74 Labor and Monopoly Capital
decisions that are made in the course of work. Since, in the case of pig-iron handling, the only decisions to be made were those having to do with a time sequence, Taylor simply dictated that timing and the results at the end of the day added up to his planned day-task. As to the use of money as motivation, while this element has a usefulness in the first stages of a new mode of work, employers do not, when they have once found a way to compel a more rapid pace of work, continue to pay a 60 percent differential for common labor, or for any other job. Taylor was to discover (and to complain) that management treated his “scientific incentives" like any other piece rate, cutting them mercilessly so long as the labor market permitted, so that workers pushed to the Taylorian intensity found themselves getting little, or nothing, more than the going rate for the area, while other employers—under pressure of this competitive threat—forced their own workers to the higher intensities of labor.\*
Taylor liked to pretend that his work standards were not beyond human capabilities exercised without undue strain, but as he himself made clear, this pretense could be maintained only on the understanding that unusual physical specimens were selected for each of his jobs:
instead of twelve and a half tons of pig iron a day. Every detail of the man's job was specified: the size of the shovel, the bite into the pile, the weight of the scoop, the distance to walk, the arc of the swing, and the rest periods that Schmidt should take. By systematically varying each factor, Taylor got the optimum amount of barrow load.21 In the face of so much circumstantial detail, one hesitates to inquire whether Professor Bell can imagine handling a 92-pound pig of iron on a shovel, let alone what sort of an “arc of the swing" one could manage, or how a "barrow" would handle a whole “scoop"” of them. The point here is not that anyone may be tripped up by the use of secondary sources, or get his stories mixed, or have never seen a pig of iron; the point is that sociologists, with few exceptions, deem it proper to write about occupations, work, skills, etc. without even bare familiarity. The result is what one would get from a school ofliterary critics who never read the novels, plays, poems they write about, but construct their theories entirely on the basis of responses to questionnaires put to “scientifically selected samples" of readers. Bell's error is only the grandfather of a long line of such misapprehensions, which become truly extraordinary as more complex forms of work are dealt with. In this situation, management canand gleefully does—tell academics anything it pleases about the evolution of work, skills, etc.
As to the scientific selection of the men, it is a fact that in this gang of 75 pig-iron handlers only about one man in eight was physically capable of handling 47½/ tons per day. With the very best of intentions, the other seven out of eight men were physically unable to work at this pace. Now the one man in eight who was able to do this work was in no sense superior to the other men who were working on the gang. He merely happened to be a man of the type of the ox,—no rare specimen of humanity, difficult to find and therefore very highly prized. On the contrary, he was a man so stupid that he was unfitted to do most kinds of laboring work, even. The selection of the man, then, does not involve finding some extraordinary individual, but merely picking out from among very ordinary men the few who are especially suited to this type of work. Although in this particular gang only one man in eight was suited to doing the work, we had not the slightest difficulty in getting all the men who were neededsome of them from inside the works and others from the neighboring country—who were exactly suited to the job.23 \*
Taylor spent his lifetime in expounding the principles of control enunciated here, and in applying them directly to many other tasks: shoveling loose materials, lumbering, inspecting ball bearings, etc., but particularly to the machinist's trade. He believed that the forms of control he advocated could be applied not only to simple labor, but to labor in its most complex forms, without exception, and in fact it was in machine shops, bricklaying, and other such sites for the practice of well-developed crafts that he and his immediate successors achieved their most striking results.
From earliest times to the Industrial Revolution the craft or skilled trade was the basic unit, the elementary cell of the labor process. In each craft, the worker was presumed to be the master of a body of traditional knowledge, and methods and procedures were left to his or her discretion. In each such worker reposed the accumulated knowledge of materials and processes by which production was accomplished in the craft. The potter, tanner, smith, weaver, carpenter, baker, miller, glassmaker, cobbler, etc., each representing a branch of the social division of labor, was a repository of human technique for the labor processes of that branch. The worker combined, in mind and body, the concepts and physical dexterities of the specialty: technique, understood in this way, is, as has often been observed, the predecessor and progenitor of science. The most important and widespread of all crafts was, and throughout the world remains to this day, that of farmer. The farming family combines its craft with the rude practice of a number of others, including those of the smith, mason, carpenter, butcher, miller, and baker, etc. The apprenticeships required in traditional crafts ranged from three to seven years, and for the farmer of course extends beyond this to include most of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. In view of the knowledge to be assimilated, the dexterities to be gained, and the fact that the craftsman, like the professional, was required to master a specialty and become the best judge of the manner of its application to specific production problems, the years of apprenticeship were generally needed and were employed in a learning process that extended well into the journeyman decades. Of these trades, that of the machinist was in Taylor's day among the most recent, and certainly the most important to modern industry.
Scientific Management
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\* In his classic study of scientific management undertaken in 1915 for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, Robert F. Hoxie pointed out that most rate cutting in shops which had installed a formal system of scientific management took place indirectly, by creating new job classifications at lower rates, etc. He concludes that under scientific management “what amounts to rate cutting seems to be almost of ,, 22 necessity an essential part of its very nature.
\* Georges Friedmann reports that in 1927 a German physiologist, reviewing the Schmidt experience, calculated that the level of output set by Taylor could not be accepted as a standard because “most workers will succumb under the pressure of these labors.24 Yet Taylor persisted in calling it “a pace under which men become happier and thrive."25 We should also note that although Taylor called Schmidt “a man of the type of the ox," and Schmidt's stupidity has become part of the folklore of industrial sociology, Taylor himself reported that Schmidt was building his own house, presumably without anyone to tell him when to stand and when to squat. But a belief in the original stupidity of the worker is a necessity for management; otherwise it would have to admit that it is engaged in a wholesale enterprise of prizing and fostering stupidity.