Wednesday, May 09, 2012

A REMINDER...




















…of how capitalism used to work and still does – with the same underlying attitudes – except, unlike Henry Ford, no one today is about to double wages to stabilize the workforce or even ensure that the workers earn enough to buy the product.

"Ford's assembly line and his production techniques in general were exemplars of 'scientific management,' a phrase and approach made popular by Philadelphia engineer and businessman Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor was one of the nation's first specialists in shop-floor management, and his short book The Principles of Scientific Management was the best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century. Taylor believed that workplaces could be made more efficient by training, inducing, and compelling workers to labor more steadily and intensively. He conducted time and motion studies to analyze the tasks workers were expected to perform and then encouraged employers to reorganize the work process to minimize wasted motion and time. He also favored piece-rate payment schemes to compel employees, many of whom he described as 'stupid,' to work more quickly. 'Faster work can be assured,' wrote Taylor, 'only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adop­tion of the best implements... and enforced cooperation.’. Not surprisingly, most industrial workers resisted such schemes. One worker at the Ford Motor Company com­plained that 'when the whistle blows he starts to jerk and when the whistle blows again he stops jerking.' At Ford and elsewhere, a common response to the brutal intensification of work was absenteeism and high quit rates: in 1913, Ford's daily absentee rate was 10 percent, while annual turnover ex­ceeded 350 percent. To reduce turnover, which was costly to the company, Ford doubled the daily wages of his most val­ued employees, to five dollars a day. This strategy was successful in stabilizing the labor force and reducing operating costs." Pauline Maier, Merritt Roe Smith, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel J. Kevles; Inventing America (Norton)

4 comments:

Johnny Haddo said...

& ya got a copy of 'The Elders of Zion' for ur trouble..no YIDS please _

Mick said...

Enough with the Yid shit, okay?

Mick said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Johnny Haddo said...

Is a little irony lost on u..??Kirk Douglas once said, ' the best thing about being Jewish is, u can be anti-semitic as fuck'
that's let me in, & u standing outside..think about it, Jews like to piss 'The Goy' off.
there are no truths outside the gates of eden..hahaHa
btw; working for Henry Ford was a precursor to IG FARBEN, the money machine behind Hitler _