The Economy of Permanence: A Quest for a Social Order Based on Non-violence (स्थायी अर्थतन्त्र)

Economy of Permanence
XIII. DIVISION OF LABOUR
Not one will dispute the benefits to be obtained from a division of labour,
which makes for specialization and efficiency. In our land, such specialization
has held sway since time immemorial and it has even gone to seed, having
become hereditary and caste bound. Such an extreme has also led to
difficulties and to a blind alley.
Under the plea of a wholesome division of labour, Western industrialists have
broken up work into minute processes in such a way that work and drudgery
have become synonymous terms associated with all the undesirable qualities of
a curse.
Work, to be healthy and beneficial to the worker himself, apart from all
considerations on the product, should have diversion and variety in sufficient
measure in every sub-divided unit of it to prevent its becoming a strain on the
nerves. There is, therefore, a limit beyond which division of labour cannot go
without impugning its claims to wholesomeness.
The sub-divided unit must be as near a whole industry in itself as it possibly can
be and not be reduced to a mere process of an industry. For instance, if
carpentry is to be subdivided, it may well be into wheel-wrights and oil-mill
makers. These two are highly skilled departments each affording full scope for
all the faculties of the artisans. The products also are complete marketable
units. Instead of this, if these crafts were further subdivided into makers of
spokes and felloes for the wheels on the one hand, and into hewers of wood on
the other, it would be verging on drudgery. In leather crafts, shoemaking or
even specializing in chappals can be a healthy unit, while the mere cutting out
of pieces of leather for the soles or the uppers of shoes cannot stand by itself
as a healthy sub-division. In modern factories, such division of work into its
minute processes has gone to such an extent as to limit a man's operation and
attention to driving a nail or screwing on a nut bolt. Take a shoe factory. An
electrically driven belt moving horizontally will carry hundreds of lasts on
which the various operations incidental to the making of a shoe will be
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