BEAT THE CLOCK

THE STORY OF FEDERICK WINSLOW TAYLOR, WHO MADE MILLIONS OF WORKERS A LOT MORE EFFICIENT AND A LOT LESS HAPPY

Author: By David Mehegan

Date: SUNDAY, June 15, 1997

Page: N17

Section: Books

Frederick who, you ask? He was the father of ``scientific management,'' the idea of maximizing workplace efficiency by analyzing jobs, breaking them up into precisely timed component steps, and then using that information to exact higher output from workers. To Taylor we trace such things as ``efficiency experts'' and ``time-and-motion studies,'' and especially the idea (one we usually accept) that we should eliminate unnecessary motions to move ourselves to ever-higher levels of achievement.

As Robert Kanigel's interesting, eventually illuminating, but awkward biography finally reveals, the core of Taylor's ideas about efficiency and productivity were articulated in his 1911 treatise, ``The Principles of Scientific Management,'' published first in American Magazine and then in book form. They soon attracted an apostolate and a cult following and were disseminated worldwide. But resistance to and resentment of Taylor's ideas were born almost as soon as they were applied, and the synthesis of the two forces is really the heart of today's rough bargain between labor and management.

Born of a prosperous Pennsylvania family, Taylor (1856-1915) attended Phillips Exeter Academy and seemed destined for Harvard, but instead in 1874 became an apprentice patternmaker in a Philadelphia company that made hydraulic pumps. In 1878, he took a machinist's job at Philadelphia's Midvale Steel Co., soon moving off the floor into lower and then middle management, with a gang of workers under him.

Young Taylor became possessed by the idea that a superior analytical mind could ``scientifically'' determine the ``correct'' -- i.e., highest possible -- output for a worker. With senior management's approval, he began experimenting with scientific analysis and applying it to the men under him. Productivity went up, but Taylor soon became a pariah to his men, which would become a pattern in his career.

His scheme had several technical elements. By precise observation of worker functions, including the timing of them, management could identify the ``one best way'' to do a job, determine the correct productivity level, then set a pay rate based on that level. Those who did not or could not make that level would earn a lower rate.

But the techniques of Taylor's system were not the essence of it, nor were they what caused it to be condemned. The radical heart of it was an anachronistic and profoundly classist prejudice about working people. They were to be managed like machines or draft amimals, with capacities but no right to control over their work that management need respect: ``The control of the work,'' as Kanigel summarizes the theory, ``must be taken from the men who did it and placed in the hands of a new breed of planners and thinkers. These men would think everything through beforehand. The workmen -- elements of production to be studied, manipulated and controlled -- were to do as they were told.''

The success of his system, Taylor wrote to a Bethlehem Steel manager in 1906, required ``absolutely rigid and inflexible standards throughout your establishment,'' and that each worker ``received every day clear-cut, definite instructions as to just what he is to do and how he is to do it, and these instructions should be exactly carried out, whether they are right or wrong.'' In ``Principles of Scientific Management'' he wrote, ``Each man must . . . grow accustomed to receiving and obeying directions covering details, large and small, which in the past have been left to his individual judgment.'' In a lecture, he said, ``Our scheme does not ask any initiative in a man. We do not care for his initiative.''

In the early decades of the century, this was music to industry's ears. Taylor was hailed as a messiah and his ideas were enthusiastically accepted by businessmen in America, Japan, and Europe, notably in Germany. But they enraged workers. In 1910, at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts, when the Taylor system was put in place, a short-lived strike broke out when a Taylorite manager stood behind a worker on the factory floor with a stopwatch. Speaking for many, labor leader Samuel Gompers wrote that Taylorism ``presents novelty only in its cold-bloodedness and its endeavor to transfer mathematical observations of the strength of metals to those of the strength of men's muscles and spirit.''

After the Watertown strike, Congress held hearings in 1912 on the Taylor system, taking testimony from supporters and opponents. ``Scientific management,'' at least the presumption that all control must reside in management, in the end was pilloried by the committee's report. Taylor himself was hotly grilled by the labor-minded chairman. Baffled and embittered by the chorus of opposition, he went on fighting and arguing until his death from pneumonia in 1915.

The Taylor story should be fascinating. But Kanigel's treatment is a trial for the reader. His style runs to Jamesian fustian: ``The Griffiths of the world,'' he writes of a machinist, ``may be hidden from history, yet they leave their mark, seeming to embody in their calloused hands and plain talk eons of secret knowledge.'' He is given to ``must have'' formulations: Taylor ``must have'' thought so-and-so or ``must have'' done a certain thing for a certain reason. Then there are the unanswerable rhetorical questions: ``How many, over the years, had stood in Taylor's shoes? How many, named foreman and charged with getting out the work, had turned to harsh language and harsher actions? How many felt uncomfortable in their new positions as they sought to balance their loyalty to their friends among the workmen with that to the company that paid their salaries?'' (I give up -- how many?)

Seeming to be torn in his attitude toward his subject, sometimes defending him (as in the passage above), other times attacking him, Kanigel focuses in prolix, repetitive detail on the particulars of Taylor's life, almost as precisely sliced and diced as a factory worker's day. And yet he fails to bring his subject to life. Taylor was clearly a boring, small-minded, arrogant, unimaginative, overbearing martinet -- and more detail does not make him more interesting. This book could easily have been a third shorter.

Taylor's ideas, though, and the reactions for and against them, are fascinating. It is astonishing today that anyone could have argued with such a blunt class bias, and that business and industry could have taken these ideas seriously. Taylor actually believed his approach was in the best interest of the workers, and he could not comprehend why they saw it differently. Why did they persist in the error of thinking that they should have some influence, even some power, over their work and their working lives? His continual battering against their obstinacy left him bitter and confused. He really did not get it.

But 1911 was still the morning of the labor movement. Even though powerful unions did not yet exist, working men had powerful support, and of course workers were voters and regarded themselves as having rights that could not be trampled by beady-eyed bureaucrats with stopwatches. It took decades of industrial strife, economic upheaval, and political battle to establish workers' rights to have some say in work rules and in the establishment of output standards. That such rights are not questioned today is the main reason for the remarkable labor-management peace of the last 50 years -- and some would say, of the enormous productivity of the modern economy.

As for the idea that the brains of workers are actually a hindrance to productivity, the prevailing idea today is just the opposite: that those closest to the work often have a better idea of the most efficient way to carry it out than managers analyzing the process from some separate office or according to some abstract idea of efficiency. But it is necessary for management to ask the workers for their ideas, which Fred Taylor would not have dreamed of doing: After all, he knew he was smarter than they were.

Taylor also knew, as Kanigel points out, that his theories would never be tried out on him personally. He became a rich consultant who worked when and as much as he liked. As always, there is the gored-ox factor. Kanigel quotes labor historian Harley Shaiken: ``The large ships that once plied the Mediterranean, propelled by legions of slaves in the galley, were designed by people who had no expectation of doing any rowing.''