JOB EMBROIDERY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 225, 23 September 1938, Page 13

JOB EMBROIDERY.

THE CIVIL SERVICE.

RED TAPE IN EXCELSIS

WHERE INTEIXIOENOfi IS BTBANGLED. (By DQUOLAS COMPTOX-TAMKS, Late Inland Revenue Department.) LONDON. There is to' be an economy drive in the Civil Service. I know what that means. Coarse scratchy paper will be substituted for smooth, white paper; stationery repositions will be automatically reduced by 20 per cent until, in self-defence, the requisition el?rk learns to order 20 per cent more than he needs. And so on.

Economy campaigns in the Civil Service always result in a reduction of materials and often enough the attempt to practise material economy creates waste.

During the great economy drive of 1920-30 I looked round my own branch office to see where and how f could effect savings. One of the minor points that struck me was the inability of a woman to sharpen a pencil. Typists and women clerks would often cut half a pencil away in a vain effort to produce a point. It was a trivial matter, but it was occurring daily in seven hundred tax offices.

On my next stationery requisition I ordered some pencil-sharpeners. The economy "expert" at Somerset House returned the requisition with the following note:—"Re pencil-sharpeners— for what purpose are these required?" There followed a long argument by correspondence which resulted in a victory for "economy" and as far as I know tax office typists are still whittling pencils away with p> .llmives or persuading male clerks to sharpen their pencils for them. Imagine that—not a single official pencil / arpener among the whole staff of the Board of Inland Revenue.

The waste of materials, however, is not nearly so important a problem as the waste of man-power. The largest single source of waste in the public service is the old Civil Service custom of "embroidering the job." An Exhausting Day. There are two distinct kinds of job embroidery—psychological and physical. I met psychological embroidery on the very first day of my service when I reported for duty as a registered boy clerk. My immediate superior was a senior second division clerk, whose work consisted of comparing cheques with the details on a list. When he had satisfied himself that each cheque was correct as to name, amount and reference number, he initialled it. At the end of the morning's work he would lean back in his padded chair and close his eyes, as though worn out with the heavy responsibilities that were his. Recuperation in the restaurant (and subsequently the bar) occupied him until 3 p.m., when he reappeared to tidy up his desk. For this work he received the pre-war salary of £350 a year. That was in 1913, but throughout the whole of my twenty-ihree years' service under the Government I found job embroidery in every department and branch.

It takes a fresh mind to spot these embroideries, but the only fresh minds who make contact with his Civil Servants are new entrants with no authority By the time they achieve authority they are broken in by the twin steam-rollers of tradition and precedent. All civil servants are subject to certain occupational diseases, of which "groove-blindness" —the inability to see beyond the confines of a particular job ; 9 the most common. You cannot criticise the civil servant for succumbing to groove-blindness any more than you can blame the coalminer for developing nystagmus. The system is at fault, not the individuals.

Tricks and Tickets. Civil servants enter the service as intelligent units, but the majority of the | new ideas they propound are strangled at birth in red tape. New entrants are speedily trained to accept as inevitable circumstances that are patently ridiculous. Indeed, any civil Bervant who persists in displaying marked originality is likely to get himself into serious trouble. Thus, some of the best brains in Great Britain are gradually moulded into the amorphous, muddling masa of mediocrity that is the British Civil Service of to-day. Physical embroidery comprises the trick of adding ornamental details for the purpose of puffng out a part-time j«b to a full-time job. This habit is often most difficult to detect and check. In one office I had working under me a woman clerk whose output was good but who never seemed to be able to settle a case. She was » prodigious letter writer, occupying a considerable part of a shorthand-typist's time with her correspondence. It fell to me to check her work, and I must admit that I was very favourably impressed with her correspondence. It was always well written -nd nicely phrased. After I had spent some weeks in signing her letters I began to suspect

that many of her comments and questions were superfluous, and after checking a number of her cases back to first principles, thio suspicion was confirmed. This clerk was unconsciously embroidering her job and at the same time giving the impression that she was a fast and clever worker.

The "ticket"' system introduced in some dej>artmer.ts as a means of getting more work out of the staff sometimes has the reverse effect. The idea is to fix - a minimum output of work per man and to insist on each man producing that minimum. In one office the work consisted of calculating answers to arithmetical sums, such as 2543 tons of coal at 39/9 a ton, less 5J per cent. I'wo hundred such computations a day was the "ticket."

One of the new entrants started on this job turned out to be a mathematical prodigy, and it was not long before he discovered a short cut. Bv writing down two lines of figures and drawing a vertical "anchor" in some special way, he had the answer.

He knew perfectly well that this unorthodox form of computation would never pass his superior officer, who was supposed to check 10 per cent of the calculations, so he embroidered all his spare time by writing out the full computations in beautifullv-formed figures, salving his own conscience with the plea that hi* short cut needed elieckinanvwav. °