Measurement of Responsibility

A study of work, payment, and individual capacity

Elliott Jaques

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415264433
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136431241
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1956 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

PART I

The Problem

CHAPTER I

The Recurrence of Payment Disputes

I

THE problem with which we are here concerned is how to determine the appropriate payment and status for individuals for the work they do. By appropriate is meant a payment and status accorded in such a manner that each one has a sense of fair and just return for his work. It also means a pattern of payment that is economically sound.

Our problem is a complex one. It is framed by the wider question of how the general wage and salary structure of industry is arrived at. It requires a definition of work. It includes the problem of how to assess the ability of people so as to ensure that they have jobs appropriate to that ability. And it calls for principles that can provide for stability in the arrangements made, while at the same time making due allowance for the changes that occur in people and the changes occuring in the work that has to be done.

The present book is an interim report, deriving from work on the above problem carried out in just one industrial organization.¹ In the course of this work, some methods have been developed and ideas elaborated that suggest lines along which these problems may be more objectively appraised. These developments comprise: a means to explore and to analyse manual and non-manual work objectively; a method that may give an objective measure of the level of work or responsibility; and some propositions about the possible existence of explicit and definable salary and wage differentials emerging from the use of the methods to be described. The conclusions to be drawn will be limited to industry.

II

The problem of status and payment is made more complex because it evokes powerful emotions—emotions about economic security and about the value attributed to one’s own work as compared with that of others. The big issue of differentials is at stake—differentials in payment and in status, differentials between individuals and between groups. What commonly occurs is that a person or a body of people complains of losing ground relative to some other persons or bodies. They may feel this because they consider they are getting left behind by other persons or groups who are bettering their position. They may consider that somebody below them is catching up. Or they may consider that they have simply been underpaid or under-recognized for too long. Solutions to these problems are notoriously unstable. An adjustment that satisfies one body leads to the same problem arising for others, who then consider that their position has worsened. The consequent situation, with its indecisiveness and fluidity, is ordinarily held to be intractable as far as objective analysis is concerned. It is treated as though it is resolvable, in the final analysis, only within the framework of group pressures. The strongest forces are supposed to get the best of the matter.

One of the underlying difficulties in these arguments—and, it is suggested, a very important difficulty—is that, although there is a scale in terms of money for expressing amount of payment, there is no equivalent measure for individual capacity or for level of work.¹ In the absence of a measuring yardstick, argument and negotiation take place on the basis of assumptions and opinions about capacity and level of work. Thus, for example, if it is argued that one body of people has been losing ground to another with respect to payment, it is usually assumed that the level of work carried out by the two bodies has remained unchanged. It is also frequently assumed that the bodies continue to be made up of the same kinds of person as previously. These assumptions are at the core of the matter. Only to the extent that they are true does the argument hold that the gap between two bodies is narrowing or widening. But such assumptions leave a great deal of room for difference of opinion. Without some yardstick of comparison, the differences remain matters of emotional debate—and make for perverseness and rigidity in dispute. Even though the participants—labour and management alike—may earnestly try to find a way out of the deadlock, they nevertheless find themselves unable to do so. One of the consequences is the paralysing kind of industrial stress that may flare up over differentials.

It is of special importance to have a yardstick for measuring level of work, because of the widespread endorsement of the principle that payment should be directly related to the level of work done. This principle is commonly stated in the slogan ‘the rate for the job’. But the large question that remains is how to measure the job. Everyone knows that it is possible, in a rough and ready way, to compare jobs—to recognize that this one is a more important or a bigger job than that one, or that this category of job is growing in skill and responsibility, or that those jobs have diminished in size and are no longer as big as they were. But intuitive judgment of this type does not prove very helpful in a wage-negotiation situation when people’s levels of income are dependent upon the results. Intuitive judgments are too coarse for such a purpose. And they are not only too coarse. The making of intuitive comparisons between jobs as a means of settling rates of pay suffers from other very great defects as well: people do not look at jobs in the same way; nor are they equally familiar with different jobs; nor, since jobs change, do they necessarily know a job today because they have done so at some time in the past; nor are they necessarily even talking about the same job, since the same job title can often cover a multitude of different kinds of work.

Despite the difficulties cited, making intuitive judgments about work is in common use as a means of assessing and agreeing the payment and status for given jobs in particular establishments. Much of job evaluation is based on such judgment—although the largely intuitive basis is often obscured behind the apparent, but simulated, objectivity to be obtained by using rating scales that give varying numbers of points to various aspects of a job. Judgment of this intuitive kind, while possibly having a limited use under local conditions, is of no use at all in negotiations affecting numbers of people in widely distributed establishments. Such negotiations require statements about work and about jobs in terms of principle. Principle requires explicit statement in words. Intuitive judgment is difficult, if not impossible, to frame in words. So long as judgment about work remains intuitive, negotiation in terms of principle remains impossible.

III

The yardsticks that are currently used in assessing and describing work whose payment is in question may be divided into two main categories: work yardsticks and personal yardsticks. The work yardsticks relate to comparisons between jobs on the basis of various aspects of responsibility that they have in common. The personal yardsticks relate to comparisons between jobs on the basis of comparisons between the persons who would be required to do the job in a reasonable and efficient way.

The first category of yardsticks—the work yardsticks—includes such factors as: physical weight of the work, distance travelled, danger, accuracy required, speed of work required, cleanliness, discomfort or dirtiness, quality of finish, numbers of subordinates controlled, seriousness of the effect of negligence, complexity or straightforwardness, and value of the materials worked with. Of such characteristics, serious scrutiny will show that all but three—danger, discomfort, and dirtiness—are likely to be misleading if taken by themselves, or together, as yardsticks for measuring and comparing jobs. And these three are factors relevant to the granting of special additional payments over and above a prescribed rate for a job, rather than a basis for a rate structure itself.

Accuracy required in work often arouses great passion in discussion. Working to fine tolerances, for example, is considered by those doing it as an argument for higher rates than for doing rough-finish work. What is often left out of account in such argument is the quality and character of the tooling—there being little virtue in operating a machine tool that does fine work that is checked with an automatic gauge, as compared with work that relies upon the sensibility of the operator or craftsman himself. And the same considerations would apply to quality of finish. Speed of work, like the foregoing factors, may make a job more difficult, or may not affect it at all. A job that includes as one of its aspects copy-typing at fifty words per minute need not be any more difficult as a job than one requiring forty words per minute, although it may be more difficult to keep going at the higher rate for any length of time.

Numbers of subordinates controlled is a favourite index of size of job. It is probably true in many cases that if the number of subordinates under one’s control in the same job increases, then one’s responsibility is increasing. But it need not be true. An increase in the number of subordinates granted for carrying out an increasing number of laid-down administrative duties could reflect a decrease in responsibility. And a junior foreman with a number of subordinates is not necessarily doing a bigger job than, for example, a designer working on his own on a new machine-tool but having no subordinates at all.

The complexity or apparent straightforwardness of a job are other favourite indices of its importance or degree of responsibility. To say that a particular job is complex is to praise it; and to call it routine, a term of disparagement. The difficulty is to signify what is meant. Whether a task is complex or routine is often a matter on which competent judges may well disagree. And to the person unfamiliar with a job’s requirements, what seems merely routine may be a much more complex task concealed under apparent ease of performance. So also such factors as the value of the articles or equipment worked with, the weight of work handled, the distances travelled, may have everything or nothing to do with size of responsibility. They are not sufficient in themselves as criteria for measurement—as yardsticks—and their use for such a purpose may often become quite incongruous.

The second category of yardsticks—the personal yardsticks (those based on the idea that jobs can be compared by comparing the persons needed to do them)—proves no more helpful. Examples of such yardsticks are: the skill, training and qualifications, experience or length of service, required in order to do a job; or other personality characteristics such as courage, resourcefulness, determination, reliability, and imagination. Such criteria, it is true, are quite general, in that to some degree, however slight, they apply to most jobs. But once again experience shows that they are extremely difficult to apply in practice in comparing jobs. This difficulty is well known, for instance, in the job evaluation methods that make use of rating scales for assessing the relative importance of jobs by rating the amounts of such qualities required in them.

In the first place, all these personal qualities are notoriously difficult to measure. Even the criterion of training, which seems simpler than some of the others, presents difficulties in comparing, for example, a five-year apprentice course, a four-year University course, and a ten-year period of on-the-job experience: and managing directors’ jobs, in particular, are difficult to express in terms of the amount or type of training required. As for the other psychological criteria, their assessment leads into all kinds of subjective comparisons, admirably suited for ensnaring negotiators in emotional and partisan argument—with which society has become quite familiar in reading about the wage-differential disputes that afflict it. These arguments are hardly calculated to help in getting a satisfactory and lasting solution to the problems with which the criteria are supposed to deal.

IV

It is questionable whether either of these categories contains a single yardstick, or combination of yardsticks, that makes possible anything other than an apparent or illusory objectivity in discussion, in comparing jobs of work, and in negotiating the payment to be made for them. But perhaps one of the most serious difficulties in using such criteria is that sometimes, in very limited circumstances and for limited periods of time, they work. It may happen, for example, that for a given group, say, of machining operations, the smallness of the tolerances required may conform to what is felt to be the size of the job and to its value as far as payment is concerned. Agreement reached on such a basis, it is suggested, may be quite misleading, and a potential source of trouble. For the character of work, in ordinary circumstances, does not remain unchanged. Slight or gross modifications to one or other of the machines are introduced. As the market changes, customers’ demands change, the product changes, and the individual operations change. The direction such changes will take is often difficult to foresee. The rate at which the changes are likely to occur is even more difficult to foresee. But one thing is a matter of common experience, and that is that, as the changes occur, the old criteria for comparing jobs tend no longer to work, and new aspects emerge as being of greater consequence under the changed methods of work. Then the cycle of discovering the most relevant criteria and of developing a satisfactory structure of payment begins again.

The problems outlined will be familiar to those with experience of industry. Another, and perhaps more far-reaching, difficulty will also be familiar. Not one of the criteria of the type outlined above can be used for comparing jobs of different types. This is true whether the criteria are taken singly, or together, with or without allowances or ratings for relative importance. Postmen cannot be compared with milkmen, porters with railway engineers, invoice clerks with draughtsmen, machine operators with typists, electricians with research technicians. The criteria simply do not apply in the same way to different jobs. Some, such as distance travelled, apply to some jobs, and not to others. Others, such as number of subordinates, or accuracy of work, may apply to all, but simply do not have the same relevance or meaning in one set of jobs as they would have in another.

With respect to the personal yardsticks, even if the psychological factors on which they are based could be measured, they would still beg the question of the rate for the job, substituting for it the rate for the person or grade of person. There is a widespread desire in industry to keep free from the use of such criteria. They lead to invidious comparisons being made between people, or between groups or categories of people. Such comparisons can be argued but not resolved so far as value in terms of relative income levels is concerned. And yet, despite the desire to keep away from such comparisons, industrial negotiations about rates frequently take place, without its being recognized, in terms not of the rate for the job but of the rate for the person in the job. Thus, for example, talking about rates for skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled work is talking in terms of a psychological description of work—although it is not commonly recognized as such. It describes a job as requiring a ‘skilled’, or ‘semi-skilled’, or ‘unskilled’ person to do it. And while seemingly useful for describing categories of work on a very broad basis for an industry as a whole, there is a great deal of everyday experience to show that using such criteria brings about disruptive consequences on the shop floor. These consequences are to put a worker in the unenviable, difficult, and often irritating or frustrating position of having to argue that he has become as skilled as the next man, and that his job has become as skilled as well. His manager, replying in kind, then involves them in a discussion, equally disagreeable to both, of his opinion of that worker compared with his opinion of others. Whatever the outcome, a certain amount of feeling has been stirred, which, with the best will on both sides, may not readily be forgotten because of the particular framework of the discussion. Although we have used the illustration of a worker and his manager, it may be recognized that such argument may occur at any level in industry.

V

Negotiations about payment using seemingly objective criteria such as those outlined above may readily and easily revert, in a completely unrecognized way, to mere argument over differences in opinion based upon differences in intuitive judgment about jobs. Such argument, heightened and fanned by the wishes and desires aroused in the contending parties, is not only not held within the helpful grip of an agreed and objective frame of reference. It may be further exaggerated and distorted precisely because it is carried on within a framework that is presumed to be objective, but is really not, and so adds the worry and complication of vagueness and uncertainty, without its being quite apparent from just what quarter the obscurity is emanating.

It may be asked whether the circumstances described do not constitute a factor of some importance in the difficulties experienced over the negotiation of differentials in contemporary industrial life—difficulties strongly experienced not only between unions and employers, workers and staff, but also between various grades of worker, and various grades of staff, and between trade unions themselves. The lack of an objective foundation upon which to pin discussion about differentials may not commonly be held to be a primary cause of industrial discord. But it cannot be denied that it does contribute to suspicion and discord in negotiation; and it certainly does not facilitate agreement. An understanding of the consequences arising out of the framework currently in use may help to make understandable the very great difficulties experienced even by those with a genuine and hard-headed desire to resolve wage and salary questions in a fair and realistic way, but who nevertheless find themselves locked in painful and unwanted negotiation whose outcome may at the very best be a compromise. Such compromises, because they do not resolve any fundamental issues, lead only to the hope that they will last as long as possible.

The foregoing difficulties were encountered in their full complexity at the Glacier Metal Company, just as they are experienced in other industrial concerns. They led to an attempt to find a definition of work in the sense of work that is paid for, and a more satisfactory yardstick for measuring work directly and objectively. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I The Problem
• PART II The Glacier Experience
• PART III Theoretical Considerations
• APPENDIX
• INDEX