ABSTRACT
Donkey fiddles thrive in jobs where a person is both insulated from co-workers and constrained by rules. The extreme example is probably provided by the nineteenth-century skivvy in a one-servant family who was tightly constrained by rules determining her position in time and place and who had her mode of work closely defined for her. Jobs on long and noisy mass-production belts are good examples of donkey jobs. Not only are physical movements constrained from outside, by the pace of the belt and the ‘rules’ of the ‘time and motion’ men, but a man’s freedom to relate to others is limited to his immediate neighbours – to those who precede and succeed him on the line. Managers and specialist workers, like electricians and maintenance men, have freedom and the autonomy over how they do a job that goes with it.
