Frederick Taylor came into the machine shop of the Midvale Steel Company in 1878. He had served an apprenticeship as a pattern-maker and machinist, but business was poor after the panic of 1873, and he started as a day laborer. He became the shop’s clerk, then ran a lathe. He turned out more work than the other machinists, and after several months he was made gang boss over the lathes.
Everything that follows is Taylor’s own account, written more than thirty years later in The Principles of Scientific Management.
Almost all the work in the shop was paid by the piece. The shop, he wrote, “was really run by the workmen, and not by the bosses.” The men had “carefully planned just how fast each job should be done,” and had set a pace for each machine that was limited to about one-third of a good day’s work. A new man was told at once how much to do. If he did more, he was soon driven out.
As soon as Taylor became gang boss, one man after another came to see him. “Now, Fred we’re very glad to see that you’ve been made gang-boss. You know the game all right, and we’re sure that you’re not likely to be a piece-work hog. You come along with us, and every-thing will be all right, but if you try breaking any of these rates you can be mighty sure that we’ll throw you over the fence.”
He told them he was now working on the side of the management. That, he wrote, “immediately started a war.” He fired or cut the pay of the most stubborn men, lowered piece rates, hired green men and taught them himself. The men pressed anyone who sped up until he slowed down again or quit. Machines started breaking, and the machinists told the superintendent an incompetent foreman was overstraining them. Taylor said they were breaking them on purpose, and the superintendent let him make any man whose machine broke pay part of the repair. Once or twice, friends among the workmen begged him not to walk home along the lonely path beside the railway; it would be at the risk of his life, they said. He sent word that he would walk it every night.
After about three years, output had risen, in many cases doubled, and he was promoted to foreman of the shop. His workmen friends kept asking him, privately, whether they should turn out more. He told them that in their place he would fight it too, because under piece work they would be made to work harder for no more pay.
Looking back, he made an admission. Although he was foreman, he wrote, “the combined knowledge and skill of the workmen who were under him was certainly ten times as great as his own.” The men knew the work. Management didn’t.
So he set out to change who knew it. He got permission from the company’s president, William Sellers, to spend money on a careful study of how long the work should take. Sellers, by Taylor’s account, did not believe it would give results of much value.
The system that grew out of that study moved the planning off the shop floor. In most cases, Taylor wrote in 1911, “one type of man is needed to plan ahead and an entirely different type to execute the work.”