ABSTRACT
Management says that workers have lost the will to do an honest day’s work, have lost ambition and the taste for workmanship. While possessions and children are being accumulated, the steps in the ladder of plant seniority are likely to seem particularly slow and frustrating, and the ex-teen-ager who casually hired in may begin to wonder about some entrepreneurial activity which might allow escape from the plant altogether if it pays off. Warren Peterson in a study of Kansas City schoolteachers found also this growing demand for early retirement, expressing boredom and defeatism about work as much as any specific desires for postwork leisure activities. Marx went much further in seeing the factory as the ambush of brutishness, so terrible that it might engender a rational revolt against itself. No doubt, both men overlooked elements of passivity and boredom in the peasant’s life, the yeoman’s life, to which they could still look back.
