Capitalism during this period is often described as conforming to a “virtuous” cycle of investment and hiring, in which increases in productivity and wages were mutually constitutive, rising together. This allowed for a “compromise” between capital and labor, in which workers would relinquish control over the conditions of labor in exchange for a larger share of the proceeds. Capitalists could therefore institute a wide spectrum of techniques to rationalize and intensify labor in accord with the profit drive, and it was the success of such productivity-increasing programs that allowed capitalists to increase wages and still keep a handy sum for themselves. Typically, one speaks (sometimes interchangeably) of two types of managerial programs: Taylorism and Fordism. Taylorism refers to the “scientific management” techniques popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor at the turn of the century, which involved an analysis of existing work practices (“time and motion studies”) and an attempt to reconstruct such practices by way of precisely choreographed movements designed for maximum efficiency. Fordism, which often incorporated Taylorist management techniques, refers in particular to the automation of production through the establishment of assembly lines where workers at different stations perform a single task, notably pioneered in Ford Motor Company’s factories.6 Fordism also refers to a particular social arrangement in which workers are paid enough to purchase the products they make. Henry Ford famously paid workers five dollars per day so that they could purchase the very cars they had themselves built. Fordism thus becomes a particularly useful if also limited shorthand for the postwar order and its linkage of productivity and wages. Both Fordism and Taylorism typically imply processes of “deskilling” and “routinization” that allow workers to begin a job with no training and tend to increase managerial control over the pace and design of work. They also make it much easier to replace workers, since the years of apprenticeship that craft-based production required are done away with.7 Since these processes required such large numbers of workers, and since deskilling meant that employers could expand their workforce rapidly, productive investment led to a favorable bargaining position for workers, whose unions emerged from the 1940s as powerful if also domesticated political forces.