The greater part of systematic soldiering . . . is done by the men with the deliberate object of keeping their employers ignorant of how fast work can be done.
So universal is soldiering for this purpose, that hardly a competent workman can be found in a large establishment, whether he works by the day or on piece work, contract work or under any of the ordinary systems of compensating labor, who does not devote a considerable part of his time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.
The causes for this are, briefly, that practically all employers determine upon a maximum sum which they feel it is right for each of their classes of employés to earn per day, whether their men work by the day or piece.2
That the pay of labor is a socially determined figure, relatively independent of productivity, among employers of similar types of labor power in any given period was thus known to Taylor. Workers who produce twice or three times as much as they did the day before do not thereby double or triple their pay, but may be given a small incremental advantage over their fellows, an advantage which disappears as their level of production becomes generalized. The contest over the size of the portion of the day's labor power to be embodied in each product is thus relatively independent of the level of pay, which responds chiefly to market, social, and historical factors. The worker learns this from repeated experiences, whether working under day or piece rates: "It is, however," says Taylor, "under piece work that the art of systematic soldiering is thoroughly developed. After a workman has had the price per piece of the work he is doing lowered two or three times as a result of his having worked harder and increased his output, he is likely to entirely lose sight of his employer's side of the case and to become imbued with a grim determination to have no more cuts if soldiering can prevent it."13To this it should be added that even where a piecework or “incentive" system allows the worker to increase his pay, the contest is not thereby ended but only exacerbated, because the output records now determine the setting and revision of pay rates.
piece-work system they would be allowed to earn no more wages than they had been earning, and yet they would be made to work harder."14 \*
The conclusions which Taylor drew from the baptism by fire he received in the Midvale struggle may be summarized as follows: Workers who are controlled only by general orders and discipline are not adequately controlled, because they retain their grip on the actual processes of labor. So long as they control the labor process itself, they will thwart efforts to realize to the full the potential inherent in their labor power. To change this situation, control over the labor process must pass into the hands of management, not only in a formal sense but by the control and dictation of each step of the process, including its mode of performance. In pursuit of this end, no pains are too great, no efforts excessive, because the results will repay all efforts and expenses lavished on this demanding and costly endeavor.\*\*
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\* In this respect, the later industrial sociologists took a step backward from Taylor. Rather than face the fact of a conflict of interests, they interpreted the behavior of workers in refusing to work harder and earn more under piece rates as “irrational" and "noneconomic" behavior, in contrast to that of management, which always behaved rationally. And this despite the fact that, in the observations made at the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric from which the "human relations" school emerged, the "lowest producer in the room ranked first in intelligence and third in dexterity; the highest producer in the room was seventh in dexterity and lowest in intelligence."15
At least one economist, William M. Leiserson, has given a proper judgment on workers’ rationality in this connection: “. . . the same conditions that lead businessmen to curtail production when prices are falling, and to cut wages when labor efficiency is increasing, cause workers to limit output and reduce efficiency when wages are increasing. . . . If the workers' reasoning is wrong, then business economics as it is taught by employers and the businelss practices of modern industry generally must be equally wrong.16 The Hawthome investigators thought, and their followers still think, that the Western Electric workers were “irrational" or motivated by “group” or “social" or other “emotional" considerations in holding their output down, despite the fact that these very Hawthorne investigations were brought to an end by the Western Electric layoffs in the Great Depression of the 1930s, thus demonstrating just how rational the workers' fears were.
One of the most interesting inquiries into this subject was done in the late 1940s by a sociologist at the University of Chicago who took a job in a factory. He studied intensively eighty-four workers, and found among them only nine “rate busters," who were “social isolates" not only on the job but off; eight of the nine were Republicans while the shop was 70 percent Democratic, and all were from farm or middle-class backgrounds while the rest of the shop was predominantly working-class in family history.' 2,17
Taylor always took the view that workers, by acting in this fashion, were behaving rationally and with an adequate view of their own best interests. He claimed, in another account of his Midvale battle, that he conceded as much even in the midst of the struggle: “His workman friends came to him [Taylor] continually and asked him, in a personal, friendly way, whether he would advise them, for their own best interest, to turn out more work. And, as a truthful man, he had to tell them that if he were in their place he would fight against turning out any more work, just as they were doing, because under the
\*\* Clearly, this last conclusion depends on Adam Smith's well-known principle that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market, and Taylorism cannot become generalized in any industry or applicable in particular situations until the scale of production is adequate to support the efforts and costs involved in “rationalizing" it. It is for this reason above all that Taylorism coincides with the growth of production and its concentration in ever larger corporate units in the latter part of the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries.