Frederick Winslow Taylor
(1856–1915)
Something went wrong with Frederick Taylor’s eyes. At least that was the reason the young Philadelphian gave for not going to Harvard, even after he passed the entrance exams with honors, and he followed his father into the practice of law. His eyesight had gone bad, he said. Yet Taylor soon turned from both Harvard and the law to a far less prestigious industrial trade that depended even more on having good vision: he apprenticed as a foundry patternmaker and machinist while earning an engineering degree from the night school of Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. From here, he went on to disrupt the industrial workplace—indeed, the very nature of modern work. And, unlike many of the business consultants who would work to enact his principles in later years (for a price, of course), all of it was the product of close observation, the results of which he published in the unlikely 1911 blockbuster with the off-putting title Principles of Scientific Management.
By the 1880s, Taylor had worked his way up to machine shop foreman at Philadelphia’s Midvale Steel Company. He watched his men, very closely, and concluded that many were “soldiering”—that is, not just slacking off, but working at the slowest rate possible without incurring punishment. Even more striking was his observation that, despite the growing mechanization throughout the plant, the rate of production still depended largely on the pace set by the least productive workers. As Taylor saw it, both the “soldiers” and the most highly skilled employees were equally unproductive.
This was a breakthrough insight: according to Taylor’s research, the workers most highly valued (and therefore most highly paid) for their skills had precisely the same negative impact on productivity as the least valued, most incorrigible loafers.
Taylor continued to observe his workers, analyzing the human aspects of productivity—what people did, how they moved when they did it, and in what order they performed each step of a given process. He saw over and over again that “excessive idiosyncrasy” (the trait of the skilled worker, the true craftsman) had the same effect as laziness (the trait of the “soldier”). Both retarded the rate of production. For productivity to be maximized, Taylor concluded, managers, not the workers, had to be given full control of all manufacturing processes. Managers had to prescribe methods, and managers had to set the required pace.
Power was to be taken from the worker and transferred to the manager; however, Taylor did not propose giving managers absolute power. He believed that it was the responsibility of managers to apply science to regulating their workers for maximum productivity. Each manufacturing operation was to be observed, analyzed, and broken down into discrete steps. Then, each step needed to be evaluated as to the nature and number of every movement made by each worker. Once a manager had accurately collated these observations, Taylor believed they would have a blueprint that revealed the correct human role for getting a given industrial process done in the best—that is, most highly productive—way possible.
Taylor quickly ascended to the upper levels of engineering and management. In 1893, after his know-it-all ways had made him an unpopular executive at Bethlehem Steel, he left to set up as the world’s first professional management consultant. His brand-new business card announced himself as “Consulting Engineer—Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs a Specialty.” This profession, which he invented, was the culmination of an evolution that had begun in the eighteenth century with the introduction of textile-manufacturing machinery driven by steam or water power. This had marked the beginning of a long—often unhappy—working relationship between human workers and machines.
By the late nineteenth century, it was clear to factory and workshop managers that machines were inherently more efficient than human workers, who increasingly either tended the machines or performed portions of production processes that had yet to be mechanized. Taylor’s idea was to design standardized procedures that would bring human workers closer to the efficiency of machines. He believed that every job had “One Best Way” to do it. But he never asked workers themselves about their jobs. Instead, he watched them.
Taylor performed what he called “time-and-motion studies,” breaking down even the simplest jobs into their component parts and measuring each part to the hundredth of a minute. Often, his object was to show managers how to precisely prescribe required procedures and methods. But at his best, Taylor also sought to marry the human and mechanical components of any given job. For instance, while working at Bethlehem Steel, he noticed that workers used the same shovel for all materials. He calculated that the most efficient shovelful was 21.5 pounds. So, he had the workers issued specialized shovels that would scoop up 21.5 pounds of whatever material they were intended for. The result was a three- to four-fold increase in productivity, which was rewarded with pay increases for the workers.
Taylor’s “scientific management”—or “Taylorism”—roiled the American workplace. There was no question that his methods increased productivity. But while Taylor sometimes advocated for workers, calling for frequent breaks and good pay for good work, he also compared unskilled laborers to beasts of burden, labeling both equally “stupid.” Taylor was a strong advocate for the division of labor, assigning workers to various phases of production based on their suitability to the nature and demands of the work. This segmentation deprived workers of a vital sense of connection to what they produced. Industrial work became inherently fragmented, repetitive, unfulfilling, and meaningless. Reduced to being a cog in a machine, a worker could take little pride in what he did. Craftsmanship had become a quaint relic of an unproductive past. Anomie—the breakdown of social bonds between individual workers and the greater community—became a dreary hallmark of mass production.
As it reduced the satisfaction that workers took in their jobs, Taylorism intensified the demands placed on them. Taylor introduced the concept of “scaled piecework rates” as an incentive for workers to move faster and achieve higher output. The consultant promoted this as a fair method of compensation. But the workers perceived the system as dehumanizing, stripping away their autonomy and individuality.
While a gulf opened up between labor and craftsmanship, an even wider gulf yawned between labor and management. Strikes, often violent, were commonplace, and labor unions became a divisive subject in the national dialog. The House of Representatives was moved to investigate the human cost of Taylorism after a strike shut down the army’s Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts. A House committee concluded in 1912 that scientific management provided many benefits, including increased production at lower costs, but that it also handed management an unacceptably high level of unregulated power. In the end, the U.S. Senate banned the application of Taylorism from the Watertown Arsenal.
While Taylorism often made work miserable and thereby contributed to individual despair and social unrest, the increases in production and reductions in costs put an unprecedented variety and volume of consumer goods within reach of the average American family. At the same time, the “de-skilling” of many factory jobs allowed companies to first hire cheaper labor and then to phase out human workers altogether. As industrial processes were analyzed and broken down, it became increasingly feasible for machines to replicate what human workers had been doing.
Taylorism thus accelerated the progress from mechanization (machines tended or complemented by humans) to automation (machines requiring no human operators). The resulting lower or even non-existent wages meant that fewer consumers could afford to buy many of the products being produced in greater quantities at lower costs. In many cases, the unintended, highly disruptive consequence of increased industrial efficiency was a decline in product demand and therefore a decrease in corporate revenues. This was a vicious circle, the opposite of the intended “virtuous circle,” in which highly paid workers would be enabled to purchase more goods and services, thereby driving the economy. This decline, in turn, reduced the demand for labor, which further decreased the number of consumers with sufficient means to buy the output of efficient industrial production. The Great Depression was the result of many causes, but chief among them was an imbalance of production and demand. Companies produced too much of what too few could afford to purchase.
The work of Frederick Taylor helped to make America an industrial giant. Capitalists the world over claimed that scientific management actually improved the lot of unskilled labor, since anyone, even those with no specific skills or training, could be trained to do repetitive tasks and thus get a job. For example, Taylor discovered that workers moving 12.5 tons of pig iron per day could be incentivized, through scaled piecework rates, to move 47.5 tons per day, provided that managers determined, through close observation and analysis, the optimal timing of lifting and resting. Left to their own devices, workers invariably tired and fell short of the 47.5-ton quota. Yet, Taylor concluded, even using the scientific approach, only an eighth of pig-iron handlers could regularly move 47.5 tons. He argued that this presented strong but unskilled laborers with a unique opportunity for well-paid work. Others argued that Taylor’s demands meant that seven-eighths of weaker but equally unskilled laborers were disqualified from moving pig iron. In the end, many workers accepted Taylorism, especially if they believed the added efficiency was increasing their pay; yet many more found the close monitoring, especially the use of stopwatches, intolerable. This single issue was the complaint most often heard among the workers who struck the Watertown Arsenal.
In seeking to increase productivity and lower costs, Taylorism often abandoned the search for balance between people and technology. Overwhelmingly, efficiency of production outweighed the engagement and happiness of the workers. The result of the movement Taylor started was, therefore, ever-expanding automation, not only in industrial production, but in virtually every aspect of human activity, from driving a car to piloting an airplane. Today, industrial robots build other industrial robots, and the nature of work is changing yet more radically and rapidly, opening up new industries even as it threatens to diminish employment in the old.