Scientific management / Taylorism

In 1899, Frederick Winslow Taylor stood in the yard of Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania with a stopwatch and watched a laborer named Henry Noll load pig iron onto a railcar. Taylor had calculated that a first-class man, following precise instructions about when to lift, walk, and rest, could load 47.5 tons per day instead of the 12.5 tons that workers typically managed.1

Noll, whom Taylor called Schmidt in his published account, agreed to follow instructions in exchange for higher pay. Taylor directed him to pick up the iron, walk at a specific pace, sit when told to sit, and resume when told to resume. Noll loaded 47 tons that day.2

Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. The book argued that every task had one best way to perform it and that managers, not workers, should determine what that way was.3 Planning should be separated from execution. Workers should not be asked to think about what they were doing. Thinking was management’s job. Doing was the worker’s job. The separation was the innovation.

The system spread beyond the factory. Taylor’s disciples applied time-and-motion studies to hospitals, offices, kitchens, and schools. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth refined the method using motion picture cameras to eliminate wasted movements from bricklaying, surgery, and typing.4 By the 1920s, the logic of scientific management had reached government. Congressional hearings in 1912 had investigated and criticized Taylor’s methods after a strike at the Watertown Arsenal, where workers objected to being timed, yet the principles survived the controversy and continued spreading.5

Taylor died of pneumonia in 1915 at age fifty-nine. His gravestone in Philadelphia bears the inscription Father of Scientific Management. At the time of his death, worker turnover at factories operating under Taylorist methods often exceeded 300 percent annually, a statistic Taylor attributed to workers who could not meet the standard rather than to the standard itself.6