Humanization of working life

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The term humanization of working life (HdA) has so far lacked a clear and consistent definition. It officially entered political terminology in 1974 with the government's “Research Program on the Humanization of Working Life” and the debate about the quality of working life. The focus was on dealing with the Taylorist - Fordist organization of work. Around 1,600 projects were funded as part of the state program, which was initiated as a labor policy sub-program of the social democratic reform era.

Phases

First stage

The first stage in the 1970s was about the criticism of increasingly inhuman working conditions and forms of work, for which assembly line work was the symbol. On the academic side, this criticism was primarily borne by a politically and socially-theoretically charged industrial and work sociology, which was relatively closely linked to trade union programs and the political reform approaches of the social democracy of the time. The main aim was to expand the opportunities for employees to participate, with the co-determination rights of works councils serving as a lever when introducing new work processes and technologies on the basis of the Works Constitution Act .

Second stage

In a second stage, which roughly spanned the 1980s, the crisis of Taylorism became more evident. In Industrial Engineering and also in the trade unions , a veritable design euphoria developed. It reached its peak with the new production concepts propagated in the mid-1980s, which were based on the compatibility of rationalization and humanization through work structuring and were reflected on the one hand in ergonomic projects to ensure harmlessness and impairment of work, on the other hand in large industry projects to introduce new work structures, e.g. . B. found in the clothing or foundry industry. From today's perspective, the ergonomic projects neglected the dynamics of technical development, especially in the field of information technology. Some came too early due to a lack of technical support and must be viewed as unsustainable.

Third stage

In a third stage, since the early 1990s, the programmatic departure from Taylorist working methods reached its climax. The new management concepts (especially lean production ), the modern concepts of work and therefore also essential parts of the operational reality increasingly followed the principles of Taylorismuskritik: flexible and self-determined working hours , group work , job enrichment associated with the increase in the proportion of cognitive and conducive to learning activities, hierarchies, Self-organization , employee participation, etc. Familiar coordinates of the organization of work - hierarchy, control, external rationalization, external determination, restricted subjectivity, separation of work and living environment, etc. - and the evaluation criteria gained from this, such as stress and restrictiveness, room for maneuver, etc. began to falter. These projects were increasingly dedicated to the service sector and also to health prevention. Because of their largely individual approach, an often inadequate methodology (employee surveys and short-term examinations) and their frequent ergonomic fixation on individual workplaces, they often missed the target. They missed the trend of the increasing transformation of services from rule-based processing to flexible customer communication and were overtaken by the development of communication technology and networking.

financing

The program was financed with funds from the then "Federal Minister for Research and Technology" (BMFT), today the "Federal Ministry for Education and Research" ( BMBF ), which in 1974 broke the narrow framework of traditional technology research for the first time with the program. In 1989 it was redesigned as the Work and Technology program , with the program changed in the direction of strengthening the innovative strength of the German economy. The social and labor policy funding goals were weakened.

Organizationally, the program was handled by a project management organization belonging to the "German Aerospace Research and Research Institute" (DFVLR), now the "German Aerospace Center" ( DLR ) .

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stefan Müller: The research and action program "Humanization of Working Life" (1974-1989) . In: Nina Kleinöder, Stefan Müller, Karsten Uhl (eds.): “Humanization of work”. New beginnings and conflicts in the rationalized world of work of the 20th century . transcript, Bielefeld 2019, pp. 59–88, here p. 59.
  2. ↑ Andrea Hofmann, Petra Wassermann: Biased in the possible. About the difficulties in developing future opportunities for the German clothing industry and its employees. Frankfurt 1998, pp. 2, 5, 146.
  3. ↑ HD Hellige: Normatively controlled technology genesis as a complexity and cooperation problem. Lecture at the artec anniversary workshop Good work? Good environment? Good technique? (pdf)  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . University of Bremen, October 11, 2001.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.artec.uni-bremen.de  
  4. ↑ H. Bieneck: Humanization of working life - a lesson in social and research policy. GRIN, Munich 1998. (also as e-book ISBN 978-3-640-68200-3 ).