SOME LIKE IT, AND SOME DON'T

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 204, 21 May 1943, Page 6

SOME LIKE IT, AND SOME DON'T

"[HE Listener" recently printed "certain basic conclusions" from a research conducted into the use of music in industry in England. Since that article appeared, we have sought the comments of employers and employees at several New Zealand factories

Tobacco Factory IRST we chose a tobacco factory where, someone had told us, the workers had music to lighten their labour. Half-way down a passage a window slid back and a man looked out from over a sign marked "Timekeeper." "Y’m from The Listener. I want to ask about the music they have in the factory." "Want to sell him some records?" "No, no; I’ve got nothing to sell." So we were permitted an audience. At a point of vantage from which four fairly big work rooms could be seen (one of them through a well in the floor), we found a sort of glass cockpit-office with the overseer’s desk as its main piece of furniture, and an amplifier and a pile of records taking up most of the rest of the space. From this point, wiring led to three loudspeakers with baffle boards to carry the music to women who were stripping tobacco, feeding it into processing machines, tending conveyor belts or cigarettemaking machines, or packing roll-your-own tobacco into cartons. "How do you operate this music," we asked the forewoman. "Do you limit the use of the machine to any particular times? Do you make up any special sort of programmes? Who paid for all these records? What’s the most popular record at the moment?" The machine was installed by the firm, and the girls brought their own records. Collections had been taken up at times but generally a girl brought in a new record, it was played to death by a procedure of request performing, and then perhaps taken home again. "Then there’s no limit to the use of the amplifier, and they have it on just when they want to?" "Yes. The girls can ask for any one of the records to be put on, and one of

a certain number of the senior women can come in and fix it up. Swing’s the most popular, of course, and they’ve no time for this classical music, you know. What they want is crooning and all that; Jazz and waltzes, a bit of everything really." And we left the tobacco factory with a new recording of the Blue Danube over-riding the noise of light machinery and 250 busy pairs of hands. Music for Milliners ALLING at a hat factory, we asked for the proprietor, and as he opened the door we saw rows of girls at tables with high piles of hats, blue, brown, red, each one performing a single operation to hat after hat of the same pattern. "From The Listener .. . understand you have a radio . . . what they like best . . . does it help things? .. ." He spluttered for a moment, waved his hands in front of his face. Then: "You can take the dumb thing away and smash it. That’s what J think." "Don’t you like it? What’s the matter? Programmes?" "Dumb rotten." "What do you have it for, then?" "If you don’t have the radio on the girls want to talk, and if they want to talk they have to shout to be heard over the noise. Put the radio on and they shut their traps." So we left the hat factory. "The Same as at Home" SOFT-GOODS factory where we knew they had a radio was a little too far out of town, so we rang them up. One of the girls in the workroom told us about it: . "Yes, we just turn it on all day. We put it on 2YA when Aunt Daisy’s on and back to 2ZB when the classical hour comes; you know, just the same as you do at home." Definite Ideas So far we hadn’t spoken to anyone who was likely to have very definite ideas on the aspects of the subject which

the BBC had investigated. We had seen people working at dull, monotonous tasks, some of them on piece-work, to judge by the rate at which their hands were moving, and where the noise of machinery was not too great, music was plainly a diversion and a_ relaxation, something to make the job pleasanter. But the manager of a radio manufacturing concern, where half the workers are now on direct munitions work, had read the subject up, and had seen The Listener’s article and editorial. "There’s a lot of hooey been talked about it. Some people, perhaps with business experience, but not much of that, have been put in charge of installing radios or amplifiers in factories and have been full of enthusiasm when reporting on their results, but not so full of real understanding. The. point is that music in a factory is only one of dozens of different factors which can affect production by way of the general attitude of the workers, and it just isn’t possible to single (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) out music as the thing that has pepped up output, unless you can establish that all other things have been equal. Personal grudges, minor inconveniences, all sorts of things that you can’t take into account will affect output when they’re piled up in a large number of workers. I remember seeing an article in an American magazine showing how in one big electrical factory in the States they set up a separate unit to supply entertainment for the workers and then began to study the results. Output went up and up. They added some further benefit, and results mounted. They tacked on something more to improve the service and things got even better. Then suddenly they wiped it all out and went right back to where they’d started, just for an experiment. And it made no difference at all! Probably the sense of participating in an experiment and perhaps increasing experience could have accounted for the whole illusions. Anyway I think a lot more importance has been attached to the idea in some quarters than it deserves."