Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  He had also distinguished himself, among friends, as something of an odd duck. Less generous observers might have called him a maniac. Throughout his life, he displayed an obsession with measurements and with ensuring that every physical activity was being performed with the maximum possible level of efficiency. The young Taylor insisted on measuring out a square for a game of rounders (an ancestor of baseball) in exact feet and inches.20 In adulthood Taylor would show up at recreational tennis games with a patented racket he had designed, bent in the middle, claiming it increased the productivity of his swing; he had also taken out patents for new, more efficient nets and net supports. Odd, too, was his golf game: his driver was ten inches longer than the standard; he used a homemade two-handed putter, which he swung croquet-style. He had developed an unusual swing based on amateur motion studies: bending one leg and raising one shoulder, he would spring as he struck the ball, managing nonetheless to achieve an incredibly long drive. Responding in a letter to a friend who poked fun at his swing, he wrote, coolly,

  Your mind seems to run entirely to implements, while mine has been working rather in the direction of motion study. I wish it were possible to convey to you an adequate impression of some of the beautiful movements that I have been working up during the past year. The only possible drawback to them is that the ball still refuses to settle down quietly into the cup, as it ought to, and also in most cases declines to go either in the direction that I wish or the required distance. Aside from these few drawbacks, the theories are perfect.21

  Many of his obsessions can be traced back to his youth. He was born in 1856—the same year as Freud—to a successful and wealthy Philadelphia family, who brought him up in a culturally rich household and schooled him for three years in Europe, where Taylor acquired fluency in French and German. But Taylor displayed little interest in cultural pursuits. Though he was sent to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was groomed for Harvard, his grades were mediocre. After beginning to study harder and improve his performance, Taylor started to suffer from frequent eyesight problems and painful headaches. Physiologically, this probably represented a lack of medical attention (he simply needed to wear glasses), but Taylor’s parents took his medical problems to mean that he had worked too hard and needed to reconsider college altogether. One of Taylor’s biographers, the psychiatrist Sudhir Kakar, has argued, somewhat outlandishly, that Taylor’s headaches were in fact psychosomatic manifestations of an existential crisis: Taylor was crippled by his desire to reject Harvard, a symbol of his father’s elite inheritance, for real manly work.

  Whatever his reasons, it was in fact a little strange that Taylor, rather than securing a safe and unstrenuous job as a clerk in a manner appropriate to his class, decided to slum it and work instead as an apprentice machinist in a hydraulic works (where, rather than payment from the factory, he received an allowance from his father). He would later claim that his apprenticeship had made him deeply aware of the attitudes of workmen.22 Yet his understanding of the workers’ point of view, rather than making him sympathetic to concerns on the shop floor, instead hardened his opinion against them. Workers didn’t work very hard in his opinion and spent extravagant amounts of time chatting, taking smoke breaks, and slowing down their pace when they needed to rest. At the same time he began to turn against the habitual attitudes of executives and capitalists, who, it seemed to him, had an equal misunderstanding of what was necessary to make work more efficient. After his apprenticeship, he became an executive trainee at the Midvale Steel Works, where, as he tells it, he became acquainted with soldiering, the practice that would preoccupy and enrage him for the rest of his life.

  At Midvale, Taylor became the demon of the workplace. He was constantly berating workers for their deliberate dawdling, their refusal to take or follow orders as he outlined them. And of course they responded with choice words of their own. “I was a young man in years,” he would say later, testifying before Congress, “but I give you my word I was a great deal older than I am now with worry, meanness, and contemptibleness of the whole damn thing. It is a horrid life for any man to live, not to be able to look any workman in the face all day long without seeing hostility there.”23 After moving from Midvale to Bethlehem, he decided he would break the hostility once and for all. The key, he would discover, was to take knowledge away from the workers and install it in a separate class of people.

  There is not a single worker, Taylor would repeat, “who does not devote a considerable part of his time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.”24 But it was the lackadaisical management styles that prevailed in one factory office after another that were to blame. There wasn’t a single manager who knew how long each task was ideally supposed to take. No one had studied the kinds of motions involved in completing a task. No one knew whether the tools were designed to create the most efficiency in making the particular product. As on the tennis court, so in the office: in Bethlehem, Taylor insisted on the creation of teams of people to draw up an entire diagram of the labor process, to see where lacunae and inefficiencies existed and to see where workers doing needless tasks could be disposed of.

  Frederick “Speedy” Taylor (1856–1915). Frederick Winslow Taylor Collection, Samuel C. Williams Library, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N.J.

  “Dealing with every workman as a separate individual in this way involved the building of a labor office for the superintendent and clerks who were in charge of this section of the work,” Taylor wrote of one factory example. “In this office every laborer’s work was planned out well in advance, and the workmen were all moved from place to place by the clerks with elaborate diagrams or maps of the yard before them, very much as chessmen are moved on a chess-board, a telephone and messenger system having been installed for this purpose.”25 He demanded the separate observation, study, and encouragement of each individual worker. And, most notoriously of all, he ensured that all workers were doing their jobs as quickly and efficiently as possible by having hired experts time their every motion with a stopwatch. After observation, Taylor would divide up each job into a series of pieces and assign each segment a rate. This “piece-rate” system also corresponded to a system of incentives: rather than being paid a single wage, workers would be paid based on the completion of particular segments of their work; if they managed to increase their speed, they would get a raise. Fans of the book and subsequent film Moneyball, where a form of Taylorism is applied to the baseball dugout and diamond, will recognize the broad fundamentals of the approach: The old stubborn insistence on guts and instinct has to be disposed of. Instead, one must uphold the sanctity of measurable results: diagrams, metrics—“science.”

  But what Taylor was arguing for was much bigger than the pursuit of mere efficiency. Taylorism implied a wholesale change in the nature and understanding of work itself.

  Dividing up labor and tasks wasn’t itself new. The increasing technical division of labor into separable, minute activities had been foreseen at least as early as Adam Smith, with his imaginary pin factory in The Wealth of Nations; industrial machinery was already making most work homogeneous and automatic, such that what was once a complex object crafted by at most two or three hands would increasingly be divided up among dozens of workers, who contributed to the final product simply by pulling a crank at the right time. Workers who might have initially taken pride from their work were now reduced to, as the phrase went, “cogs in a machine,” indistinguishable from each other, no longer possessed of any particular skills or abilities that they could hold as points of pride. Many would see—and have seen—Taylorism as arguing for an even deeper kind of degradation, since it divided up work even further, into the smallest units possible.

  Strangely enough, Taylorism was pitched as an attempt to redeem the division of labor and emancipate the individual worker. Taylor hated unions, which claimed that workers could get together to protect their collective interests; he argued
the opposite, that each individual worker had his own interests and that a worker could and should be responsible for his own rise. Workers had no common interests; they competed with each other. The system of incentives he established showed how a worker could improve his own working abilities and how he could visibly measure the results of his improvement, with improving marks on his time card. If the early-twentieth-century workplace seemed to be destroying the individual, Taylor’s system would attempt to restore it.

  Of course, the pitch was patently false. Taylor’s come-hither comments to American workers belied some of his more aggressive statements on behalf of his vision, a fact lost on very few actual workers. “In the past the man has been first,” Taylor wrote. “In the future, the system must be first.”26 Taylorism was a way of thinking that came at the expense of workers’ own knowledge of their system. Whatever mental components went into manual labor had to be stripped and given to specially trained foremen, who would reorganize the job in such a way that it became impossible for any group of workers to take control of the process. And the Taylorists would do it by any means necessary. With impressively crazed clarity, Taylor summed up his philosophy thus:

  It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with the management alone.27

  (Emphasis in the original.)

  Though slow to gain acceptance in the world of business, Taylor’s system steadily gained repute. He gradually accrued a circle of acolytes, who propagated his system in various workplaces as freelance consultants. The Society to Promote the Science of Management held its first meeting at Keens Chophouse in New York, in the hopes that one day the principles would catch on.

  In November 1910, the breakthrough came. Railroads were seeking to raise their freight rates by $27 million. Along with the executives, railroad workers and insurance companies (representing investors holding railroad bonds) supported the move; the shippers who would have borne the brunt of the costs opposed it. Louis Brandeis, a middle-aged lawyer from Boston who had gained some repute for drawing on socioeconomic factors in his legal briefs, decided to fight the railroads for no fee. In early arguments he repeatedly questioned the railroad executives about their accounting rationale for raising costs. No one could give Brandeis a straight answer. During a recess in the trial, Brandeis sought more information to bolster his case; one of his friends—Harrington Emerson, an efficiency expert with the Santa Fe Railway (not part of the suit)—told him to seek out Frederick Taylor. “I quickly recognized,” he would later say, “that in Mr. Taylor I had met a really great man.” Staying in close touch with the circle, Brandeis became more and more convinced that the movement for scientific management was greater than all others “in its importance and hopefulness.” When the trial resumed, Brandeis proclaimed that more efficiency was possible: “We offer cooperation to reduce costs and hence to lower prices. This can be done through the introduction of scientific management.” All of Taylor’s associates testified. On November 10, 1910, the New York Times headline read,

  ROADS COULD SAVE

  $1,000,000 A DAY

  Brandeis Says Scientific Management

  Would Do It—Calls

  Rate Increases Unnecessary

  Over the next two months, the papers tried to find the man behind this new “scientific management.” The morning the New-York Tribune profile appeared—“Weeding Waste out of Business Is This Man’s Special Joy: Perhaps Our Railways Might Save One Million Dollars a Day by Listening to Him”—Taylor woke up famous.28

  With Taylor’s articles now finding a home in more popular journals, the obscure Taylorists, embracing each other and their love of efficiency like members of a persecuted religious sect, suddenly burst into the limelight.29 Even Lenin, soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, could be found arguing in Pravda for the usefulness of Taylorism in the development of Soviet industry:

  The Taylor system … like all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analyzing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field.30

  Taylor and the figure of the “efficiency expert” became subjects of caricature throughout the country, with every unnecessary motion, even whistling, considered an impediment to pure efficiency. He distilled his theories into the book The Principles of Scientific Management, which was influential as far afield as Japan, where many executives attributed his influence to the country’s successful recovery from the war. When Taylor’s son Robert visited a Toshiba factory in 1961, executives clamored for a picture or even a pencil—anything that his great father might have touched with his hands.

  The Taylorist triumph that had taken over the news would spread on the shop floor more surreptitiously, like a virus. Factory workers on the shop floor began to report sudden appearances of “white shirts” in their midst, creeping in at first one by one, before suddenly they were everywhere in a blinding white swarm. Motion-capture cameras, which had been developed first by the revolutionary photographer Eadweard Muybridge, were soon deployed by white shirts in factories to ensure that the motion of every laborer was efficient. A group of machinists from the New England Bolt Company of Everett, Massachusetts, testified to their comrades being surrounded: “Cameras to the front of them. Cameras to the rear of them. Cameras to the right of them. Cameras to the left of them … If the ‘Taylorisers’ only had an apparatus that could tell what the mind of the worker was thinking, they would probably develop a greater ‘efficiency’ by making them ‘cut out’ all thoughts of their being men.”31

  But the most infamous element of the Taylorist model was the man with the stopwatch. It would start with one white shirt with a watch. The only line in the May 28, 1915, diary entry of Will Poyfair Jr., an autoworker for Buick, reads, “Stop watched today.” The terseness is ominous. One week later, he notes that his four-man drip-pan gang has been split up, their work divided into separate tasks, each assigned a quota and a piece rate. At the Watertown Arsenal, a group of molders walked out when one worker refused to labor under the stopwatch and his fellow workers followed; the strike led to a five-month congressional hearing into the nature of Taylorism.32

  A cartoon in Life magazine (1925).

  Taylor died in 1915 of pneumonia. He was already becoming a cult figure, drawing acolytes, each of whom attempted to outdo the other in faithfulness to the master’s ideas. It’s no wonder he exerted such a tremendous influence on his contemporaries: through sheer compulsion he had become a titan, channeling the entire spirit of his age to lend his name to a new way of working and of managing work. The management theorist Peter Drucker would class him alongside Freud and Darwin (with Taylor replacing the usual Marx) as the three progenitors of the modern age. Few writers about management or the division of labor or the history of work have failed to pay homage—either in admiration or in scorn—to Taylor. But it was the novelist John Dos Passos, in his trilogy of experimental novels, U.S.A., who offered perhaps the most quietly sardonic portrait, drawing on the legend that Taylor wound up his watch first thing in the morning: “He couldn’t stand to see an idle lathe or an idle man. Production went to his head and thrilled his sleepless nerves like liquor or women on a Saturday night … on the morning of his fiftyninth birthday, when the nurse went into his room to look at him at fourthirty, he was dead with his watch in his hand.”33

  Taylor’s animus was lodged entirely against the laziness of the industrial shop floor. But his greatest influence lay elsewhere. For in divesting workers of their own ways of handling work�
��what one union organizer, “Big Bill” Haywood, had called “the manager’s brains … under the worker’s cap”—he had simply transferred the work of management elsewhere: into the office. Offices became massive overheads for Taylorist operations, with organizational charts to designate, down to the minutest detail, the labor process that workers once carried within their own heads. Offices grew enormously simply to house all the new white shirts, with their stopwatches and cameras. Even where Taylorism in its strictest form wasn’t adopted—and, indeed, this was true of most offices—the spirit of management itself spread far and wide.

  To adopt scientific management therefore required an enormous expansion of office bureaucracies. “All of this [that is, scientific management] requires the kindly cooperation of the management, and involves a much more elaborate organization and system than the old-fashioned herding of men in large gangs,” Taylor wrote. “This organization consisted, in this case [that is, Bethlehem Steel], of one set of men, who were engaged in the development of the science of laboring through time study, such as has been described above; another set of men, mostly skilled laborers themselves, who were teachers, and who helped and guided the men in their work; another set of toolroom men who provided them with the proper implements and kept them in perfect order, and another set of clerks who planned the work well in advance, moved the men with the least loss of time from one place to another, and properly recorded each man’s earnings, etc.” This simplified model of the Taylor system indicated what a profound increase in hierarchy, in terms of levels and departments, scientific management required. For all the costs that the system saved on the factory floor, it was likely that it reproduced them within the company offices with all the new hired hands.