This Day in Labor History: August 11, 1911. Workers at the Watertown Arsenal walk off the job as Frederick Winslow Taylor's time management methods are applied against them. Let's talk about how workers responded to the loss of control over their own work lives. 
One of the biggest issues in late 19th century labor is something that we have a hard time understanding today--control over the minute by minute aspects of work. Most workers controlled much of their daily work lives. They weren't breathing machines. They were skilled.
This didn't really fit well into the Industrial Revolution and especially after the Civil War, control over the shopfloor and work process was a major issue of contention between labor and management. We have so lost this battle that we can't really comprehend it well today.
But workers valued themselves as skilled laborers and they highly resented any foremen or boss telling them how to do their job. This was at least a big an issue as wages or hours in late 19th century labor struggles.
Frederick Winslow Taylor was an aristocratic Philadelphian who after a few years working as a manual laborer, chose to dedicate his life to making industrial labor more efficient and streamlined.
He began managing some Maine paper mills before starting his own efficiency practice in Philadelphia in 1893. His first big job was with Bethlehem Steel between 1898 and 1901, when he was forced out for clashing with other managers, a frequent problem for the bullheaded Taylor.
Taylor believed that workers were nothing more than inefficient machines and like real machines could be time and trained to do more work at a greater speed for less money per unit, thus increasing both productivity and profit.
Taylor himself publicized his work in his famous book, The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. This highly influential book laid out the case for treating workers like machines to increase profits.
Taylor borrowed the term “scientific management” from Louis Brandeis, who coined it the year before in arguing a case about railroads before the Interstate Commerce Commission, borrowing from Taylor’s ideas to argue that railroads could raise wages without raising freight rates.
Taylor fundamentally thought working people were stupid, a not uncommon belief for the Gilded Age.
Taylor wrote: "Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type....
...The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is...entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work."
Taylor’s ideas, and those of other pioneers of scientific management, became popular among the nation’s industrialists by the 1900s.
As increasingly huge corporations sought to maximize profit, controlling the lives of workers on the shop floor became more appealing. While the industrial system had long exploited workers, in many ways, workers still ran the shop floors with a significant degree of autonomy.
The long cherished freedom of individual labor had long disappeared by the early 20th century, but the masculine idea of a man having some control over his labor remained strong.
In 1909, General William Crozier, head of the Army Ordinance Department, visited Taylor about his methods. This military facility at Watertown, MA was one of the nation’s largest arsenals, established in 1816 but turned into a site of gun carriage manufacturing only in 1892.
Taylor and his acolytes, particularly Carl Barth, began implementing Taylorist ideas of reorganization. This immediately got the attention of workers around the country. The International Association of Machinists urged members to complain to their congressmen.
When Taylor sent Dwight Merrick to Watertown in May 1911 with a stopwatch to time workers, the workers erupted in fury. Taylor warned the officers to not completely implement a time study plan without prior preparation of the workers, but seeking quick results they did anyway.
The workers then walked off the job after one worker refused to allow Merrick to time him and was fired for subordination. The Watertown molders wrote to Lieutenant Colonel C.B. Wheeler, commanding officer of the arsenal:
"Dear Sir: The very unsatisfactory conditions which have prevailed in the foundry among the molders for the past week or more reached an acute stage this afternoon when a man was seen to use as top watch on one of the molders. This we believe to be the limit of our endurance...
...It is humiliating to us, who have always tried to give to the Government the best that was in us. This method is un-American in principle, and we most respectfully request that you have it discontinued at once."
I love this letter because you can really feel the outrage. These men are insulted. They have pride in their work and they work hard. And then some college boy with a stopwatch comes around and tells them they aren’t working hard enough! No way!
Moreover, they show how often early Taylorism to be a total failure because rather than increase efficiency, they caused strikes. Taylor’s hard-headed ways of running these experiments routinely led to these problems and thus most of his personal work was a failure.
The strike itself was short, lasting only until August 18 when the fired worker was reinstated and the Ordinance Department promised an investigation of the new management techniques.
Taylor was furious that the officers had not followed his plans to the tee and thus precipitated the strike and the bad publicity that went along with it. The strike led to hearings in the House Labor Committee over Taylorism.
They were testy, in no small part because Taylor was not good at hiding his contempt for workers and their dignity.
When asked about his method, Taylor said “the ordinary pig-iron man is not suited for shoveling coal because he is too stupid. But a first-class man who could lift a shovel weighing twenty one and a half pounds could move a pile of coal lickety-split.”
When asked “but what about the effects on a man who wasn’t first-class? Taylor dismissed the concern: “Scientific management has no place for a bird that can sing and won’t sing.”
The person asking these questions--future Secretary of Labor William Wilson was furious: “We are not dealing with horses nor singing birds, but we are dealing with men who are part of society and for whose benefit society is organized.” But this is how Taylor rolled.
Congress took apart Taylor’s system at Watertown and later banned the use of stopwatches to time workers in factories. Taylor personally suffered a major setback, but his ideas of scientific management and efficiency based upon making workers’ lives worse continued to advance.
No one did more on this front than Henry Ford, whose vaunted $5 a day wage has given him an unjustified reputation as a humane boss.
But the reality was that Ford extracted his pound of flesh for that $5, working laborers so hard and with such speed and efficiency that many simply could not hack the work there and had to quit.
Treating workers like machines became central to American labor management practices, with the eventual hope to just replacing them with machines, which has moved much closer to happening in recent years.
In the end, Taylorism is still with us--it's all part of turning humans into automatons, wresting profit from the workers and eliminating any worker control over production. Pretty grim stuff and we live with it today.
Interestingly, some of Taylor's students moved in a slightly different direction and moved toward larger scale national planning projects, often working with unions in doing so. That happened in part because unions gave up the fight for control over work in exchange for $$.
If you want to read more about this, other than reading Taylor himself, check out Sanford Jacoby's Employing Bureaucracy
amazon.com/dp/0805844104/…
amazon.com/dp/0805844104/…
Back on Monday to talk about how employers crushed the Knights of Labor through lockouts, which goes to show much about why unions have had so much trouble succeeding in America.
Now enjoy your Saturday night. I'm off to see the Spanish punk band Mourn play in Boston. Rock and roll!
