Frederick Winslow Taylor (August/September 1979 | Volume: 30, Issue: 5)

Frederick Winslow Taylor

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Authors: Spencer Klaw

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August/September 1979 | Volume 30, Issue 5

Toward the end of the last century an idea took form in the mind of a Philadelphia factory engineer that was destined to change, in profound and troubling ways, the nature of work in the modern world. The engineer was Frederick Winslow Taylor, a brash and eccentric young man whose most notable prior accomplishment had been the invention of a crook-handled tennis racquet, shaped like a giant teaspoon, with which he had taken the measure of a number of the leading players of the day. The idea that came to Taylor was that just as there was a science of metals (metallurgy) and a science of machines (mechanics), there must be a science and technology of work, whose laws could be discovered by observation and experiment. He was soon convinced—and he was to spend the rest of his life trying to convince others—that only by requiring workers to submit to the authority of those laws, and thereby to surrender all claims to autonomy or discretion in their work, could the full potential of the industrial revolution at last be realized.

The key element in Taylor’s new technology of work, to which he later gave the name of “scientific management,” was the time-and-motion study. This was, and is, a technique for determining how fast a job can reasonably be performed, and for identifying, and eliminating, inefficient and time-wasting practices. Its symbol and principal tool is the stop watch, and its end product is an instruction sheet specifying the exact sequence of operations to be followed in doing a given job, and the exact time, to the second, in which each operation is to be completed. Workers, Taylor wrote, “must do what they are told promptly and without asking questions or making suggestions. … It is absolutely necessary for every man in an organization to become one of a train of gear wheels.”

In factories where Taylor’s ideas were put into effect, output doubled or even tripled, and profits soared. Wages went up too, for it was a fixed principle with Taylor that workmen meeting the new production standards were entitled to bonuses of 30 to 60 per cent or more. Such striking demonstrations of what scientific management could do eventually caught the public fancy, and in the last years of Taylor’s life—he died in 1915—magazines and newspapers competed in praising him. The popular journalist Will Irwin, writing in The Century , observed, for example, that efficiency was “a kind of religion” for Taylor and his disciples. Their object, he added, “is not only the increase of production, but the ultimate happiness of the world—satisfied stomachs, shod feet, light hearts, untroubled souls.” Taylor’s admirers included a number of the leading reformers of the day, among them Louis D. Brandeis and Herbert Croly, the founder of the New Republic , who saw scientific management as a magical device for enriching labor without impoverishing capital.

Capital and labor, however, were slower than the general public and