Taylorism on Trial: The Watertown Strike, Congress and Lenin's U-Turn

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In 1877 Frederick Winslow Taylor took a job as a clerk at the Midvale Steel Company, and as foreman by 1880 he concluded his team produced about one third of a good day's work. He blamed soldiering, a rational defense against managers who cut piece rates when output rose. From the fall of 1882 he timed every motion with a stopwatch to find the one best way. At Bethlehem Steel he set the optimal shovel load at 21.5 pounds and had a pig iron handler he called Schmidt move 47 tons a day instead of 12.5 by working under load about 43 percent of the time and resting the other 57 percent, while managers issued detailed instruction cards.

Taylor first called his approach shop management. During 1910 Interstate Commerce Commission hearings, Louis Brandeis argued that railroads could save a million dollars a day through efficiency and rebranded the method scientific management, and Taylor published his principles in 1911. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor opposed it, and skilled molders at the government's Watertown Arsenal struck over stopwatch timing. A 1912 congressional investigation led the government to ban stopwatches and pay premiums in its manufacturing plants. Lenin, who in 1913 had called the system man's enslavement by the machine, demanded in 1918 that the Soviet republic adopt it.

• Taylor's premium pay could raise wages by up to 100 percent over the baseline.
• Watertown workers complained of nervous exhaustion and feared their craft could be taught to anyone.
• The episode says Ford developed its moving assembly line largely independently of Taylor.
• Alexei Gastev founded Moscow's Central Institute of Labor to conduct time and motion studies.
• The episode traces Taylor's influence to lean manufacturing, operations research and digital Taylorism in workplace monitoring software.