On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

Frederick Winslow Taylor was born into a wealthy Philadelphia family in 1856. Expected to go to Harvard, he instead chose to go into industry by taking a job as a lowly machinist’s apprentice at Midvale Steelworks. As young Fred worked his way up to head engineer, he observed widespread soldiering among his coworkers. “The natural laziness of men is serious,” Taylor would later write in his 1911 magnum opus, The Principles of Scientific Management, “but by far the greatest evil from which both workmen and employers are suffering is the systematic soldiering which is almost universal.” He really meant “evil,” too. Taylor was an early true believer in the idea of efficiency and productivity as savior. Increases in labor productivity at factories employing his “scientific management,” he believed, would raise the wages of the workers, which he saw as the only realistic way of ending poverty and class conflict. Scientific management, or Taylorism, was a new system of eliminating all mystery from factory work, whether it was how fast workers were really capable of going or the “sorcery and black magic” methods of skilled workers. To do this, Taylor used a relatively new technology—the affordable, accurate stopwatch—to measure and analyze previously subjective tasks. It was the birth of literal micromanagement. First, Taylor would pull the best, strongest “first-rate men” and pay them extra to work as fast as possible while he watched, timing their motions to fractions of a seco...