In 1890, he moved on to a paper manufacturer and eventually to independent consulting. A broader theory of management began to come together: like Samuel Bentham, Taylor combined social engineering, technical innovations, and improved accounting practices. Possibly as early as the 1880s, Taylor engaged in “time studies,” quantifying tasks with a watch in order to optimize them. When Bethlehem Steel Company became a Taylor client in 1899, it offered special opportunities for testing Taylor’s theories.
According to Taylor, Bethlehem was in a stronger financial position than previous clients and more open to change. With the help of James Gillespie, who had previously worked with Taylor, and Hartley C. Wolle, a Bethlehem supervisor, he embarked on an important study that later became a famous anecdote in his Principles of Scientific Management.
On March 13, 1899, Gillespie and Wolle tasked ten men who they felt were particularly fast workers with moving pig iron as fast as they could. Multiplied across a day, their rate would have been over seventy-five tons per day per man. Gillespie and Wolle recognized this pace was unsustainable, though, and so cut it by 40 percent to allow for rest. This was an arbitrary cut, the kind of “rule of thumb” method Taylor loathed—why not 60 percent, or 55? However, his own attempts to calculate a scientific law of human exhaustion were similarly dubious.
The utility of science in Taylorism was its rhetorical power rather than methodological rigor: it legitimized managerial tyranny as objectively necessary and ultimately mutually beneficial. Science also justified Taylor’s project of centralizing all decision and thought about work. Under what he called the “task idea,” the worker has specified for them “not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it.”
As much as possible, workers were meant to be mere appendages of decision-making managers, components of capital’s machinery. The goal was not new, and Taylor’s methods were not all that effective in achieving it. The calculations and conclusions of his time studies were remarkably haphazard, and it appears that his organization of physical space and his accounting practices made a far greater material difference for his clients than his worker control schemes did. But Taylor’s impact was ideological and political as much as practical. His poorly controlled experiments and confused averages epistemologically distinguished enlightened and rational managers from their subordinates, legitimizing class distinctions.
Whether his methods were properly conducted science is immaterial. What mattered was that Frederick Winslow Taylor could present a convincing and convenient figure for management—approximately 45 tons per man day—and workers could not. Once Taylor and his assistant arrived at this figure, they set about making it a reality. This was no easy task: it was four times what workers were then averaging. The obvious move was to shift workers from day work—pay by day—to piecework, or pay by ton loaded.
By setting the rate carefully, they could entice workers to do several times as much work for more pay per time but proportionally less per ton. This was the kind of win-win Taylor felt made his program appealing to workers: in theory, everyone was better off.
