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

by Emily Guendelsberger

Taylor’s results could be incredible, but he left a trail of discontent behind him. Men complained of overwork, exhaustion, and the mind-numbing monotony of this new kind of work. “No tyrant or slave driver in the ecstasy of his most delirious dream ever sought to place upon abject slaves a condition more repugnant,” said one very dramatic labor leader in the midst of a 1911 strike at Boston’s federal Watertown Arsenal. It had been catalyzed by Taylor’s pronouncement that a molding process usually taking fifty-three minutes would now take less than half that long. But even more than the stopwatches, Watertown workers deeply resented Taylor’s inherent premise that they were lazy morons who would just screw around or mess things up if given any freedom at all. They wrote in a plea to their boss: “It is humiliating to us, who have always tried to give the Government the best that was in us. This method is un-American.” Taylorism nominally fell out of favor in the 1930s, and in modern parlance the word has a negative connotation along the lines of “eugenics” or “lobotomy.” But Taylorism’s central premise that workers are lazy, stupid, and never to be trusted became the undercurrent of American management, from Ford’s assembly lines to Taco Bell’s decree that every car at the drive-through be greeted within four seconds of pulling up.