The Division Of Labor

5 Pages 1333 Words

The “ division of labor” has many viewpoints the two being discussed in the following are Karl Marx and Fredrick Winslow Taylor. They believed that the workplace alienated its workers from their own lives. Division of Labor can be viewed in two ways, Karl Marx saw it as an alienation from oneself and co-worker, and Fredrick viewed it, with a scientific approach, utilizing efficiency as a way of improving the workplace.
Karl Marx believed that the people who do the work in a capitalistic society own none of the means of production, which they use in their work. These are owned
by the capitalists, to whom the workers must sell their 'labor power', or
ability to do work, in return for a wage. The capitalists, owning the factories,
automatically have ownership rights to everything produced by it, and can do
with it what the wish. Marx also uses the term alienation to describe the worker becoming slaves to the object. He states that the worker becomes alienated from themselves and from there co-workers. He also describes that a worker is enslaved to their workplace because the worker is always working, therefore the working day is not a constant number of hours but it varies. We must include the time it takes to prepare for work, duration of time it takes to get to work, the actual work day, as well as surplus-labor, duration of time it takes to get home from work, and then the cycle begins again.
Fredrick Winslow Taylor believed that the division of labor had a scientific reason for its alienation. This is because with all the new technology the workplace has become a place were employs do the labor and managers do the thinking. When there is one manager and many workers doing the same thing, the individualism is taken away. While the workplace was being standardized, Taylor discovered efficiency. The work place was becoming a place of sole productivity and the employees were just laborers. The workers needs were no...