you ask yourself. You of the poetry books and collages. You of
the political demonstrations. You of the
French movies followed by long discussions in cafes. This is
not what you were promised before leaving Buenos Aires.
The training session on
the first day is short: the grumpy supervisor shows you a “gun” and points to
an open spot on a long counter where more than ten young women are sitting
already, working on wooden boards – panels that will eventually become the
insides of telephones.
“Insert this wire into
the barrel. See? Like this,” the supervisor’s hand - big and
chubby, holds the tool easily. She tells
you to grip it just so and shoot it around a metal screw on the panel. The wire coils so rapidly you’re startled. The supervisor snickers.
“Now you do it,” she
hands you the gun. Your hand – small and
weak – struggles to keep it firmly enough to discharge around the right screw
without hurting yourself or anyone else.
You hesitate. “C’mon on. You can do it,” she’s growing
impatient. You follow her
instructions.
“Like this?” you ask after trying the first one, your
hand shaking.
“Yes,”
the supervisor replies in her husky voice, stares at you with a puzzled look,
then moves on to the next new worker. But,
before leaving, she reminds you of the daily quota of boards: so many panels an
hour have to be finished if you want to keep the job.
You look to your right,
to your left. Women, mostly young, their
heads bent over their small portion of the long counter where they wire coils
silently, swiftly, focused on quality, but mostly, on quantity. After a few seconds, you too bow your head to
the work in front of you: wires, guns, screws, panels, the chair hard, the
sounds disquieting. Will you be able to
do this eight hours a day, five days a week? You struggle to insert the wire correctly,
shoot the gun accurately, prove yourself a worthy wiring technician.
Western Electric was
established as the Hawthorne Works, in Cicero, Illinois, in 1905 by founder
Enos Barton. A large factory complex, it
had 45,000 employees at the height of its operations. Besides telephone
equipment, the factory produced a wide variety of consumer products, including
refrigerators and electric fans. The rural Hawthorne plant became a virtually
self-sufficient city, with a power plant, hospital, fire brigade, laundry,
greenhouse, a brass band, and an annual beauty pageant. It even boasted a staff
of trained nurses who made house calls. Thousands
of immigrant workers passed through its walls year after year, laboring long
hours to provide their families a decent life.
A subsidiary facility
of Western Electric was opened later in the Clearing Industrial Park, on West
65th Street - within walking distance from your uncle’s house. That’s where you’ve landed in the fall of
1970, completely against your better judgment.
But, of the three of you, you’re the one who finds a job first. Somebody has to support the family. To your parents’ dismay, signs proclaiming NO
HELP NEEDED litter the fronts of factories, warehouses, and shops. Before arriving in Chicago you were promised
a virtual smorgasbord of jobs.
The Hawthorne Works
became famous in the early part of the 20th century as a leader in the
“scientific management” of employees and the production process. Researchers at the plant pioneered new
technologies - the high-vacuum tube, the condenser microphone, and radio
systems for airplanes. But after 1970, Western Electric started to slip, when
the FCC ruled that customers could connect their own equipment to the telephone
network. These changes opened the door
for independent manufacturers of telephone equipment and signaled the beginning
of the end for Western Electric.
And that’s when you go
to work there.
In the lunchroom young
black girls grill you with questions:
“Where are you from?”
“Are you married?”
“Do you have children?”
“How can I have
children if I’m not married?” you reply annoyed.
They stare at you
perplexed, puzzled by your wide-eyed confusion.
The dislocation you feel is as immense as the warehouse you find yourself
in, a displacement so vast you’re not able to be who you are – or rather who you
were before arriving to these shores.
Every day you beg your parents to let you go back home. You write sad, frantic letters to all the
friends you’ve left behind who reply with words of hope and patience. Could you have stayed? Did you have that choice?
From 1924 until 1933,
the Hawthorne plant was the site of a series of experiments conducted under the
auspices of the National Research Council. The initial studies involved the
impact of changes in lighting levels on the productivity of several groups of
workers. The most involved of the experiments, the relay assembly test room, involved
isolating six women, then measuring their production, health, and social
interactions in response to changes in working conditions, such as the number
and duration of rest periods, length of the work day, and the amount of food
they ate.
Every morning, after
breakfast, your aunt, who works there too, and you walk the ten blocks to the
Clearing Industrial Plant. You cross the railroad tracks on 59th Street and keep
south. During your morning treks she
likes to offer advice like warning you against Puerto Ricans who work at the
plant.
“I’m not afraid of them,”
you say.
“That’s because you
speak their language,” she replies and also warns you against black people.
Stunned at her racist beliefs, you offer no
counterargument. You know the history of
this country but you never thought your own family would be party to such
bigotry. Not a year ago you were
marching in support of the Civil Rights Movement, appalled at the water hoses,
dogs, and batons the police used to control the demonstrators.
At the entrance to the
factory, you each go your own way. You
have no idea what she does, but you know what you’re doing is tedious; the
surroundings dull yet raucous. Disconnected
from your world, your adolescence interrupted, uprooted from familiar soil, you’re
not able to grow and mature normally.
Immigration forces you to start again, to be a child in some way. At least, that’s what you feel at this time:
a child who has to work to support her family, dependent on others to make
sense of this new world you’ve been thrown in,
The research of what
came to be known as “The Hawthorne Effect” started out by examining the
physical and environmental influences of the workplace, such as, brightness of
lights and humidity; and later, moved into the psychological aspects, such as,
breaks, group pressure, working hours, and managerial leadership. The study was only expected to last one year,
but because the researchers were set back each time they tried to relate the
manipulated physical conditions to the worker's productivity, the project
extended out to five years.
“You have to work
faster,” the supervisor cautions you. It’s been a week already but you’re
nowhere close to achieving the quota expected of you.
“I’m trying. It’s not easy,” you reply in your
small, mortified voice, your accent identifying you as a foreigner. What else can you say? That you hate the factory, the job, the
country your parents have brought you to for some reason you still don’t quite understand?
“If you stopped looking
around and concentrated on your job, you’d work faster,” she retorts, her impatient voice sharp and loud. She’s a stout woman, always dressed in dark
colors – blue, brown, gray – hair upswept and no jewelry of any kind.
The experimenters who
collected and analyzed the data determined, at first, that there appeared to be
a correlation between the intensity of the lights and the productivity, which increased
as each improvement was introduced, until the crucial twelfth test. In this test, researchers removed all the
special conditions, yet output increased again. Realizing that the light levels and other
enhancements may not have had any impact on the hourly output, the
experimenters conducted interviews with the participants to determine the likely
cause of the increases. The interviews determined that the increases in
production were not a result of changes to light intensity; instead, the
workers worked harder because they noticed that they were being watched
closely. Ultimately, because of the constant supervision and the process of being
monitored actively, productivity increased.
After two weeks, payday
arrives. It’s Friday afternoon when your aunt and you leave the factory, walk
home. In one pocket you carry your first
paycheck; in the other, a letter to your friend Elena. On your way you spot a mailbox on the corner,
take out the envelope from your right pocket and drop it in the blue box.
You arrive home to
great anticipation, can’t wait to show everyone your first paycheck. Your parents, aunts, and uncles are gathered
in the living room. Even your two young
cousins are thrilled.
You pull out an
envelope from your left pocket and hold it up.
“Oh my God! It’s the
letter.”
“What happened?” your mother asks confused. “Is that
your paycheck? It doesn’t look like a paycheck.”
You immediately realize
that your check is in the mailbox in the corner. When you’re finally able to communicate the
calamity to the family, general chaos ensues.
“Go to the mailbox and
wait for the mailman to pick up the mail,”
your father recommends.
“No, no,” exclaims your
aunt Sophie, “go to the post office and wait for the mail to be brought back
from the box. Then you can explain to the clerk what happened.”
“We’ll go to the office
Monday and ask them for another check,” your aunt Maria suggests.
Your mother shakes her
head, dumbfounded, unable to speak.
Finally, she says, “how could you? What’s the matter with you?”
After much discussion, Sophie’s
advice seems the best idea. You remain
speechless.
Maria and you walk to
the post office where you try to explain your predicament to the suspicious
clerk. Maria adds her comments, confirming you’re telling the truth. At first the
postal worker looks at both of you unconvinced but after a few minutes of
explanation and pleading, she realizes you’re telling the truth and starts to laugh. You don’t find it funny at all but you force yourself
to grin, showing goodwill and hoping for a quick resolution.
“You have to wait for
the mailman to bring the bag. He comes around 4:30.”
“That’s ok,” you nod and
look at your aunt.
When the mailman returns
with the mailbag your heart starts to pound.
What if it isn’t in the bag? What
if someone took it? What if it fell out
of your pocket in the street? Maria and
the clerk rummage inside.
You hold your breath. Why is it taking so long?
Your heart pounds. After five interminable minutes the clerk pulls
out an envelope. “I think this is it,”
she says. You grab it and read your
name through the window. A very deep sigh
of relief escapes from your mouth. “Thank
you, thank you,” you touch the clerk’s arm.
On the way back home
you wonder if that’s an omen of things to come in this new life in this new
country.
The conclusions about
worker productivity were in sharp contrast to the common perceptions of that
time. Financial reward was found to be much less conducive to worker output
than expected. Instead, greater yield resulted when management made workers
feel valued and aware that their concerns were taken seriously. The phrase "Hawthorne Effect" has
come to mean any unexpected outcome from non-experimental variables in social
or behavioral sciences.
Before the end of the
month you’re fired for lack of productivity and inability to focus on the work.
Perhaps too much attention doesn’t
always lead to workers feeling valued and producing more. It will be a while before you find another job
– this time as a typist for Montgomery Ward’s catalog division. Better suited to this kind of work, you’ll
make friends, start taking art classes on Saturdays, go back to writing poems
and stories, and, in this way, begin the process of finding yourself again, the
one you left in Buenos Aires. It will
take you a long time to realize the unpredicted consequences – your “Hawthorne
Effect” – of leaving home, of starting again, of adapting to a whole new
world. As a matter of fact, you think you’re
still working on that.
