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

by Emily Guendelsberger

Journalist Upton Sinclair, whose The Jungle was the catalyst for reforms in the meatpacking industry, wrote a horrified letter to American Magazine in response to its publication of the excerpted Story of Schmidt. “I shall not soon forget the picture which he gave us,” wrote Sinclair, of Schmidt and his fellow workers at Bethlehem Steel, “induced to give 362 per cent more service for 61 per cent more pay.” Why, he asked, should they “receive $1.85 for the work, instead of, say, $2.85”? Taylor responded in a letter to the same magazine the next month, explaining that in his experience, if you pay workers too much, they “work irregularly and tend to become more or less shiftless, extravagant and dissipated. Our experiments showed… that for their own best interest it does not do for most men to get rich too fast.” The less obvious but equally important effect of Taylorism was breaking the power that skilled workers held over the pace of work and the operations of factories. He began disassembling skilled jobs into multiple smaller unskilled jobs, often designing specialized tools to replace a skilled worker’s “sorcery and black magic” knowledge base. There was no mystery in the “one best way,” and that removed the job security of skilled workers, further shifting the balance of power toward factory owners.