He could also choose to cut down on the coffee breaks, apply himself, and increase production , and then ask for and get more money .
But that would be self-defeating, and he knows it.It would also place him in competition with other workers, which would be playing into the bosses hands.What he would rather do is to create some slack for himself and enjoy his job more .
At present on the West Coast , when a gang of longshoremen working on cargo start a shift , they often divide themselves into two equal groups and toss a coin.One group goes into the far reaches of the ship s hold and sits around .
The other group starts loading cargo, usually working with a vengeance , sinceeach one of them is doing the work of two men.An hour later, the groups change places.In other words, although my fellow longshoremen and I are getting paid for eight hours, on occasion we work only four.If someone reading this feels a sense of moral outrage because we are sitting down on the job, I am sorry.I have searched my mind in vain for a polite way to tell that reader to go to hell.
If you are that reader, I would recommend that you abandon your outrage and begin thinking about doing something similar for yourself.You probably already have, even if you won t admit it.White collar office workers, too,have come under criticism recently for robbing their bosses of their full-time services.Too much time is being spent around the Mr.Coffee machine, and some people ( would you believe it ?) have even been having personal conversations on company time.In fact, one office-system expert recently said that he had yet to encounter a business work place that was functioning at more than about 60 percent efficiency .
Management often struggles hard to set up a situation where work is done in series: a worker receives an article of manufacture, does something to it , and passes it on to another worker , who does something else to it and then passes it on to the next guy, and so on.The assembly line is a perfect example of this .
Managers like this type of manufacture because it is more efficient - that is, it achieves more production.They also like it for another reason , even if they will v not admit it: it makes it very difficult for the worker to do anything other than work .
Frederick W.Taylor, the efficiency expert who early in this century conducted the time-and-motion studies that led to the assembly-line process,tried to reduce workers to robots, all in the name of greater production.His staff of experts, each armed with clipboard and stopwatch , studied individual workers with a view toward eliminating unnecessary movement.They soon found a great deal of opposition from the workers,Most people not directly engaged in daily work express disapproval when they hear of people working on and off.A studied campaign with carefully chosen language -“a full day s work for a full day s pay,” “taking a free ride”- has been pushed by certain employers to discredit the practice, and their success is such that I rarely discuss it except with other workers.My response is personal, and I feel no need to defend it : If I am getting a free ride,how come I am so tired when I go home at the end of a shift ?
Ⅰ.About the Author
Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, was born on March 20, 1865, into an upper class liberal Philadelphia family.His father,a Princeton graduate and lawyer, made enough money from mortgages and did not have to keep a regular job.His mother was a spirited abolitionist and feminist who was said to have run an underground railroad station for runaway slaves.Both parents were Quakers and believed in high thinking and plain living.Parental authority was not questioned and children were seen and not heard in the Taylor family.Family members referred to each other as“thee”
and“ thou”. At an early age Taylor learned self-control and his Quaker upbringing helped him to avoid conflicts with his peers and to resolve disagreements among them .
Taylor was a compulsive adolescent and was always counting and measuring things to figure a better way of doing something.At age twelve, he invented a harness for himself to keep from sleeping on his back, hoping to avoid the nightmares he was having .
At age twenty-five, Taylor earned an engineering degree at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey while holding a full time job .To date, no one has broken that record .
Another of his achievements was his winning of the U .S.Lawn Tennis Association doubles championship where he used a patented spoon-shaped racket that he himself designed .
Even though he excelled in math and sports and had a degree from an exclusive college, Frederick chose to work as a machinist and pattern maker in Philadelphia at the Enterprise Hydraulic Works (Weisford 1987) .
After his apprenticeship at the hydraulic works plant , he became a common laborer at the Midvale Steel Company.He started as a shop clerk and quickly progressed to a machinist, foreman, maintenance foreman, and chief draftsman.Within six years he advanced to a research director, then a chief engineer.While working there he introduced piece work in the factory.His goal was to find the most efficient way to perform specific tasks.He closely watched how work was done and would then measure the quantity produced (Kanigel 44) .