Thursday, February 5, 2009

John option #1 - On Taylorism

Scientific Management

Fredrick Winslow Taylor is my enemy. I cannot think of many other people in this world who, in my opinion, are just evil. The most angering piece of information I’ve found about Taylor is what he is in relation to a wage laborer. Taylor is an engineer, and like many engineers, he seeks to maximize the efficiency of a process or in this case work in general. I believe the most aggravating part of reading Taylor is the thought that continually was in my head: Taylor has no perspective to create a theory without thorough experience in manual labor. If you go and take a peek at his biography on the internet you’ll find that he was a well educated man with little experience in the field involving manual labor. This leads me to believe that Taylor in fact has no experience on what steel or mine workers desire in the workplace or what management techniques will maximize their efficiency. As a result of this inexperience, it seems quite evident that Taylor is preaching from his ivory tower and all of his assumptions on how to make work better for both the worker and the management are really only benefiting management.


Taylor’s idea of a perfect work environment is an orgy of socialism where everyone just seems to be working for the sake of working really great! By following in the lines of Taylor it is very evident that the owners of the company will get much wealthier at the cost of the worker. In no part of Taylor’s idea do I see a real benefit for the worker. All he is doing is making their time more efficient and efficiency in the work place means more automated design and less human contact with the products. This despite what Taylor thinks DOES in fact eliminate jobs. While Taylor claims that new technology doesn’t do eliminate jobs, I’m certain with my extra one hundred years of history that he’s quite wrong and there are far fewer jobs for unskilled workers today then there were in the early 20th century.

Now that I’ve established my stand point on Taylorism, I can with great delight, deny that I have ever been a part of a business or employer that specifically advocated the idea of scientific management. What I can say is that from working at a labor union for the past three summers I can safely say that this is exactly what labor unions strive to eliminate. The idea that management and the workforce have identical economic interests is not a valid claim and through working at the United Steel Workers I found that a main goal was to embrace individual talents of workers.


Let me begin by saying that individuality is one of, if not the most defining, unique trait to human beings. If it were not for individuality human beings would not be nearly as scientifically advanced as we are today. This is largely due to individuality and creativity being linked. Without individuality we would lack different experiences to draw upon when making decisions for our everyday life, which would result in less innovative designs, which as we know, are a huge part of the scientific leaps we have made over the course of humanity.


Concluding I can say that undoubtedly the lack of the individual in Taylor’s theory of scientific management truly is flawed. As a result of this failure, the workers lose creativity, and without creativity in the workplace today few, if any, great inventions and scientific advancements would occur.

1 comment:

Adam Johns said...

1) Writing a political critique of Taylor, from the viewpoint of organized labor, is a good idea.

2) That being said, your reading of Taylor is sloppy. Take these three sentences: "Taylor’s idea of a perfect work environment is an orgy of socialism where everyone just seems to be working for the sake of working really great! By following in the lines of Taylor it is very evident that the owners of the company will get much wealthier at the cost of the worker. In no part of Taylor’s idea do I see a real benefit for the worker." Taylor explicitly and relentlessly advocates *large* wage increases, and often fewer hours worked, for labor. You might say that he didn't live up to his promises (in which case, you'd need to research that claim); you might say that even with higher wages, the changes he advocated are not helpful. There are other legitimate approaches as well. But you are challenging neither Taylor's logic nor his facts; instead, you're ignoring much of what he has to say.

3) Similarly, you make a couple generalizations about Taylor's biography based on something you read at a nameless site. This kind of "research" is, obviously, absolutely worthless. To challenge Taylor's detailed claims about his early years (which you never mention!) you should include citations - hopefully from a reputable source. There are times when an internet source is ok; there are no times when an uncited source is worthwhile.

The problem here, in other words, has nothing to do with your perspective: I'm all for an angry, political critique of Taylor. But nothing here makes me think that you really *get* Taylor in the first place. Maybe you do - but it's not on the page.