Problems in

A Latin American Factory Society

SIMON ROTTENBERG *

EDITOR'S NOTE.-This article, like a "camera in miniature," is intended only to portray the behavior of the workers in a given plant in a given community. It does, however, typify the kinds of problems, although not the precise problems, which can arise when a factory is introduced into an underdeveloped community.

BEFORE World War II, Latin America produced mineral and agricultural raw materials and foodstuffs and exchanged these for fabricated goods produced elsewhere. Wartime scarcities of consumer goods and postwar public policies designed to save hard currencies and to promote diversification have resulted in a very large growth in manufacturing in some Latin American countries. Clusters of factories dot the countrysides, and large numbers of workers with only casual and rural previous work experience are now employed in factory crafts.

Very little is formally known about the social structure of the factory work group in these countries or about the impact of the culture external to the factory upon behavior in plants. The new discipline of study of human relations in industry and the older discipline of industrial sociology, especially in the United States and England, have yielded a large literature which has contributed to insightful understanding of the processes of social intercourse in work groups in those countries. Almost no research of this kind has been carried on in Latin America.

The Factory's Locale and Labor Supply

This article summarizes one such study of workers in a Latin American factory.1 The factory produces women's underclothing and, at the time of the study, had been in active operation for about a year and a half. It is located on the outskirts of the town of Tumbo (population 1,500) in the foothills of a low mountainous region where agriculture has been the traditional economic activity and dairy products and coffee the major products.

The coffee crop requires a great deal more labor at harvest time than at other times of the year and in the interharvest period the men of Tumbo stand idly about the town's plaza talking. Tumbo women do not work in the fields; they stay at home tending the children and doing household work and have subordinate status relative to men. Many of the women are from time to time employed in industrial homework, assembling bead necklaces by hand.

The factory operates under a regime of work discipline with regularly scheduled hours, gives regular employment, and uses machines. At the time of the study, it employed about 200 workers, of whom 160 were women. Most of them live in the rural area surrounding Tumbo and commute to and from work by bus. Although there is a thriving manufacturing community at La Libertad, about 20 miles away, the factory at Tumbo is the only one in the town and the area surrounding it, so almost none of the workers had any previous work experience in industry and had to be trained for their work in the plant. They had better-than-average schooling and were regarded by the community as being "better"than-average people.

Large landholders, who are sometimes also merchants, have enormous prestige in the community. The priest in Tumbo said that when talk of the establishment of the factory was

Assistant Professor, Industrial Relations Center, University of Chicago. 1 The names are fictitious and details have been changed in other respects to conceal the identity of the firm in which the study was done. The method of research was to place in the factory for 6 weeks a girl who is a university graduate and who is a national of the country in which the factory is located. She engaged the workers in informal conversation which she sought to steer into channels relevant to the subject of the study. Factory management representatives were interviewed formally.

initiated, there was a whispering campaign against it by the landholders, who feared that the plant would bid their workers away from them. However, once they saw that the factory would employ a very high proportion of women, leaving the supply of male labor unaffected, the community almost universally came to believe that the location of the plant in Tumbo was a good thing. The factory, of course, has brought added income to the town and has made buyers for the merchants' wares.

Some rumblings continue to be heard among middle-class housewives, who feel that the location of the factory in the town has diminished the supply of female labor for domestic service, deteriorated its quality, and bid up its price.

Other relevant aspects of the Tumbo culture can be defined as follows: Kinship ties are strong and extend, by a system of compadrazco (god parentage), beyond the limits of the family; ties of the workers to their families, largely unbroken, were just beginning to break; men desire strongly to be manly, and a commonly held code defines the qualities of manly behavior; class status differentiates to some extent occupational roles; aspirations for goods and services are relatively high; interpersonal (face-to-face) relations are important; and paternalism characterizes the traditional relations between workers and employers.

In some dominantly rural communities, recruitment for factory work is difficult because workers refuse to accept jobs either because they involve a regime of discipline or for other reasons. No such problem exists in Tumbo, where the people are wage-oriented and job-hungry and seem to have a great desire for work in the factory. The company has no trouble in getting job applicants who are willing to take the 2-hour-a-day, 4-week training course, even though they receive no compensation for it and no assurance of placement.

However, there are limits to the "price" that Tumbeños are willing to pay for having a job, and these affect the distribution of workers among occupations. Men, for example, being unwilling to suffer the ridicule of other men, for the most part will refuse to accept sewing-machine operating jobs because this work is considered to be fit only for women. Many women also reject these

jobs because they are fearful that their fingers will be caught under the machine's needle.

Employee Relations and Morale

Recent research has indicated that, in the United States, there is a relationship between a work group's productivity and its level of morale, and has defined conditions affecting morale. One of these conditions involves the relationship between management and the work group.

Discussions with the workers in the factory at Tumbo revealed that they regarded management as not sympathetic or understanding and that they responded by being uncooperative. They characterized management's attitude toward them as being like that of a father addressing errant children who will not obey unless approached with stern words. The role both of the company's personnel practices and of the native culture in shaping the workers' attitudes was evident in their comments about quits and absences, which management claimed were its main problems, and about management policies on communications and production quotas.

Quits. The manager was apparently under considerable pressure from the owner to deliver a large volume of product. The resultant pressure upon the workers, according to them, has taken the form of scolding and the making of such threats as that individuals who cannot meet production standards will lose their jobs, that the factory will close, or that it will be moved elsewhere. The younger girls, who can be supported by their parents, tended not to respond to these pressures, and the older women were heard to say: "Bueno, if they close the factory, we can go to work in La Libertad." To the extent that workers begin to see the possibilities of alternative jobs in other places, the menacing threat as a tactic in personnel relations will be less effective. It is also to be expected that workers against whom threat tactics are used will respond by devising subtle infringements of factory rules.

It seemed clear, however, that most workers regarded loss of their jobs as something very serious and to be avoided even at great real cost. The company's wage rate was high for the area,

and the possession of a job at this rate was highly valued. Many workers said their earnings (or all but a portion set aside for personal requirements) were pooled with the family income and often were the family's largest single source of income. Installment debts contracted by the workers in buying jewelry and watches from two ambulant vendors who come to the plant gate further appreciated the value of continued receipt of wages.

Still, the workers spoke immediately of quitting when they became distressed in the plant, were involved in disputes with supervisors or other workers, were spoken to harshly, or tired of their work. There was, however, much more talk of quitting than actual quitting, and it was clear that reiteration of the yo me voy theme was simply a form of expression which articulated distress but did not express active intention.

There was talk also of quitting to go to the capital city and a belief that work could easily be secured there in factories at wages higher than those in Tumbo. The occasional presence of friends and relatives there tended to pull in that direction. Most of the workers in the plant, however, continued to live at home, going to and from work by bus; very few moved into the town upon taking their jobs. They had not, therefore, broken their first roots in the home. The talk of going to the capital, therefore, also expressed a vague aspiration rather than an active intention. If the workers were no longer living with their families but had moved to the town, the roots would have been broken and the movement to the capital would undoubtedly have been greater.

Some workers talked of leaving for other jobs in the country, especially in La Libertad, and some had become aware of the possibilities of job alternatives. However, most of the workers were not looking for other jobs. Since the going rate for sewing was higher in this factory than in other industries, rational choice of alternative earnings on different jobs would have tended to keep machine operators at the Tumbo plant rather than to cause them to take jobs elsewhere.

Nevertheless, from the management point of view, quits were particularly serious because they necessitated the training of replacement workers who had no previous experience with machines.

The company had alleviated this condition somewhat by building up a small backlog of trained operators who had taken the training course on their own time, with the hope of qualifying for jobs and being placed in the factory.

Absences. Management also viewed very seriously the high rate of absenteeism, and had once closed the factory for 3 days to punish the workers for large-scale absences. That the workers had regarded this shutdown as a welcome holiday, although it represented an income loss, was evident from inquiry into their income aspirations, which seemed to be related to their willingness to work regularly. Although the measurement of levels of aspiration, even by intuitive processes and in approximation, is difficult, their responses seemed to indicate clearly that they were willing to forego marginal increments of income of this nature. Thus, they also seemed to prefer to lose income for Saturday work, rather than to lose their leisure on that day. In the same way, workers would sometimes hurry to finish a task before the end of the day, so that they could leave early, although this, too, meant loss of income.

However, absences were usually caused by illness, either of the worker himself or of a member of his family. Devotion to kinfolk, even distantly removed, was great, and external expression of this devotion (as by visiting an ill relative) was valued much more highly by the workers than uninterrupted attendance at work. It seemed to be true that they magnified the seriousness of illnesses in the family, and that sometimes they became upset simply by anticipating bad news about the health of kinfolk.

The other causes of absence occasioned by family relations are illustrated, although not typified, by the following cases:

1. A worker's brother was leaving the country and she was absent to see him off.

2. A worker followed her ex-concubinario to another town to try to recover half the price of their jointly owned house which he had sold.

3. A worker absented herself to take her children to her mother's home, because she feared that her husband would do them violence.

In the case of illness of the worker himself, whether or not the illness was sufficiently acute to warrant staying away from the factory, it

seemed to be true that the workers believed they were sick enough to justify staying home; they were not capricious or willful in their absences. They therefore resented the management rule that all absences claimed to be caused by illness must be covered by medical certificates. Indeed, the rule seemed to work badly. The worker who was truly ill was penalized, since he had to pay a doctor for a certificate, even though the illness may not have been serious enough to require a doctor's attention. The worker who was capriciously absent could cover up, because local doctors would certify illness even where there

was none.

Communications. The workers seemed even more resentful of the rule against conversation in the plant. The Tumbeño is a gregarious, voluble person, and the rule against talking was roundly violated. Talking was supposed to be permitted only about things related to work and in connection with getting work done. Conversation in other contexts did go on, however, when a supervisor was not close by. Workers engaged in talk looked about them to see that they were not being watched by a supervisor, and supervisors attempted to separate girls who were standing close together, because that was prima facie evidence of talking or might lead to talking.

Management's refusal to permit talking and close association at work when feasible manifested a misunderstanding of the role of association in a work group as an incentive to productive behavior in the factory. Elton Mayo found that "man's desire to be continuously associated in work with his fellows is a strong, if not the strongest, human characteristic. Any disregard of it by management or any ill-advised attempt to defeat this human impulse leads instantly to some form of defeat for management itself." 2

Nor was there any upward communication in the plant. The management's policy was to communicate with the workers only through channels in which communication moved down from management to workers, but never oppositely. The supervisors were identified with management and not with the workers, who

The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization, Boston, Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, Division of Research, 1945.

regarded them as management agents and not "intermediaries" between the workers at the lower level and the manager at the upward level. Consequently, the workers felt that their suggestions for changes in work methods would not be accepted in good faith.

Production. Similarly, the workers had no discretion to make small-scale innovations in the details of work methods. They also said that management made decisions unilaterally without regard to what workers considered their interests; neither did it inform the workers of the reasons for its decisions.

Uniform hourly rates were paid to all workers, as required by law, and slow workers were thus paid the same as fast workers. Management set production standards, however, for all operations. Workers were told "this is the minimum number that you are expected to produce." These production standards were increased gradually, rather than having the ultimate standard set immediately. The manager said that if, when the girls were producing 11 dozen units daily, he had told them that their minimum was 22, they would never have progressed beyond 11. But, by increasing the standard in units of 1 dozen, each several weeks, he was able to force output up and the standards were always within reach. His procedure was to induce a pace setter to break the standard once it had been met.

The danger, which he had apparently not encountered, is that at some time the workers may come to regard an established standard as a final objective and may refuse to produce more. It is significant that this had not happened and that the workers continued to break the standard and increase output, as new and progressively higher

norms were set.

Among many work groups in different cultures, workers frequently have set output standards for themselves in each operation and have enforced these standards upon pace-setting or fast workers in order to relieve the pressure for greater and greater output. The establishment and maintenance of such a standard, however, would require a consciousness among them of the comparative outputs of various workers and some talk about output. The workers at Tumbo rarely talked about their daily output and when they did, it

was in matter-of-fact tones and without boastfulness or pride with respect either to low or high output. They did know the ordinal ranking of various sections by output, but not the number of pieces, even approximately, being produced by the others. Thus, the workers as a group did not attempt to enforce output ceilings, since to do so would have required knowledge of comparative output with some exactness. There were some indications, however, that individual workers, on their own initiative and not within the framework of a work-group decision, had imposed output ceilings on themselves, in order to escape the pressure for "more and more."

Implications and Limitations of the Data

The research was done largely through informal interviewing of workers. Their comments should not be taken at face value. One of the attributes of the Latin American character is exuberance of expression, and many of the recorded comments were undoubtedly exaggerated to make them more colorful. Further, the point of view of the workers was surely defined by their conception of their own interest; they were in no sense objective and, indeed, they may even have misunderstood what are their true interests or their long-run interests.

The study leaves untouched an enormous area of relevance. For example, the fact that illnessreal, assumed, or pretended-of the worker or of kinfolk, sometimes distantly removed, was found to be the most important cause of absenteeism, means that loyalty to kin ranks high in the values of the community, that the kinship system has extended tentacles, and that there is intense preoccupation with matters of sickness and health. How this came about, why it persists, whether it ought to be changed, how change can be effected, all are relevant, but this study did not deal with them.

Relations between management and workers in the Tumbo factory were strained and the workers themselves did not form a cohesive social group; rather, relations among them had frequent conflict characteristics. Research into employment situations in the United States has indicated that,

in those situations, productivity is inversely related to these characteristics. The conduct of management at Tumbo thus would be expected to have a depressive influence on output if it prevailed in a factory in the States.

But clearly these Latin American workers are not United States workers: their values, their upbringing, the social pattern of their community, their previous employment and earnings experience, their employment prospects, and their kinship relationships are all different. It is not safe to conclude, therefore, that the workers at Tumbo respond to a given set of stimuli in the same way as workers in the United States. Indeed, the study suggests that they respond oppositely. It suggests, for example, that they are more productive when directed and "driven" than when they have discretion and are permitted to set their own pace.

The study indicates the ways in which culture external to the factory invades it subtly and affects behavior on the inside. Thus, the value placed on loyalty to kinfolk and the extended quality of the family has a depressive influence upon attendance at work; the pattern of interclass relations makes abusive behavior in the factory permissible; the newness of industrial experience makes workers less sophisticated in the circumvention of management objectives than they otherwise would be; the high aspiration levels for goods and services diminishes the incidence of quits, as does the scarcity of equivalent employment alternatives; the tradition of casual work, in which the worker sets his own pace and schedule, increases absences; and the cult of manliness affects the distribution of workers by sex among occupations.

In all societies, of course, the values of a community and its structure infiltrate its factories, as, indeed, they do any other of its institutions. In this sense, this case is not distinct from those of other places and times. But cultures are diverse and the qualities of their incidence upon conduct in factories are correspondingly diverse. The case reported here tells something of the behavior in a society culturally distinct from our own.