[...] 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 machinists would deliberately break some part of his machine as an object lesson to demonstrate 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.

The 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.

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.**

• 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 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 of literary 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 can—and gleefully does—tell academics anything it pleases about the evolution of work, skills, etc.

• 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.

• 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, and are then routinized and subjugated to management control. As this tendency has attacked office, technical, and “educated” occupations, sociologists have spoken of it as “bureaucratization,” an evasive and unfortunate use of Weberian terminology, a terminology which often reflects its users’ view that this form of government over work is endemic to “large-scale” or “complex” enterprises, whereas it is better understood as the specific product of the capitalist organization of work, and reflects not primarily scale but social antagonisms.

[...] 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 usually attended by from twenty-five hundred to three thousand. Nothing humanly possible ever kept me from attending those Saturday night lectures. I was fairly quivering in my intense desire to know. Mental hunger is just as painful as physical hunger. Every Saturday night some great scholar talked to an open meeting and gave most wonderfully illuminating results of experimentation and study. Sometimes Professor Proctor told us of the wonders of astronomy—of what science had learned of time and distance, light, motion, etc. Truths gleaned in these lectures became a most vital part of me and gave the world marvelously inspiring meaning. Those lectures were treasured opportunities to hear authorities in science tell what they were doing and thinking. I attended these lectures and study classes over a period of twenty years.17

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 in 1914, of the $5.00 day. Although this dramatic increase in wages was not so strictly adhered to as Ford would have had the public believe when he launched it, it did raise pay at the Ford plant so much above the prevailing rate in the area that it solved both threats for the moment. It gave the company a large pool of labor from which to choose and at the same time opened up new possibilities for the intensification of labor within the plants, where workers were now anxious to keep their jobs. “The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day,” Ford was to write in his autobiography, “was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made.”

Science is the last—and after labor the most important—social property to be turned into an adjunct of capital. The story of its conversion from the province of amateurs, “philosophers,” tinkerers, and seekers after knowledge to its present highly organized and lavishly financed state is largely the story of its incorporation into the capitalist firm and subsidiary organizations. At first science costs the capitalist nothing, since he merely exploits the accumulated knowledge of the physical sciences, but later the capitalist systematically organizes and harnesses science, paying for scientific education, research, laboratories, etc., out of the huge surplus social product which either belongs directly to him or which the capitalist class as a whole controls in the form of tax revenues. A formerly relatively free-floating social endeavor is integrated into production and the market.

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, what Landes called “the exhaustion of the technological possibilities of the Industrial Revolution” had set in.20 The new scientific-technical revolution which replenished the stock of technological possibilities had a conscious and purposive character largely absent from the old. In place of spontaneous innovation indirectly evoked by the social processes of production came the planned progress of technology and product design. This was accomplished by means of the transformation of science itself into a commodity bought and sold like the other implements and labors of production. From an “external economy,” scientific knowledge has become a balance-sheet item.21 Like all commodities, its supply is called forth by demand, with the result that the development of materials, power sources, and processes has become less fortuitous and more responsive to the immediate needs of capital. The scientific-technical revolution, for this reason, cannot be understood in terms of specific innovations—as in the case of the Industrial Revolution, which may be adequately characterized by a handful of key inventions—but must be understood rather in its totality as a mode of production into which science and exhaustive engineering investigations have been integrated as part of ordinary functioning. The key innovation is not to be found in chemistry, electronics, automatic machinery, aeronautics, atomic physics, or any of the products of these science-technologies, but rather in the transformation of science itself into capital.*