Robert Owen and the Silent Monitor
Patron Saints of organisational weirdness #1
Welcome to the first in an occasional series of profiles of the people who have contributed to the weird working cultures we have today: the Patron Saints of organisational weirdness.
Today we are meeting Robert Owen, a prodigious social reformer, mill owner, early co-operative living advocate and “Britain’s first socialist”. He was born in 1771, a child of the industrial revolution. He was the son of a saddler and ironmonger, by 10 years old an apprentice draper, and by 20 he was running a cotton mill in Manchester1.
He joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and was part of what must have been a really exciting scene of social reformers in a time of huge change. The 1790s saw the fallout from the French Revolution, the industrial revolution causing massive change (and deep social unrest), and big shifts in the role of religion. Thomas Paine published the Rights of Man in 1791, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women came out in 1792.
Against this backdrop of huge change, Owen became the owner (by marrying the existing owners’ daughter) of New Lanark cotton mills in Scotland in 1799. This was more than a business opportunity for him and he saw the potential for social change:
“My intention was not merely to be a manager of cotton mills but to change the conditions of the people who were surrounded by circumstances having an injurious influence on the character of the entire population”.
He believed that people’s characters were formed by their environments, so the working environment was important. We should remember that the cotton his mills were processing was grown by enslaved Africans in the West Indies and the American South. The wealth that funded this wave of social reform in the UK was acquired through stolen labour. I don’t want to denigrate him and his achievements but this pattern of caring more about the people you can see than those further away feels like another thing that has rippled out across our different organisational cultures.
He was serious about social change, though. He embarked on a series of social experiments at New Lanark - calling it “the most important experiment for the happiness of the human race that has yet been instituted in any part of the world”. He invested in improving houses and roads and shortening the working day (to just 10.5 hours from a more usual 15). He is now seen as a pioneer of early education - opening a workplace nursery school, and making sure all children under 10 were in formal education. His campaign to raise the minimum age of all workers up to 10 years old and limit their working day to 10 hours was seen as “too advanced” for Parliament (this was a time children as young as five or six regularly worked in mills across the country)
All of which to say, if you had to work in a cotton mill in the early 1800s, you probably wanted to work in Robert Owen’s cotton mill.
What we are interested in here, though, is what is often referred to as one of the first Human Resources Management practices. Because Owen believed that the wellbeing of workers was important, and that people’s characters were formed by their environments, he was very against the idea of corporal punishment. He needed a way of controlling his workers’ behaviour (there seems to have been quite a lot of turning up to work drunk) that didn’t involve physical punishment.
His innovation was the silent monitor: each worker had a four sided cube hanging above their workplace. The supervisor would turn the cube to a different side depending on the worker’s behaviour and effort the previous day. If it was on the white side, your behaviour had been excellent, yellow for good, blue for “indifferent”, and the black side represented bad behaviour.
The intention behind this public and transparent monitoring system was to encourage workers to do their best. I wonder how it felt for the workers - was it really an encouragement? Were there jokes about people making a blue amount of effort? Did people suck up to the supervisor to try and get the white side facing out? How did it feel to work all day with the black side of the cube hanging above you?
Some say that the silent monitor is the origin of the Scots term “black affronted” which means embarrassed or ashamed - and while it may have been far from Owen’s intention, I do wonder about the thread between the silent monitor and the culture of workplace surveillance we have today. Nowadays there are myriad ways employers can monitor employees - even when we are working from home. From timesheets to sales figures to being able to monitor in real time what someone is doing on their computer, employers have far more tools at their disposal than Owen could have dreamed of.
Owen was deeply invested in the moral character of his workers and many of his reforms had a deeply paternalistic flavour. He certainly saw his workers as more human and worthy of respect than many other employers did at the time, but equally part of why he created nursery schools was to get young children away from what he saw as the bad influence of their parents. He certainly didn’t feel that he could trust people to do a good job without a system of oversight and control.
It’s that attitude that permeates much modern surveillance and monitoring of employees. There are now many software solutions purporting to answer the question “How do you gauge a staff's work hours and productivity when you don't see each other regularly?” with intricate details about keystrokes and mouse movements. There is a similarly flourishing ecosystem of ways of evading this software.
Amazon, whose warehouses are maybe the cotton mills of the 21st century, has come under attack for excessive monitoring and surveillance of its workers. The fight to unionise Amazon workers focuses both on the “brutal” working conditions and the constant surveillance warehouse staff are under. Their time is tracked to the minute and managers are encouraged to identify the “top offenders” per shift who are spending “time off task”.
I can’t help but wonder what Robert Owen would think of these kind of workplaces. Would he agree that in general people can’t be trusted to work effectively (or at least not in places like warehouses and factories), and that regular monitoring is necessary? Or would he see these kind of intrusive practices as dehumanising?
We’ll never know, obviously - but it does feel like the thread that started in the New Lanark cotton mill has been woven into a more complex tapestry in the modern workplace. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a straightforward feedback system for your work (or home?) life, you can purchase a replica silent monitor here!
The Robert Owen Museum has a lovely detailed account of his life - he sounds like a fascinating character in lots of respects! He went on to found a utopian community in America as well as being seen as the father of the co-operative movement in many ways.