The Encyclopedia of Labor History Worldwide (2004)
FREDERICK WINSLOW TAYLOR (1856-1915)
As industrialism expanded in the United States following the Civil War, the
essence of the labor movement was the struggle for control of the workplace between the
workers, holding fast to their craft skills, and the management. One of the most famous
figures to participate in this struggle was Frederick Winslow Taylor, who rose from an
apprentice sweeping out a foundry in Philadelphia to become the proponent of “scientific
management,” combining ruthless industrial efficiency with social gospel, which became,
in turn, the genesis of the “science” of management itself.
While Taylor is most popularly associated with ”Taylorism,” the practice of timeand-motion studies, this vulgar depiction fails to do justice to the enormous scope of his
work, of which the efficiency studies were a small part. He intended nothing less than
revolutionizing—his term!—the way in which work was organized, expecting to build a
land of prosperity and industrial harmony.
Born into a wealthy family in Philadelphia, Taylor took a position as an
apprentice in a foundry in 1873, in the midst of The Panic of 1873. The cutting of metal,
which he first witnessed in this foundry, became one of his life’s obsessions. Taylor
immediately noticed two elements of the work process that disturbed him for the
remainder of his life, and which he committed himself to eliminating.
The first was soldiering, a derogatory term for Taylor, by which workers carefully
controlled their output. In his Congressional testimony in 1912, Taylor maintained that
higher productivity led to higher employment, but the workers of the late 19th century
saw the reverse: they were careful not to finish work too quickly to avoid both running
out of work and working too hard. Here was the situation—the formal and informal
organization by the workers—that Taylor devoted his life to abolishing. He called the
individual’s holding back “natural soldiering” while the shop-wide organization was
called “systematic soldiering.”
The other was the rule-of-thumb, a haphazard practice of organizing the work,
which gave individual workers enormous control. The production process had never been
subjected to what Taylor called “scientific” scrutiny—work simply continued as it always
had, depending upon the skill of individual workers. These workers determined the speed
of their machines and the methods—or “feed”--of cutting metal. Foremen were
responsible for many different functions: assigning the work, disciplining the men,
resolving production delays, but had virtually no direct control over the individual
worker.
To Taylor, this process was enormously wasteful. Machinists did all of the work
on a particular piece, from the unskilled work of setting up the piece to the semi-skilled
work of grinding their own tools to the skilled work of actually making a cut. They had to
search around for parts in what Taylor called ”a leisurely fashion,” and often had to wait
for other machines to finish. In short, there was no system, and the principles of science,
utilizing thoroughly documented experiments, was wholly lacking.
The most important element which Taylor resented, however, and which directed
all of his work, was the control which the workers still maintained. In Scientific
Management, a three-part volume summing up his work, he stated “As was usual then
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[1879] and in fact is still usual [1911] in most of the shops in this country, the shop was
really run by the workmen, and not by the bosses. The workmen together had carefully
planned just how fast each job should be done, and they had set a pace for each machine
throughout the shop, which was limited to about one-third of a good day’s work.“
In 1879, Taylor was appointed a gang boss at Midvale Steel, admitting to the
workers that “he was now on the side of management, and that he proposed to do
whatever he could to get a fair day’s work out of the lathers.” His determination to
increase productivity led him in the autumn of 1880, to a series of systematic experiments
in metal-cutting. He found almost immediately that cooling the cutting tools with a water
spray, permitted an increase of the cutting speed by 40%.
By February, 1884, Taylor was given complete authority over the machine shop
and set about transforming its organization. He began to time workers with a stop-watch
as they worked and created “instruction cards,” which noted each motion and each
decision that workers had passed along informally to each other. These decisions were
recorded for the foreman and were used both to instruct and to control new workers. By
calculating “scientifically” how each job should be performed, and how long it should
take, Taylor increased productivity but, most importantly, transferred control of the work
process over to management.
As he observed each movement, moreover, Taylor tried to simplify each one.
While his immediate goal was increasing productivity, he contributed to the deskilling of
the work place.
As the foreman was forced to take more responsibility, Taylor was working to
eliminate the job’s traditional description. He broke up the work into five different
categories: instruction-card clerk; time clerk; inspector; traditional gang-boss; and shop
disciplinarian.
For fifteen years at Midvale, Taylor experimented and recorded every aspect of
the work process. He created a set of differential rates, which promised to pay workers
higher rates for increased productivity, improving the simple piece-rate structure, as a
futile gesture to get their support. He looked at every step of the production process,
trying to eliminate any breakdowns or inefficiencies.
One of his evaluations involved the system of belts which drove the machines. He
measured the life of each belt, its width and thickness, to find which ones lasted longest
at the highest speeds. In time, he pulled all of his experiments together into his first
public pronouncement, called Notes on Belting, which he read in December 1893, at the
annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
ASME had been founded to gather technical information, but in 1886, Henry
Robinson Towne, of the Yale & Towne lock maker, read a paper called The Engineer as
Economist, which has been called “the founding document of the new science of
management” because it talked to engineers about the practices of shop management.
Taylor consistently followed this course, using technical improvements to change the
way that production was organized, deskilling the work and strengthening management’s
control.
As an example of this dual purpose, Taylor presented a second paper for ASME,
in June 1895, called A Piece-Rate System: A Step Toward Partial Solution of the Labor
Problem. Taylor had left Midvale in 1889, and had spent years trying to convince other
manufactures to adopt scientific management, as he conceived it—a total system of
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administering the work process, and not just isolated pieces, such as time-study. Close to
the tumult of the Homestead and Pullman strikes, Taylor proposed using “science” to
create industrial harmony. He stated “the ordinary piece-rate system involves a
permanent antagonism between employers and men,” and proposed a “scientific” pay
system which “renders labor unions and strikes unnecessary.” When this paper was
reprinted in Engineering Magazine, Taylor became—after 22 years of experimentation—
an overnight sensation.
He was hired by Bethlehem Steel in the spring, 1898, and given control over
Machine Shop No. 2, the largest in the world, producing enormous cannon for the
Spanish-American War. Calling Bethlehem Steel “a case study in inefficiency,” Taylor
began to transform the work place in every area, installing “scientific management,” or
“Taylorism,” as it was now known, over the objections of both workers and managers.
Working with metallurgist Maunsell White, Taylor began experiments on the
heat-treating of tool steel, and eventually determined that heating the tool steel to a
temperature of 2,200 degrees provided maximum efficiency, allowing cuts that were
100% faster and 40% deeper; a cannon tube that previously required 72 hours to cut was
now finished in 22 hours. The pair applied for a patent and showcased their efforts at the
Centennial Exhibition in Paris in 1900, making Taylor’s “scientific” approach worldfamous. They published The Art of Cutting Metal, which first appeared at the ASME
meeting in November 1906.
Another protégé arrived at Bethlehem when Carl Barth was hired to develop
mathematical formulas for calculating the job rates. By devising a special slide rule,
management was able to accurately predict the amount of time needed for each process,
eliminating the rule-of-thumb which had dominated the shop.
The final achievement at Bethlehem involved the famous experiments on
shoveling, with a laborer named Henry Noll, later disguised by Taylor as “a man named
Schmidt.” Beginning as an evaluation of a labor gang loading pig iron on freight cars, the
later experiments on shovel sizes and design showed that “Taylorism” could apply to
even the most unskilled job.
The final important paper presented to the annual ASME meetings appeared in
June, 1903, when Taylor provided a comprehensive summary of “Taylorism” called Shop
Management. While the presentation was filled with technical exhibits and diagrams,
Taylor also invoked his social theory about the workers, claiming that some would
appreciate the social and economic benefits of “scientific management,” while others
“either stupid or stubborn, can never be made to see that the new system is as good as the
old; and these, too, must drop out . . .”
As unionism grew after the turn of the century, however, so did organized
opposition to “Taylorism.” The proposed introduction of ”scientific management” at the
Watertown, MA, arsenal in 1911 provoked both a walkout of the men and a
Congressional hearing, whose edited transcript provides the fullest expression of Taylor’s
views. The Watertown Arsenal produced seacoast gun carriages and a time-study
initiated in February, 1911, caused individual opposition, shop-wide work stoppages,
petitions, discharges, extensive meetings and national publicity—all over the topic of
“Taylorism.”
As a result, the House of Representatives authorized a “Special Committee to
Investigate the Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management,” and Taylor was called
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to testify on 25 January, 1912. Living as a consultant of sorts, Taylor had not been
directly confronted with the moral implications of scientific management and over the
years, had been able to force his system through unorganized work places.
The House committee included Cong. William B. Wilson, a former coal miner
from Pennsylvania, who would be appointed as the first Secretary of Labor in 1913 by
President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson not only challenged Taylor for three days on his
system, but also called shop workers to testify about the effects of “scientific
management.”
While the Congressional hearing offered the sharpest attack on “scientific
management,” and on Taylor personally, he also found it to be the opportunity to
proclaim the essence of his theory, in its broadest and most socially ambitious form, as a
progressive, even revolutionary, principle and to denounce managers or critics who took
only pieces of his grand vision:
Scientific management is not any efficiency device, not a device for securing
efficiency; . . . in its essence, scientific management involves a complete mental
revolution on the part of the workmen engaged in any particular establishment or
industry—a complete mental revolution on the part of these men as to their duties toward
their work, toward their fellow men, and towards their employers. And it involves the
equally complete mental revolution on the part of those on management’s side—the
foreman, the superintendent, the owner of the business, the board of directors—a
complete mental revolution on their part as to their duties toward their fellow workers in
the management, toward their workmen, and toward all of their daily problems. And
without this complete mental revolution on both sides scientific management does not
exist.
Taylor spent the last years of his life as a management consultant, working on
various projects—developing the perfect grass for putting greens, for example—and died
on 21 March 1915, in Philadelphia of pneumonia. He is buried in the West Laurel Hill
Cemetery across the Schuylkill River from the Midvale Steel works.
CONSEQUENCES
Any worker whose job has been timed has felt the effect of Taylor’s work. If “the
unexamined life is not worth living,” Taylor brought this motto to the shop floor.
Everything was examined: how work was done, how material was moved and provided,
what tools would provide the greatest productivity. By simply applying “science” to the
work process, as science had been applied with wonderful results to every other aspect of
life, factories would literally hum with harmony, producing greater wealth and increased
employment.
Efficiency became the key work in the modern vocabulary, a significant issue in
the disputes between organized labor and management. Over time, management
eliminated Taylor’s proclaimed interest in the welfare of workers, replaced by the basic
industrial desire to get more productivity out of fewer workers, at the lowest possible
costs. “Taylorism” became identified with “Fordism”: with the creation of simple and
repetitive tasks, with industrial duplication on an enormous scale, with the creation of the
modern assembly line so typical in the auto industry.
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It is interesting that a counter-Taylorism developed originally in the European
auto industry, as recognition that workers did have intelligence to contribute to the work
process. With self-managed work groups, the modern assembly plant was once again
transformed but in 2000, the International Labor Organization published an article called
“A Comeback for Taylorism?” describing the revival of the regimented work place.
Taylor really helped create the science of management as a separate and distinct
area of life, and of academic concentration. As Peter Drucker, known popularly as “a
management guru”—that is, one who studies how management should function--received
a Presidential Medal of Honor from President George W Bush in the summer of 2002, it
was like honoring Taylor himself. While Drucker spent more than 50 years refining
management practices, it was Taylor who invented “management,” as a “science.”
BIOGRAPHY
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) dedicated his life to transforming industrial
practices in all areas, allowing management to have absolute control over the workplace.
He introduced the practice of “scientific” evaluation to work processes. Known popularly
for “Taylorism,” which includes time-and-motion study, he created management as a
distinct class and topic of study.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harry Braverman. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the
Twentieth Century (New York: 1974)
Robert Kanigel. The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of
Efficiency (New York: 1997)
Daniel Nelson. Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United
States, 1880-1920 (Madison: 1975)
Frederick Winslow Taylor. Scientific Management (comprising Shop Management, The
Principles of Scientific Management and Testimony Before the special House Committee
(New York: 1911) 1947
Martin Kempe. “A Comeback for Taylorism? Report from Germany.” World of Work
(March, 2000) pp. 18-20.
Bill Barry
Community College of Baltimore County
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