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

by Emily Guendelsberger

Smith’s theory of markets works on the assumption that the profits of higher labor productivity would obviously be passed along to workers as higher wages—giving them an incentive to put up with the monotony of subdivided work. And in the late 1700s, that might have worked. Businesses were much smaller back then—Smith’s pin “factory” had just ten workers, who’d be doubly motivated by working alongside a boss they knew personally and sharing in the profits. That system has a ceiling, though. Once a company grows to employ more than a couple hundred workers in more and more complicated jobs, it becomes increasingly difficult to know all of them personally, much less keep track of and control them all. The more efficiently you subdivide job duties, the unhappier your workers become. And a workforce of miserable, bored, hard-to-supervise workers quickly leads to soldiering, or situations like the shipworkers playing cards all day while one guy makes a lot of noise with a hammer. At the turn of the century, growth and division of labor were approaching that point of diminishing returns.* But Taylorism had no ceiling. Its combination of objective-seeming data analysis, specific productivity goals, monitoring, and deskilling was the system that growing factories had been desperate for. By conceiving of workers as numbers in an equation rather than individual humans, Taylor made it possible for companies to expand enormously, employing thousands and even millions of workers withou...