Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  The surest sign of trouble for a worker was when he lost his office. “I came back to the home office,” one Kodak employee recalled, in the midst of the mass layoffs of the 1980s, “and I knew that the company had really changed. My office in Texas was as big as a living room, and I had a secretary in a private office outside. When I went back to Rochester, I had a cubicle. I could hear the two people alongside me, and could hear the secretary who sat nearby.”39 Peters and Waterman, and Ouchi as well, might have argued for a loose, open-plan arrangement for the newly competitive American economy. Instead, corporations responded by giving a privileged elite the few remaining offices while cramming everyone else into partitioned spaces.

  The fierce and unyielding new corporate ethos had changed the image of the cubicle. As we remember from Propst, those three walls had once been meant to liberate office workers, to guarantee them autonomy and freedom. But they had finally taken on the image that they have today: the flimsy, fabric-wrapped, half-exposed stall where the white-collar worker waited out his days until, at long last, he was laid off. The media caught on. In news stories the word “cubicle” rarely appeared in dignified solitude; instead, it was prefaced with some inevitable epithet: “windowless” or “dreary,” “cubicle warrens,” “bull pens,” or “infernos.” People labored in “cube farms” and were stuck next to each other in six-by-six standard sets known as six-packs. Douglas Coupland’s epoch-defining book, Generation X, coined the phrase “veal-fattening pen” and provided a mock-serious “dictionary” definition: “Small, cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small pre-slaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.”

  To add insult to injury, they shrank. According to a BusinessWeek editorial from 1997, between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s the average size of a cubicle decreased between 25 and 50 percent. Ironically, the editorial was spurred by BusinessWeek’s editorial staff being “informed that most of us will lose our private offices in a year or two. This prompted a closer look at cubicles,” they wrote, “which are occupied by some 35 million of the 45 million white-collar workers in this country.”40 BW forecast only half humorously that at those rates the average cubicle in 2097 would be eight square feet. By 2006, when the average cubicle was seventy-five square feet, half of Americans would report that they believed their bathroom was larger than their cubicle; one wonders to what extent the extravagant growth of the American bathroom, and of the suburban home in general, is partly a reaction against the shrinking of cubicles, where the owners of those bathrooms spend so much of their time.41 Still others, more melodramatically, compared cubicles to prisons. Rushing to help this analogy was the fact that certain prison systems, such as that in Texas, responded to overcrowding by redesigning their jails along the lines of an open-plan office, replete with cubicle partitions.42 Prison inmates employed by the company with the classic 1990s name Unicor (combined words were always the sign of a merger) were set to work manufacturing cubicle walls and occasionally the chairs that people sat in in those cubicles.43 At night, while others left their cubicles to go back home, some prisoners by contrast left the manufacturing plant to go back to their cubicles.

  Complaints about the office environment began to mushroom. Cubicles restricted air circulation and made workers sick (this was called sick building syndrome).44 Bosses were enriching their own offices with wood-trim furnishings and credenzas while foisting more cubicles on their employees.45 Apple’s workers stayed home because they couldn’t work in their cubicles; as a result, Apple eliminated cubicles.46 In one company seeking to get rid of cubicles, the workers were afraid of losing their minimal bit of privacy.47 Employees of IBM found themselves crammed into ever smaller cubicles; they believed that the company was making its cubicles so small and miserable that people would never come to work and it wouldn’t have to spend money on office space.48

  It was in the midst of the great cubing of America that its poet arrived, with the unassuming, appropriately bland name Scott Adams. In the mid-1990s, his comic, Dilbert, provided a kind of solace to millions of white-collar workers by converting day after day of fungible dullness into concise, portable satire. It satirized the office world with necessary self-deprecation—for to be its protagonist, Dilbert, as everyone was and is Dilbert, was to be hastily sketched, basically featureless, and frankly doomed. “I worked in a cubicle for seventeen years,” Adams wrote in The Dilbert Principle, his monster best-seller book of cartoons and fake business advice. “Most business books are written by consultants and professors who haven’t spent much time in a cubicle. That’s like writing a firsthand account of the experience of the Donner party based on the fact that you’ve eaten beef jerky. Me, I’ve gnawed an ankle or two.”49 Just as important as its being true to life was the fact that Dilbert came in a form—the daily comic—that could match the pounding regularity of office routine. It arrived early every morning, just like the white-collar worker, and gave that worker something to look forward to. Even the three panels of the newspaper strip were turned to a purpose, mimicking as they did the contours—even the three-wall shape—of cubicle life: cramped, square, colorless, and infinitely replicable. Soon Dilbert was accommodating itself to the office it satirized in all kinds of ways. It turned out that Propst’s tackboards, which were meant to create individuality, were best used as spaces for clipped Dilbert cartoons. It soon became a cliché fixture of the office environment, with ubiquitous desk calendars, coffee mugs, mouse pads, and plush toys (all available in the online store’s Cubeware section of the Web site). At the end of his life, Propst was being prodded for being responsible for Dilbert. “I don’t even feel faintly guilty about Dilbert,” Propst said. “The things expressed in that comic are the very things we were trying to relieve and move beyond. It was a Dilbert world even back then. Everything we worked toward tries to express something more interesting.”50

  Imagine what it was like to work in a typical office during the first years of the personal computer. Many people don’t have to imagine: they were there; or perhaps some workplaces have changed so little that their current setups closely approximate those early days. The blinding glare of fluorescence doesn’t compensate for the lack of natural light; the recycled atmosphere is stuffy, even poisonous. Thanks to the energy crisis of the 1970s, buildings have been shut up and sealed against too much sun or fresh air; chemicals from carpeting and construction materials, like asbestos and formaldehyde, circulate with impunity, along with airborne illness.51 The chatty atmosphere of the open plan might once have made it hard to concentrate; now the conspicuous silence hovering over the partitions, interrupted only by the tapping of keys, comes from the enforcement of surveillance. Machines ensure that data-entry clerks type their minimum of keystrokes per second; talking, let alone getting up to take a walk, results in error. Even the green characters of the visual display terminal of the new personal computer suggest some kind of menace; reports in the news appear daily about their potential radiation hazards and about women who have had miscarriages thanks to them.

  Computers and automation had brought the blues to the white-collar workplace. Office worker apathy had been growing for some time, especially among the clerical ranks. An extraordinarily candid report from 1972 commissioned by the Nixon administration, Work in America, offered a bleak confirmation of worker discontent, whether at the assembly line or in front of a typewriter. (For this reason, Nixon attempted to suppress the contents of the report.) “Secretaries, clerks, and bureaucrats were once grateful for having been spared the dehumanization of the factory,” wrote the authors of the report. But, they said, “the office today, where work is segmented and authoritarian, is often a factory. For a growing number of jobs, there is little to distinguish them but the color of the worker’s collar: computer keypunch operations and typing pools share much in common with the automobile assembly-line.”52 Clerical worker pay had dipped below that of average blue-collar prod
uction workers. Turnover rates were high; union membership was growing. Managers were well aware of the apathy. A survey indicated that they believed office workers were producing at only 55 percent of their potential. One of the reasons they cited was “boredom with repetitive jobs.”53

  The effect of the personal computer was equivocal: the sort of deeply transformative item that also seemed to leave everything pretty much the same. One of its achievements was to break the “office monogamy” (as the journalist Barbara Garson has called it) between secretaries and their bosses—the old “office wife” relationship that had held steady since the earliest days of women’s entry into the workforce. Companies like IBM began to promote the concept of an “administrative support center,” where “word originators” (managers) could send their requests to be filled by “specialists” (typists on word processors). Of course typing pools had always existed, and even the noise wasn’t diminished by word processors. “The printing out is so steady … it gets to you more than a whole room of old-fashioned typewriters,” one word-processing specialist said.54 But the level of control offered by clusters of word processors was greater. Keystrokes could be monitored and an employee’s progress and speed measured. Whatever personal control the old secretarial relationship seemed to offer was stripped from the job. In one sense, this was a kind of liberation from old strictures; in another, it led to not more control by the staff but less.

  One would think it was only a matter of time before the soullessness of the new workplace would have prompted revolts by the disgruntled: workers parking their cars in executive spots, smashing their VDTs, and tearing down their cubicle walls and using them to erect barricades. And in a few cases, there were office shootings, prompting the brief media buzz phrase “cubicle rage.” More often, however—in typical office worker, or perhaps American, fashion—resistance to routine and work degradation usually took the form of apathy and foot-dragging, stealing time and control over one’s work rather than demanding it. Clerks in Citibank bank-card-processing centers, forced to deal with customer calls in under two minutes, would often hang up on their customers in order to beat the clock. Or insurance claims processors could type fake data into their computers to meet their quota for the day. People in offices everywhere are still familiar with this kind of everyday resistance to routine.55

  Resistance of that kind naturally remained limited, infrequent, and disorganized. The office that emerged from the 1980s, however lean and mean it was, did offer a new sense of “entrepreneurial” possibility to a handful of people, and for many this seemed to be enough. The newsmagazine trend-spotting figure of the age, “the yuppie,” corresponded to a real social type. Looser banking regulations, crushed unions, and granite skyscrapers combined to give corporate life a peculiar feel of exhilaration for the people whose voices were the loudest in sanctioning the transfigured, deindustrializing American economy. The correlate to pervasive insecurity among the mass of workers was euphoria among a handful of executives. With middle management in decline, organizations seemed to be more open to merit. The hope that you might rise out of the crowd, through the skillful manipulation of office politics, and into the executive suite became stronger for those not already overwhelmed by apathy. This prevailing belief held offices together in a way vastly more powerful than any mechanical surveillance installed in the new computer systems.

  The yuppies, or what sociologists have called the “professional-managerial class,” tended not to complain about cubicles; or they knew that they would eventually make it out of one of them into an office. Investment banking—until the 1980s, a relatively staid and dull profession—became the signature industry of the time. As Karen Ho has shown in her granular, sensitive anthropology of bankers, Liquidated, the frenzied culture of banking has been part of its mystique since the shareholder value revolution: insane work hours on trading floors that crammed people together, most of them men, sometimes in six-by-six modules with low partitions, made the atmosphere of banking offices legendarily heated and fratty. The investment bank that Ho observed was typical: a “bull pen” like the American plans of yore, with a plastic gate affixed to the entrance of the hallway as a kind of joke. “Inside the gate, cramped desks, shelves, and floors overflowed with pitch books, PowerPoint presentations, and old binders of previous deal books, not to mention soda cans, footballs, gym bags, weights, change of clothes, deodorant, and an extra suit hanging just in case.”56 Bankers were increasingly recruited from top universities, which took the place of the “old boys’ networks” that had hitherto populated the ranks of finance, and they brought into the workplace a cult of “smartness”: one part recognizable intelligence mixed with several parts attitude and “master of the universe” confidence. Smartness had surmounted bureaucracy.

  The importance of intelligence in the new “knowledge” workplace was a theme of Working Girl, which opens in a messy, male-dominated banking office not unlike the one Ho described in Liquidated. But Tess McGill leaves the workplace and ends up working for a woman. Initially her boss, Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), appears to be interested in her thoughts. “I welcome your ideas and I want to see hard work rewarded. It’s a two-way street on my team,” she says. It’s one of the film’s many pungent evocations of canned business-speak, and it’s because it’s canned that we the audience (if not Tess herself) can immediately scent the pure bull; it’s not too long before we see Katharine stealing all of Tess’s good ideas. Tess’s real breakthrough only comes when Katharine gets injured in a skiing accident abroad, and Tess gets to pretend that she is her boss. She lives in Katharine’s apartment, dresses in Katharine’s clothes, shows up to parties that Katharine is invited to, and even sneaks into a wedding that neither she nor Katharine is invited to, all to talk to big shots who otherwise wouldn’t bother to learn her name. At the end of the film, her game exposed, a high-placed investor offers her a manager’s job because of her “gumption.” Office politics, the film seems to say, can be such a skillful game that playing it well is often counted as a kind of merit.

  There was another factor that the office could count on its side: isolation. Whatever the terrors of assembly-line work, it had the unintended effect of forcing people together on the same shop floor. Workers often entered and left at the same time, and they spent day after day together. Few had any illusions of getting “promoted” to the head of their factory. This was a situation where people might get organized, or could at least speak to each other on a regular basis. Office work tended to siphon people off from each other. The individualism inherent in the office—something managers have counted on since the union upsurge in the 1930s, as we’ve already seen—also found its expression in work and design. Being tied to a computer could mean, as boosters often argued, that one was connected to an invisible network much larger and more powerful than any series of merely personal relationships. But in daily practice, and certainly before the spread of the Internet and the laptop computer, one was more often stuck at a VDT the way one would be chained to an assembly line. And the range of activities that most people could do on a computer was highly limited—as limited, in its way, as a ledger was to the bookkeeping staff of a Taylorist office in the 1920s. The cubicle had the effect of putting people close enough to each other to create serious social annoyances, but dividing them so that they didn’t actually feel that they were working together. It had all the hazards of privacy and sociability but the benefits of neither. It got so bad that nobody wanted them taken away; even those three walls offered some kind of psychological home, a place one could call one’s own. All of these factors could deepen the frenzied solitude of an office worker.

  And yet, despite everything, discontent did brim over into protest, and it began in the place where the work was dullest and most routine and therefore, paradoxically perhaps, togetherness was strongest: the secretarial typing pool. For generations herded together in vast caverns and condemned to positions above which they could never rise, secretaries had the strong
est claim to being the office proletariat. There was the deep and enduring crime, too, of their sex preventing them from enjoying anything resembling equal opportunity in the workplace. The few male secretaries would receive higher pay for the same work and get to skip the degrading kinds of harassment that were de rigueur for their female counterparts—the kind that, just a few years before, Helen Gurley Brown had told them to turn to their advantage.

  The signs of discontent were few and scattered, but thanks to tremendous media coverage they began to seem like a groundswell. In the infamous 1968 protest against the Miss America Pageant, more than a hundred women tossed their symbols of subjection into the trash—and among the thickly padded bras, fake eyelashes, gushing women’s magazines, lay many steno pads and typing manuals.57 The symbolic protests grew. Soon others began shirking the one duty expected of every secretary: getting coffee for their bosses. In 1973, Leonor Pendleton was fired for—in the words of her bosses—“incompetence, insubordination, and failure to comply with job instructions.” In the words of her attorney, it was her refusal “to follow a sexist practice based on the erroneous stereotype that only females, even in their employment situation, should perform household chores.”58 It turned out that Pendleton, one of the secretaries in the all-female secretarial staff of her office, had refused to make coffee and wash the dishes. A secretary in a naval air station was fired in the same year for failing to make coffee. In 1975 another was stopped in the hallway by a man she didn’t know asking her to get “four regulars,” which she refused. The man turned out to be her vice president; she was terminated twenty minutes later.59

  What was it about making coffee—or the failure to do it—that made workers and their bosses so upset? For secretaries, it was one of the features of their job that virtually no secretarial manual spoke of; it was simply assumed that as “office wives” they would know to do it. It was just an expectation, one that went hand in hand with the expectation of harassment. “My boss expected me to get his coffee and lunch and run his personal errands during my lunch hour,” a secretary at CBS said. “He constantly cracked jokes about my (and every other secretary’s) legs, hips, and breasts, and so did the other men.”60 Another secretary pointed out that it seemed to be the way things were always done: