Machine Western Electric de Cicero

The factory Western Electric de Cicero is an important research center and of telephone manufacture of material, located at Cicero, in the western suburbs of Chicago (the United States). This factory, which was in activity of 1904 with 1984, belonged to the Western Electric Company, subsidiary company industrial of American Bell Telephones Company, become later American Telegraph and Telephone Company or AT&T. The factory Western Electric de Cicero was known under the name of Hawthorne Works .

It was, during one half-century, the largest factory of the world for the telephone manufacture of material and one of the largest factories of the United States.

Origins

The Western Electric Company, founded in 1872 in Chicago and repurchased in 1881 by American Bell Telephones Company, had a factory in Chicago, on the streets Clinton and Van Buren, which employed more 5 000 people in 1900, but proved to be insufficient to face the telephone increasing demand of material. Also the founder and chair Western Electric Company, Enos Barton, transferred in 1904 his production in new and vast industrial complex located in the western suburbs from Chicago, in Cicero, a still rural community, with strong population of Czech and Polish origin.

The Hawthorne factory was almost self-sufficing: it had its own powerplant, a hospital, a brigade of firemen, a laundry, greenhouses and its own rail network. The factory of Cicero gathered all the industrial operations before carried out in the factories of Chicago and New York, so that in 1914 it was the only factory of the Electric Western.

The apogee

In 1917, the factory employed 17 000 people, and 30 000 in 1925. At that time, Hawthorne Works provided 90 % of the telephone equipment used in the United States. A certain number of technological innovations were carried out there, as the electron tube (vacuum tube), the microphone with condenser and of the radio operator systems for planes.

In 1929, the factory employed 34 100 people, but during the Great Depression of the Thirties, of the thousands of employees were laid off and there remained nothing any more but 15 about it; 000 in 1939.

The businesses began again vigorously during the Second world war, in particular thanks to the manufacture of Radar S. Plus 40 000 workers were occupied in Cicero. Supplier of the American army, the factory of Cicero then started to engage Afro-Americans.

Experiments of Hawthorne

Of 1927 with 1932, research were led to the Hawthorne factory on the relations between the environment and the labor productivity. They related initially to the improvement of lighting then on other aspects of the environment of the work stations. But at the end of three years of experience and of observations, the results obtained were not very convincing.

Under the direction of Elton Mayo, a new research team put itself then at work. By different methods, iIs discovered that the increase in the productivity was initially related to human factors. Interviews of all the employees of the factory made it possible to better include/understand the attitudes of the workers towards the direction and the practices of the framing. The Electric Western used these results to improve the work conditions, the techniques of framing and its relationships to the personnel.

Other research showed that changes in the organization of work could even cause a drop in the productivity, because they broke the dynamics of the human relations existing inside a group. The interpersonal relationships between the workmen on the one hand and the workmen and the framing on the other hand had a direct influence on the moral one and indirectly on the productivity.

The Hawthorne Studies had a durable impact on industrial psychology, the staff management and the organization of the companies.

Decline

In the Fifties and Sixties, the factory of Cicero lost of its importance within the Electric Western, which had multiplied the production units through all United States. In 1970, the factory occupied nothing any more but 25 000 of the 190 000 employees of the company in the world. At this point in time the quasi-monopoly which AT&T in the United States enjoyed was broken by the federal Commission of the communications.

The Western Electric Company became AT&T Technologies in an economic context and technological in rapid evolution. In 1980, 7 500 people still worked on the site ; 4 000 in 1983. The factory of Cicero was definitively closed in 1984.

Sources

History of the Western Electric Company

External bonds

the Western Electric Co. on Encyclopedia off Chicago in line

Hawthorne Works Museum (virtual museum of the factory, photographs)

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