Black Women in the Bell System
The nature of mankind controls the function and development of machines, and as Marx points out, this includes the power hungry capitalistic aspects of humanity with a propensity toward exploitation of others. Marx discusses the labor market in his work “Fragment on Machines.” During Marx’s time, the labor market was facing a dramatic shift as industrial technology came into the production market. As Marx explains, the new technologies were fronted as an “enhancement” of the workers, designed to help employees work more efficiently, but as the technology continued to be developed, these production machines seemingly took over the industry, pushing out and replacing human labor. As Marx explores, it is not the technology itself changing the labor market and pushing workers out of the market, but the wealthy businessmen cashing in on new technologies and the capitalist ideals, exploiting workers to increase outputs and cut costs.
In the Bell System, the system and market of telephones in the mid-1900's, the development of new, more automated technologies continually shaped and reshaped the labor market, not only bolstering the capitalist agenda, but suppressing black laborers, particularly black women. Black women were first introduced in the bell system around the time of World War I. White women moved into different jobs and the Bell System continued to grow and develop, so AT&T and similar companies “deliberately hired African American women into an occupation that not only paid low wages but was becoming technologically obsolete.” With an increase in the need for workers, managers, infused with a racist ideology, implemented new offices in an urban setting in order to exploit changing urban demographics. The nation's largest urban areas presented the Bell System with an untapped labor pool.
After the war, technological fragmentation occurred in the phone system, making the system more automated, and the low level jobs black women were working became less skilled and less humanized. As stated in the journal, the continuous quest of the Bell System was to “develop equipment that would minimize labor costs and at the same time provide quick and reliable service.” As jobs became less-skilled and the Bell System work forced shifted from white women to black, women worked in increasingly “degraded, deskilled, and dehumanized jobs.”
Just as Marx proposed, capitalism encourages movement towards dehumanizing labor. New telephone technologies were developed with the aim of reducing labor costs and “improving” the technology with automation; however, the increase in automation solely benefited the wealthy white capitalists at the head of the bell system, and pushed black women further into the capitalistic machine. The line between machine and laborer was blurred as the phone system essentially ran itself under the pretense that automation was helping the unskilled, incompetent black laborers, as societies racial view held.
- Green, Venus. “Race and Technology: African American Women in the Bell System, 1945-1980”. Technology and Culture 36.2 (1995): S101–S144. Web...