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Digital History ID 3172
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He revolutionized manufacturing
by insisting that managers should eliminate unnecessary motions
in order to increase output by workers. He gained national visibility
in 1910 when Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice,
said that his notions of scientific management could save railroad
companies $300 million a year.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was the first efficiency
expert. Using slow-motion photography and stop watches, he broke
down the production process into separate movements, then he redesigned
the work process to make it more efficient. His advocacy of scientific
management earned the admiration of Henry Ford, Benito Mussolini,
and Vladimir Lenin. But many workers condemned his time-and-motion
studies because his system sought to remove decision making from
labor and hand it over to management.
Before Taylor introduced scientific management onto the factory
floor, production was largely in the hands of skilled craftsmen,
who followed their own routines and worked at their own pace.
In the interest of increasing productivity, Taylor advised managers
to study, reorganize, and control the work process. The success
of his system, he wrote a Bethlehem Steel manager in 1906, required
that absolute control must reside in management. Each worker,
he said, must receive "clear-cut, definite instructions as
to just what he is to do and how he is to do it." His obsession
with efficiency spilled over into his family life, where he regimented
the lives of his adopted children. He convinced professional baseball
that pitching overhand was more efficient than throwing underhand.
Born into a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family, he attended
the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, and, after passing Harvard's
admission examination with distinction, apprenticed himself as
a pattern maker and machinist to a company that made hydraulic
pumps. He subsequently became a machinist at a steel company.
Soon, he became obsessed by the idea that management, applying
the principles of scientific management could organize the productive
process more efficiently, identify the one, best way to perform
a job, and increase workers' output. Factories, he believed, should
be organized like the military, with directions flowing from superiors
to subordinates. He recommended that bonuses go to workers who exceed
quotas.
Industry considered him a visionary who made factories more
productive by eliminating wasteful motion that allowed
the company to cut prices and raise wages. Management argued that
Taylor's emphasis on simplified production methods was essential
in dealing with a labor force that consisted of unskilled immigrant
workers with low proficiency in English. But his time-and-motion studies
enraged labor leaders who condemned him as a monster who valued
machine-like efficiency more than the health and well being of
labor. Trade unionists charged that his system reduced workers
to robots. Said one labor leader:
No tyrant or slave driver in the ecstasy of his most delirious
dream ever sought to place upon abject slaves a condition more
repugnant.
In 1910, a strike broke out at the Waterford Arsenal near Boston,
when a manager stood behind a worker with a stopwatch. Two years
later, a hostile Congressional committee held hearings about Taylorism.
The committee's chair condemned scientific management as undemocratic
and dehumanizing.
Although few companies used Taylor's ideas in their pure form,
the principles of scientific management were applied on assembly
lines, factory floors, secretarial pools, and housework. The relentless
quest for efficiency helped to fuel the great
gains in productivity in American industry during the 20th century. During World
War II, Taylor's principles of scientific management helped American
industry convert unskilled workers into welders and shipbuilders
in 60 to 90 days. But Taylor's techniques also exacted a cost,
increasing stress in the workplace, "de-skilling" manual
labor, and widening the gap between technical and manual work,
even as it made labor better off.
As early as the late 1920s, Taylorism had begun to provoke
a counter-reaction. Between 1927 and 1933, studies were conducted
of factory workers at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant in Illinois.
The Hawthorne studies showed that regardless of the changes made
in working conditions--increasing or reducing the number and length
of breaks or tinkering with lighting--productivity increased.
By paying attention to workers and treating their jobs as important,
productivity rose. The results of these studies encouraged business
managers to adjust workplace conditions and improve interpersonal
relations in order to improve worker morale and bolster
productivity.
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