Rate buster

Soldiering

8 when workers deliberately slow or restrict their work outputs

a group member whose work pace is significantly faster than the normal work in his or her group

2.1 Father of Scientific Management: Frederick W. Taylor

Frederick W. Taylor (1856–1915), the “father of scientific management,” began his career as a worker at Midvale Steel Company. He was later promoted to pat-ternmaker, supervisor, and then chief engineer.

At Midvale, Taylor was deeply affected by his three-year struggle to get the men who worked for him to do, as he called it, “a fair day’s work.” Taylor, who had worked alongside the men as a coworker before becoming their boss, said, “We who were the workmen of that shop had the quantity output carefully agreed upon for everything that was turned out in the shop. We limited the output to about, I should think, one-third of what we could very well have done.” Taylor explained that as soon as he became the boss, “the men who were working under me... knew that I was onto the whole game of soldiering, or deliberately restricting output.”¹⁵ When Taylor told his workers, “I have accepted a job under the management of this company and I am on the other side of the fence... I am going to try to get a bigger output,” the workers responded, “We warn you, Fred, if you try to bust any of these rates [a rate buster was someone who worked faster than the group] we will have you over the fence in six weeks.”¹⁶

Over the next three years, Taylor tried everything he could think of to improve output. He showed workers by doing the job himself that it was possible to pro-duce more output. He hired new “intelligent” workers and trained them himself, hoping they would produce more. But they would not because of “very heavy social pressure” from the other workers. Pushed by Taylor, the workers began breaking their machines so they couldn’t produce. Taylor responded by fining them every time they broke a machine and for any violation of the rules, no mat-ter how small, such as being late to work. Tensions became so severe that some of the workers threatened to shoot him. Looking back at the situation, Taylor reflected, “It is a horrid life for any man to live, not to be able to look any work-man in the face all day long without seeing hostility there and feeling that every man around one is his virtual enemy.” He said, “I made up my mind either to get out of the business entirely and go into some other line of work, or to find some remedy for this unbearable condition.”¹⁷ The remedy that Taylor eventually developed was scientific management.

Taylor, who once described scientific management as “seventy-five percent science and twenty-five percent common sense,” made clear that the goal of sci-entific management was to use systematic study to find the “one best way” of doing each task. To do that, managers must follow the four principles shown in Exhibit 2.¹⁸ First, “develop a science” for each element of work. Study it. Analyze it. Determine the “one best way” to do the work. For example, one of Taylor’s con-troversial proposals at the time was to give rest breaks to factory workers doing physical labor. We take morning, lunch, and afternoon breaks for granted, but in Taylor’s day, factory workers were expected to work without stopping.¹⁹ When Taylor said that breaks would increase worker productivity, no one believed him. Nonetheless, through systematic experimentation, he showed that workers receiving frequent rest breaks were able to quadruple their daily work.

Second, scientifically select, train, teach, and develop workers to help them reach their full potential. Before Taylor, supervisors often hired on the basis of favoritism and nepotism. Who you knew was often more important than what you could do. Instead, reasoning that they would be much more productive than

THE HISTORY OF MANAGEMENT

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