Scenes from the Office: II. The Supervisor in the Computer

Interview by Rebecca Sharpless

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 10-11

Susan Lowe, age twenty-seven, works with 200 co-workers in the claims department of a large insurance firm in Atlanta. The claims department occupies an entire floor of a downtown high-rise office building. “Claims” employees pass their days filling in forms on video display terminals. Unlike office workers of the past, these workers’ pace is set by the computer’s capabilities as programmed by management. The supervisor is in the computer. Data, entered by workers at their terminal keyboards, must fit a standardized, regularized format. Workers have little discretion in performing the job, or in the speed with which they must move across the keyboard. As Susan Lowe describes her work, she talks about the monitoring of employees that is possible with computer supervision, including the counting of keystrokes, errors, and time.

SUSAN LOWE: The computer automatically checked the number of claims processed. Every day your manager would get a printout of what you had paid the previous day, and they would post that on a board so that everybody could see what everyone else had done.

About six months to a year after they installed the computer system they had a management consulting firm come in and do a little stopwatch timing on people for paying claims. Before that, you had your quota of fifty claims a day. When they did this little stopwatch study, they determined that certain claims were not really worth as much as other claims. And so they put a value on the different kinds of claims-for example, a drug bill. A drug bill is a pretty easy thing to pay; you put in the code, the date, the amount, and you paid it. And you always paid drug claims to the claimant, so it was a pretty simple claim to pay. You got a .4 for that. If it was a hospital bill, that could be a little bit more complicated because there could be ten pages worth of charges, and you get maybe 1.2 for that. So they had what they called work units.

For the first six months to a year after they went on this work unit thing, they didn’t tell us what a work unit was. They didn’t tell us that a drug claim was only worth .4 and a hospital bill was worth 1.2. They just said, instead of being the number of claims per day that we paid, the computer was now spitting out how many work units per day you’re doing. And there didn’t seem to be any correlation-we couldn’t figure it out, at any rate-any correlation between the number of claims you paid and the number that appeared on the sheet every day saying how much you worked the day before. And that in itself was kind of depressing, when you don’t know what it is that you’re doing or not doing that’s affecting your performance.

They also, when they went to this work unit system, went to a little different system of salary increases. Before, we were reviewed once a year and given basically a merit raise, and we were also given cost-of-living raises automatically. And on the new system they kind of did away with these; well, they didn’t do away completely with the cost-of-living raises, but what it was, was that every six months they would take your cumulative total of work units and determine how much you would get paid for that six-month period. And then at the end of six months you would be reviewed again and if your production went down, your salary would drop. If your production went up, your salary would increase.

You kind of were walking a fine line all the time as to how much you were going to get paid. You couldn’t really count on a salary. If you had to go out and buy a new car and you were making $425 a week, you couldn’t guarantee that in six months you’d still be making that. You might drop down to $375 a week. That fifty bucks might be-and some people live on the edge like that, too. So that was kind of a hairy situation.

A lot of people weren’t real happy with that. I know I wasn’t real happy with that, because I was scared. I never went down; I stayed exactly the same all the time. I was consistent. But to me it was real stressful, worrying, and to me, I would have been embarrassed if my salary dropped. To me, that would have been a horrible thing to have to happen. It happened to a number of people; maybe about one quarter of the people had that happen. You get pretty consistent; most people would stay about the same.

But some people would just knock themselves out for six months and they’d get this huge salary increase. They paid very well for the industry; we were the top-paid for the city of Atlanta in our industry. So that part of it was good. But again, you had to deal with this stress all the time of, okay, I did it for this six months, and you’d kill yourself to do it for that six months, and you just can’t keep that up. I couldn’t, and that’s why I never really did that. I never really tore into something and worked twice as long.

A lot of people used to come in early and pre-process claims so that when they started work for the day they’d just type. They’d be just basically typing; they wouldn’t be doing any decision-making during the day. And they allowed you to do that. If you wanted to come in early and sit at your desk and do whatever you wanted to do, you could do it.

[Piecework] is how I felt about it. I liked what I was doing; I liked paying claims and everything. I thought it was interesting. But I was just real stressed out in that kind of environment. And it set up like this competition, I mean the fact that they posted these things on the board every day; it set up this real cutthroat, to some people, competition. They would dig through claims and look for all the easy ones and shove this pile of crap back in the claims drawer. People picked through stuff and put it back and things like that. It affected the atmosphere of the office because of that.

The quota with work units was still basically the same, I think. It went up, but it went up to like sixty. You had to do sixty work units a day, which, come to think of it, that would have translated to about seventy, seventy-five claims a day. So it went up by half. So you did have to process more claims in order to stay at the level you were before.

I don’t think they ever fired anybody for not producing. Once they went onto that salary based on your work units, people just either left because they weren’t doing real well-and normally that’s what happened, because if you weren’t doing real well-the salary ranged from like $210 to like $425. There was this huge range depending on what your production was. And people who were in the lower ranges making around two hundred dollars a week could go elsewhere. And so they did. And so basically I don’t think they ever really fired anybody for not making their quota because they didn’t make very much money, and they left on their own.

One thing that I did a lot when I worked on that job that I could kick myself for doing, was that-and I think that it contributed worse to my stress-out, really-was that I would come in-we were on flex hour time [although the computer limited the amount of flex time]. And what I started doing was, I’d be there at seven o’clock in the morning and I’d stay there until five or after five at night. To me, when I stretched it out a little bit, I was basically doing the same amount of work, but I didn’t feel as pressured in as short a period of time. So to me, I’d come in and I’d pre-process a bunch of claims before I’d actually get on the system in the mornings. And I’d do my work and then at the end of the day I’d do that extra few more claims, just put in a little bit more before the end of the day so that I’d be sure that I’d have my quota for the day.

Like I said, I didn’t fluctuate wildly; I was consistent about the number of claims that I paid per day or the number of work units that I did per day so that at the end of the six- month period I didn’t have to try to play catch-up. I tried to consistently do the same amount each day. So at the end of the day I’d throw in a few more, for good measure, basically, just to make sure I wasn’t going to lose my salary when the six-month review came around.

So that was one of my coping devices; like I said, I don’t know if it helped things at all. It just felt to me like I was relieved a little bit more. But then again, I was spending an extra hour or more a day in this stress-out situation. So I really don’t think it helped, although it seemed to psychologically make me feel a little bit better that I wasn’t so wired when I was there.

Rebecca Sharpless is a student at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.

Bottom Rails

Reviewed by Rebecca Sharpless

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 25-27

The Origins of Southern Sharecropping, by Edward Royce (Temple University Press, 1993, 279 pages).

Statistics on the South today are as bleak as ever: the highest poverty rate in the U.S., the highest infant mortality rate, the highest school drop-out rate. And we ask: How did things ever get this bad? How did the South become the nation’s poorest region?

Historians of the South point to the aftermath of the Civil War in explaining the roots of some Southern poverty. In 1865, four million slaves were freed with no means of supporting themselves, and the region has been paying the price ever since. Out of the crumbling plantation system arose a form of agricultural labor known as the crop-lien system. Under the crop-lien system, a landless farmer and his family worked a designated plot of someone else’s land in return for a portion of the crop. This organization of agriculture remained dominant throughout the South until the New Deal. (The term crop lien encompasses two forms of agricultural labor: tenant farming, in which the farmer owns his own tools and receives three-quarters of the cash crop and two-thirds of the corn that he raises; and sharecropping, in which the farmer provides only his labor and that of his family, and receives half of the cash crop and corn in return. I will use the two interchangeably, as does Royce.)

Historical discussions of how the crop-lien system arose often resemble the arguments regarding the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.1 In fact, two of the players in the struggle to find the origins of the system finally declared in frustration:

Despite the enormous amount of scholarship devoted directly or indirectly to this theme, historians cannot even agree on how to conceptualize either antebellum or postbellum southern society, much less on how to explain the transition from one to the other.2

But the problem of the origins of the crop-lien system continues to tantalyze scholars. The newest addition into the mix is The Origins of Southern Sharecropping by Edward Royce, an associate professor of sociology at Rollins College. To examine the origins of the crop-lien system (which he inelegantly and inaccurately lumps under the rubric of sharecropping), Royce employs a perspective which he calls “constriction of possibilities,” a term gleaned from E. L. Doctorow’s novel, The Book of Daniel. He begins with the premise that the crop-lien system was a compromise that gave neither plantation owners nor freed slaves exactly what they wanted in a labor system. He then seeks to examine what they did want and what happened to keep them from attaining their desires. For planters, a return to slavery would have been their first choice. Barring that, they wanted a work force that would be just as controllable as slaves. Freed slaves, with very few options for nonagricultural employment, primarily wished for their own family farms on which to raise subsistence crops. The bulk of The Origins of Southern Sharecropping looks at what could have happened to give one or both of these groups a satisfactory outcome—and didn’t.

Disagreeing with historians who see sharecropping only as a response to market pressures, Royce portrays both the freedpeople and the planters as active agents in determining their fates. He quotes philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: “Men make their history on the basis of real, prior conditions. It is the men who make it and not the prior conditions” The first result of the active freedpeople was the end of the gang-labor system which had prevailed on antebellum plantations. Despite the best efforts of planters, the U.S. Army, and the Freedmen’s Bureau, former slaves absolutely refused to work in gangs. Coercion and even terror from the Ku Klux Klan could not force freedpeople into the cotton fields as gang labor. This failed coercion thus became one possibility which freedpeople effectively blocked. Planters did not get the ultimate labor control that they believed to be necessary.

Royce next examines why freedpeople did not get their desired autonomy. Loss of nerve on the part of the U.S. government bears significant responsibility for denying freed slaves the “forty acres and a mule” which they so much wanted. Despite some attempts at land redistribution during and immediately after the Civil War, the

---

Page 26

federal government restored almost all confiscated lands to their previous owners by the end of 1865. With virtually all farmland in the hands of its antebellum owners and no money of their own, freedpeople had little opportunity to acquire land. The “best estimate” is that fewer than 5 percent of the former slaves had purchased land by the “first few years after the war.” Their wishes to become independent land owners were thus a second constricted possibility.

Faced with what they perceived as a recalcitrant black labor pool, planters sought other groups of workers as farm laborers. The South had never attracted many foreign immigrants, but postbellum planters believed that they could lure workers from China and Europe, especially Germany, to tend the crops. Neither group was willing to come to the South, and the efforts failed miserably. Poor labor conditions restricted immigration as a possibility.

Another tack discussed by some southern planters was the colonization of former slaves. Some planters believed that if freedpeople would not work under the conditions that the planters dicated, they should be deported, perhaps to Central America. Blacks opposed colonization during Reconstruction, declaring that they had a right to stay on the lands which they had cultivated for generations. A few whites removed themselves to Central or South America, unable to bear living in a land with freed slaves. But for both groups, black and white, emigration remained an impractical solution to the problems of Reconstruction.

Having exhausted other possibilities, according to Royce, Southern planters and freedpeople eventually settled into the crop-lien system. It is here that Origins is weakest, as Royce conflates the end of gang labor and the credit system which was based on the expected harvest. Blacks vehemently opposed gang labor, remembering the days under the overseer’s lash. The decentralization of plantations into individual farm plots was indeed a victory for freedpeople, giving them a measure of autonomy and privacy. It did not, however, result in the crop-lien system per se. Royce argues that freedpeople also wanted the crop-lien system, wherein a family would work the crop and receive a portion of the harvest in lieu of cash wages. The family would feel that the crop was their own and that they were not “mere hirelings.” Royce’s argument and documentation are unconvincing at this point. Why would a family defer payment for an entire year to receive income at harvest? Although planters denied it, the crop-lien system gave them considerable control over their tenants: no harvest, no payment. Royce also does not give adequate attention to the collapse of the southern financial system, which left few planters with enough cash to pay their tenants.

On its face, the crop-lien system does not look all that bad. A family worked the land; if the crop made well, the family theoretically took home a corresponding payment. Royce is concerned with origins, not effects, but his lack of focus on the credit system gives short shrift to the most pernicious aspect of the crop-lien system as it took hold on the South for the next seventy years. Under the crop-lien system, a sharecropper planted what the landlord told him to. That was always the cash crop: cotton or tobacco. Neither was edible for humans. Concentrating on the cash crop, sharecropper families rarely grew enough food to feed themselves. Instead, they purchased food on credit arranged by the landlord, with the debt to be paid out of the crop. With no cash, they also charged cloth for clothing, doctors’ fees, kerosene for their lamps—any and everything went on the credit bill. As a result, families ended up in debt year after relentless year, never able to earn a profit or create a decent way of life. Steady diets of fat pork and corn resulted in widespread cases of pellagra. Inferior water supplies created endless cases of typhoid fever. And shacks with no screens on the windows let in clouds of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Royce discusses only freed slaves as sharecroppers, and it is beyond the scope of his study to investigate the spread of the crop-lien system throughout the South. Studies by Steven Hahn, Kyle Wilkison, and others explain how white farmers, too, eventually became sucked into the crop-lien system, so that by 1920, 75 percent of the farmers, black and white, on the Texas prairies were sharecroppers or tenants. This gradual slide into tenancy led to wretched conditions for millions of southern rural families.

The New Deal brought an abrupt end to the crop-lien system as it had existed since the 1860s, but it did not end Southern poverty. Acreage allotments induced landowners to turn their tenants off of the farms, despite the fact that the tenants had nowhere to go in the middle of the Great Depression. Former tenants left for the cities, lacking educations or marketable skills that would help them in the urban world, bringing the misery of deprivation to the cities without the familiarity of the countryside. Because of the urbanization of Southern rural poverty, as well as for other reasons, the South today continues to lag economically.

In The Origins of Southern Sharecropping, Edward Royce has made a valiant attempt to shed new light on the puzzle of the crop-lien system through the theory of “constriction of possibilities.” He is to be commended especially for the agency which he attributes to freed slaves, but one of his central arguments remains unconvincing. In examining the roads not taken, he has cer-

---

Page 27

tainly gazed down some paths that others have overlooked. His perspective is different, but not superior to, many of the predecessors whom he attempts to revise.

Notes

Rebecca Sharpless is the director of the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.