In the 1930's, Hitler kept a life-size photograph of Henry Ford in his Munich office. So deep was his admiration for the American industrialist that he wanted to model his entire nation on Ford's work practices. Such modeling was not new, decades before, the Kaisers' officers had observed Ringling Brothers' build-up and breakdown-crews in order to better train their soldiers.
The 1930s production line and trophy engineering projects held a peculiar fascination for the Kali Yuga regimes of national and communist socialism, who liked to reduce humans to machine-like roles, always obeying, never questioning, or tiring. Stakanov was the model Russian worker who always (publicly) exceeded his quotas.
Ford himself was a social pioneer (also later disavowing his anti semitism and links to Hitler), allowing his American workers shorter hours and the possibility of buying the cars for themselves, coming into line with Dwapara Yuga. However, the production lines meant a move from craftsmanship and creativity towards deskilled, repetitive tasks along the new lines of Taylor's 'scientific management' and studies like the 'Hawthorne effect'. In Russia and Germany, slave laborers filled the factories. Much of Japan's industrial revitalization after the war was associated with empowering individual workers around quality and ownership (reversing the dehumanizing trend ).
Through the 1950s with the growth of so-called professional management, greater and greater emphasis was given to bureaucracies and accounting, reducing individuals to mere cogs in great machines. The symbol of the era was the IBM salesman and his funereal dark suit, keeping clients locked-in and ' true-blue' with mainframe temples (glasshouses, amusingly British Army Slang for Prison) dictating behavior from insurance companies to the jungles of Vietnam.
With wider computerization in the late 1980s, computing power escaped the glasshouses doing away with many low-end production line roles and clerical tasks such as typing and records keeping. As the power and communications abilities of computers increased in the late 1990s, the white collar world was affected as journalists, researchers and consultants, for example, found themselves being replaced by cheaper alternatives in developing nations.
In our era, the model for the company worker is no longer the dumb machine of the 1930s but the supposedly infallible, always on-computer, as employees are deluged with ever more requests for work performed to exacting standards, and connected to their places of employment in the evenings, weekends and over vacations, with replacements ready in the wings in case they 'wear or breakdown'.
However, with so many skills and capabilities now pure commodities (with an implicit race for the bottom in pricing, occasionally even at good quality) it is human ingenuity and creativity that are at a premium as never before. Microsoft who defined the early PC era are increasingly seen as dinosaurs with their only two successfull products ever, Windows and Office, near unchanged after 20 years (beyond logos, packaging and behind the scenes intimidation and Nokia's operating system is actually the most common in the world) and companies like Google, although current stock market darlings, were recently forced to try to capture the ideas of even the most junior employees lest they go to build their nemeses, who may be just 'one click away', like Wolfram Alpha, say.
In parallel, with ever more emphasis on testing in US schools, leading to SATs, GMATs, GREs and the like, derivatives of the IQ tests once used to decide who would be sterilized or not in the US and Nazi Germany of the early 20th century, a workforce is being prepared for yesterday's roles, when today's are much more in line with languages, music and arts with the technical aspects easily handled by computerization. The lunatic who attacked the Holocaust museum in the US recently was very proud of his Mensa credentials yet it was symbolic of his unbalanced nature.
We are not computers, or machines like Vaucanson's automatons. In Dwapara Yuga, as Yogananda's teachings (although not his organization, sadly modeled after his death on big business 'efficiency' with standardized lectures and the like) emphasize, it is creativity and individualism, sparks of the divine that need to be cultivated and not stamped out in the name of collectivism, which serves only its leaders.
Workers of the world, meditate, compose, paint ... and blog! You have nothing to lose but the chains of Kali Yuga thought forms :)
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