Early Industry Expert Soon Realized a StaffHas Its Own EfficiencyNovember 6, 2006;PageB1

"Hardly a competent workman can be found in a large establishment who does not devote a considerable part of his time to studying just how slow he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace."
It's the age-old lament of managers, as expressed by Frederick W. Taylor, an industrial engineer and so-called father of scientific management, who inspired America's efficiency craze in the early 20th century. Mr. Taylor didn't think much of the common laborer's work ethic. Where machines could run steadily for 24 hours, their human operators would "soldier" -- deliberately slow their pace.
"The tendency of the average man is toward working at a slow, easy gait," he said.
Mr. Taylor also believed that workers could be motivated only by money. But if they were paid a flat day rate, they had no incentive to produce more than yesterday. If they were paid by the piece, they knew from experience their employer would likely cut the piece rate. "When a naturally energetic man works for a few days beside a lazy one," Mr. Taylor wrote, "the logic of the situation is unanswerable. 'Why should I work hard when that lazy fellow gets the same pay I do and does only half the work?'"
Mr. Taylor, who in 1874 decided to apprentice as a metal worker instead of going to Harvard, hypothesized that workers could be retooled like machines, their physical and mental gears recalibrated for better productivity.
In his first experiments, at a midsize Philadelphia steel company, all jobs were timed -- often with a hidden stopwatch -- and then deconstructed into their smallest elements. Wasted motions and avoidable interruptions were eliminated. Using rules of science, not rule of thumb, management found the "one best way" to do every job, even such a basic task as shoveling.
"It must be perfectly evident that there is a maximum shovel load, a load of so many pounds resting on the shovel, at which a man will do the greatest amount of work," Mr. Taylor said. "We had to find out just what that load was for a first-class man. We found that it was about 21½ pounds. A first-class man, well built for shoveling, a skillful shoveler, would do more work with 21½ pounds than with 18 pounds or 24 pounds."
After the job was standardized, all the elements were added together to make a "fair day's work," a hitherto subjective judgment on which managers and labor unions rarely agreed.
"You have been quarreling because there have been no proper standards for a day's work," Mr. Taylor chided bosses. "You do not know what a proper day's work is. We make a bluff at it and the other side makes a guess at it, and then we fight."
The second part of Mr. Taylor's system was a task-bonus wage plan. Each worker was given a daily production target. If he made it, he got a high price per piece. If he failed, he received a much lower rate. At one machine shop, for example, Mr. Taylor set a rate of 35 cents apiece if the machinist finished 10 pieces a day, 25 cents if he finished nine or fewer.
Skeptical manufacturers wondered whether better productivity would be more than offset by higher wages. Mr. Taylor's answer: If his time study had been carried out correctly, it would be very difficult for a worker to beat the target.
Mr. Taylor persuaded several large companies to adopt his system, with varying success. It was a slow and painful process convincing workers only to do, not to think. Many manufacturing employees were first-generation immigrants from Germany and Great Britain, where work had traditionally been associated with subjective and independent craftsmanship. Union leaders denounced Taylorism as inhumane, and bills were introduced in both houses of Congress forbidding the use of stopwatches in government work.
Mr. Taylor's system might have ended up on the towering junk heap of short-lived management fads except for the highly publicized Eastern Rate Case. In 1910, after the railroads awarded their workers a wage hike, the operators requested a compensatory increase in their regulated shipping rates. A group of eastern trade associations, trying to keep down their shipping costs, retained Louis Brandeis to argue before the Interstate Commerce Commission the railroads didn't need more income, they needed to make their operations more efficient. In fact, Mr. Brandeis argued, the railroads could save $1 million a day simply by using the principles of scientific management.
The rate increase was rejected, and the public was entranced; everything from schools to churches to households could be operated more efficiently.
But as Mr. Taylor should have known, his system was doomed in all but a few settings. Soldiering was a force of nature, not subject to human rules of science. "Rates of work are not determined by chance or by the quirks of individual personality," wrote Hugh G. J. Aitken in "Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal," his 1960 study. "A norm of output is a universal feature of all organized groups, set and maintained by the group itself and often defended by highly effective sanctions."
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