Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)

by Rachel Slade

Taylorism was first proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, an upper-middle-class, well-connected Philadelphian who was one of the first nineteenth-century industrialists to analyze how actual humans were working from an efficiency standpoint. He’s probably best remembered for hovering over workers with a stopwatch, timing their movements to the hundredth of a minute to determine the ideal time for any operation. His first paper, presented in June 1895, was titled “A Piece Rate System.” Taylor’s “scientific management” system codified how workers should do their jobs. He reduced complex tasks to a series of simple operations that could be assigned to individuals on an assembly line. One person, one task. Taylor wasn’t concerned about the dehumanization of factory workers; he regarded people who worked with their hands—laborers—as machines. He maintained that to get human machines working faster, you simply had to incentivize them with money. Take away their base pay, and make them work for every penny. Taylor’s observations became the foundation of a first-year course at Harvard Business School in 1906. His system influenced Henry Ford, and was admired by Lenin and Stalin—who both strove to transform Russia from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. Taylorism and its ilk also spawned a body of futuristic dystopian literature in the twentieth century, including Brave New World and 1984—books in which workers are closely surveilled by faceless managers in an authoritarian ...