SHIFT WORK AND THE INTENSIFICATION OF LABOUR from a London ruadsr ee) eee
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An article in New Society, 2nd January, “The Future of sg —— by Stephen Aris examines the human consequences of the eae sy e Thore is first the physiological effects: “The human body i priate does not take kindly to working by night and sleeping by daye papi g to the experts we posses what is know as diurnal rhythm which ae ictated, among other things, by our blood pressure, rate of pear pulse rate, bowel function, gland action and so on. by measuring body temperature (the easiest of these to gouge) doctors have aR IRI that the body is at its most efficient at 6 PeMe and least effective a 3. OeMee The crucial question is : when 2 man's living pattern is reversed does his diurnal rhythm change also? The answer is a qualfied "No", Two Dutch doctors, J.M,. van Loon and F.M. Bouer of the Netherlands Institute of Preventive Medicine have established that, although the rhythm is disturbed very rarely is it completely reversed." After saying that research has not fully confirmed the consequences that could be expected, Aris continues: "All the researchars. however have found that shift workers invariably suffer from loss of appetite, wight _and sleep badly during the day.e In Norway, for example, 97% of those with houses close to traffic gave sleeplessness as their reason for leaving shift work and even with those who had quiet houses the figure was 84%. Lack of sleep is the shift workers! universal complaint. paradoxically it is on the wives that much of the burden of shift work falls. Ina household where three men are on shifts -— often different ones — the housewife can cook up to 5 meals a day besides looking after the children and shopping....Dudman (industrial chaplain to the Scunthorpe steel companies) believes that shift work puts a'very serious strain! on young married couples and points to comparatively large number of women in the district's mental hospital who have broken down on account of loneliness." Aris points out that managers, who do not work shifts, are likely to be ignorant of what shift work involves,
Aris writes that "for whatever reasons shift work is introduced it is bound to increase". Sometimes, as in Scunthorpe which Aris studied, shift work is a technical necessity because continuous processes are involved. In these circumstances it is important to the unions that wages reflect conditions and that unorganised workers are not introduced by the companies to avoid this: Aris records that at an average of £16, 58. weekly, wages are "not startingly high" in Scunthorpe.
Increasingly shift systems will be introduced, according to Aris, not for technical reasons tut simply to maximise profit. "As new mach— inery is increasingly expensive it becomes economically essential to use it as intensely as possible." In other words, this intensification of labour is directly linked to the change in the organic composition of capital (the growth of fixed capital in relation to variable capital or wages).