{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","uuid":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","normalized_title":"laborandmonopolycapitalthedegradationofworkinthetwentiethcentury","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","isbns":["0853459401"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital%20The%20Degradation%20of%20Work%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"66 / 67","pdf_page":46,"physical_index":46,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ab67c7f69a3701076fbf6b1ddb5dfbcd240bc7b204a6b124122760276b33d143"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"When I had trained enough of these laborers so that they could run the lathes, I went to them and said, “Now, you men to whom I have taught a trade are in a totally different position from the machinists who were running these lathes before you came here. Every one of you agreed to do a certain thing for me if I taught you a trade, and now not one of you will keep his word. I did not break my word with you, but every one of you has broken his word with me. Now, I have not any mercy on you; I have not the slightest hesitation in treating you entirely differently from the machinists.\" I said, \"I know that very heavy social pressure has been put upon you outside the works to keep you from carrying out your agreement with me, and it is very difficult for you to stand out against this pressure, but you ought not to have made your bargain with me if you did not intend to keep your end of it. Now, I am going to cut your rate in two tomorrow and you are going to work for half price from now on. But all you will have to do is to turn out a fair day's work and you can earn better wages than you have been earning.\"\n\nThese men, of course, went to the management, and protested that I was a tyrant, and a nigger driver, and for a long time they stood right by the rest of the men in the shop and refused to increase their output a particle. Finally, they all of a sudden gave right in and did a fair day's work.\n\nI want to call your attention, gentlemen, to the bitterness that was stirred up in this fight before the men finally gave in, to the meanness of it, and the contemptible conditions that exist under the old piecework system, and to show you what it leads to. In this contest, after my first fighting blood which was stirred up through strenuous opposition had subsided, I did not have any bitterness against any particular man or men. My anger and hard feelings were stirred up against the system; not against the men. Practically all of those men were my friends, and many of them are still my friends.\\* As soon as I began to be successful in forcing the men to do a fair day's work, they played what is usually the winning card. I knew that it was coming. I had predicted to the owners of the company what would happen when we began to win, and had warned them that they must stand by me; so that I had the backing of the company in taking effective steps to checkmate the final move of the men. Every time I broke a rate or forced one of the new men whom I had trained to work at a reasonable and proper speed, some one of the machinișts would deliberately break some part of his machine as an object lesson to đémonstrate to the management that a fool foreman was driving the men to overload their machines until they broke. Almost every day ingenious accidents were planned, and these happened to machines in different parts of the shop, and were, of course, always laid to the fool foreman who was driving the men and the machines beyond their proper limit.\n\nFortunately, I had told the management in advance that this would happen, so they backed me up fully. When they began breaking their machines, I said to the men, “All right; from this time on, any accident that happens in this shop, every time you break any part of a machine you will have to pay part of the cost of repairing it or else quit. I don't care if the roof falls in and breaks your machine, you will pay all the same.\" Every time a man broke anything I fined him and then turned the money over to the mutual benefit association, so that in the end it came back to the men. But I fined them, right or wrong. They could always show every time an accident happened that it was not their fault and that it was an impossible thing for them not to break their machine under the circumstances. Finally, when they found that these tactics did not produce the desired effect on the management, they got sick and tired of being fined, their opposition broke down, and they promised to do a fair day's work.\n\nAfter that we were good friends, but it took three years of hard fighting to bring this about.0\n\nThe issue here turned on the work content of a day's labor power, which Taylor defines in the phrase “a fair day's work.\" To this term he gave a crude physiological interpretation: all the work a worker can do without injury to his health, at a pace that can be sustained throughout a working lifetime. (In practice, he tended to define this level of activity at an extreme limit, choosing a pace that only a few could maintain, and then only under strain.) Why a “fair day's work\" should be defined as a physiological maximum is never made clear. In attempting to give concrete meaning to the abstraction “fairness,\" it would make just as much if not more sense to express a fair day's work as the amount of labor necessary to add to the product a value equal to the worker's pay; under such conditions, of course, profit would be impossible. The phrase “a fair day's work\" must therefore be regarded as inherently meaningless, and filled with such content as the adversaries in the purchase-sale relationship try to give it.\n\nTaylor set as his objective the maximum or “optimum\" that can be obtained from a day's labor power. “On the part of the men,\" he said in his first book, “the greatest obstacle to the attainment of this standard is the slow pace which they adopt, or the loafing or soldiering,' marking time, as it is called.\" In each of his later expositions of his system, he begins with this same point, underscoring it heavily.\" The causes of this soldiering he breaks into two parts: “This loafing or soldiering proceeds from two causes. First, from the natural instinct and tendency of men to take it easy, which may be called natural soldiering. Second, from more intricate second thought and reasoning caused by their relations with other men, which may be called systematic soldiering.\" The first of these he quickly puts aside, to concentrate on the second: “The natural laziness of men is serious, but by far the greatest evil from which both workmen and employers are suffering is the systematic soldiering which is almost universal under all the ordinary schemes of management and which results from a careful study on the part of the workmen of what they think will promote their best interests.\"\n\n66\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nScientific Management\n\n67\n\n\\* This particular bit of mythomania was typical of the man; there was apparently no truth to it. Kakar calls it “characteristic of the obsessional personality.\"9","previous_page":45,"next_page":47}