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The crisis Ford faced was intensified by the unionization drive begun by the Industrial Workers of the World among Ford workers in the summer of 1913. Ford’s response to the double threat of unionization and the flight of workers from his plants was the announcement, made with great fanfare early i…

[...] Samuel Gompers, as a cigarmaker living in New York’s dense working-class district on the Lower East Side in the 1860s, saw and experienced this same working-class interest:

Cooper Union provided opportunities for formal study courses as well as lectures every Saturday evening which were …

• One must not suppose from this that such a psychological shift in relations between worker and manager is entirely a thing of the past. On the contrary, it is constantly being recapitulated in the evolution of new occupations as they are brought into being by the development of industry and trade…

• 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…

• Daniel Bell has recorded this event as follows: “But it was in 1899 that Taylor achieved fame when he taught a Dutchman named Schmidt to shovel forty-seven tons 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 …