Many people come home from work physically and emotionally exhausted. For those who are lucky enough to avoid abusive bosses and chaotic work settings, overwork can still be a serious obstacle in the quest for dignity at work. Although workdays have shortened appreciably since the sixteen-hour days of the early industrial revolution, overwork continues to be a problem for many. An easy way for companies to increase their competitiveness, and their profits, is to demand longer hours and greater effort from their employees. Greater effort and longer hours are frequently offered as solutions to heightened global competitiveness, but at great cost in terms of human exhaustion and misery.

Assembly work, in which the division of labor is pushed to extreme levels, is the locus of some of the most concerted efforts to intensify work to the limits of human endurance. In this chapter we examine the nature of assembly work and the experiences of those who do assembly work. We also examine the responses of employees to the challenges of assembly work. In this and subsequent chapters we also examine the problems of overwork for nonassembly workers as well.

Assembly work can be organized either around a moving conveyor line or around stationary workbenches. On an assembly line, the work is brought by a continuously moving conveyor line directly to the worker, who stands in a single position and completes one or more tasks on each item as it passes.