The marketplace of the day pushed employers relentlessly in that direction. Consider what they faced:
The new companies were trying to supply huge national markets, opened up only recently by the railroad and the telegraph. So their payrolls were gargantuan by the standards of the time. Back in 1870 the McCormick reaper plant's 500 employees made it one of the nation's largest. By 1900 some 70 factories counted more than 2,000 employees apiece, with a dozen or so in the 6,000-to-10,000 range. The demand for manufacturing labor skyrocketed all over the country. Between 1880 and 1920 the U.S. population doubled. The number of factory workers more than tripled.
To fill those swelling ranks, companies coaxed young men and women off the farm and snapped up hordes of recent immigrants, themselves often of rural origin. The new workers had little schooling. The immigrants didn't speak much English. Few knew what to expect from the giant, noisy, regimented factory. What they found there ranged from merely difficult to brutal. Workdays were long -- no surprise there. But work was sporadic in those boom-and-bust days, and layoffs were frequent. Wages were usually determined by some form of piece rate, so the pace was intense. When new technology or procedures led to an increase in output, the piece rate was cut. Working conditions could be fierce: Cotton mills were heated with live steam to maintain high humidity all year long. A typical meat-packing plant, according to a contemporary account, had "slime and grease . . . so thick that a foothold was hardly possible." From 15 to 25 employees died in accidents during an average year at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead steelworks.
Strangers in a dangerous land, the workers grumbled and protested and walked off the job. Between 1880 and 1900, notes one writer, "nearly 23,000 strikes affected more than 117,000 establishments -- an average of 3 new strikes a day for 20 years." Union organizing and walkouts provoked firings, blacklisting, and violence, creating an us-against-them mentality on both sides. Turnover rates and absenteeism were astronomical by today's standards. The Amoskeag Co.'s textile mills, in Manchester, N.H., had to hire 24,000 in one year to maintain a labor force of 13,700. Ford Motor Co.'s Highland Park, Mich., plant, incredibly, had to hire 54,000 over 12 months to maintain 13,000 employees. At Highland Park, says the historian David Montgomery, between 1,300 and 1,400 workers a day were discovered "missing from their stations." That ratio -- about 10% out every day -- was more or less standard in the years preceding World War I.
So plants were adding or replacing people all the time. The managerial conclusion was inescapable: most of a company's employees had to be essentially interchangeable. Someone leaves? See who's standing at the gate looking for work. Training or skill development? Forget it -- the new employee had to get up to speed in a matter of hours, even minutes. Skilled workers were a liability, not an asset. If they left, they were hard to replace.
That need for interchangeable employees defined two basic assumptions about work and workers -- assumptions that have shaped business thinking for most of this century.
First, a job must be defined as narrowly as possible. Production workers in particular should perform minutely segmented tasks. The simpler the task, the easier it is to replace people. New production technology, developed around the turn of the century, facilitated specialization: more and more goods were produced by special-purpose machinery and assembly lines rather than by hand labor and craftsmen. The word operative, meaning machine tender, came into use. Operatives weren't expected to worry about the whole product, let alone about matters such as customer relations, finance, and work flow.
Second, workers need close, direct supervision. The historian Daniel Nelson refers to 19th-century factories as "the foreman's empire," and the description fits. Foremen hired workers, assigned them jobs, showed them what to do. They set individual pay rates. They handed out discipline (fines, dismissal, occasional physical abuse). The typical foreman's style of management was referred to as "driving," defined by Nelson as "a combination of authoritarian rule and physical compulsion." Driving had a certain compelling logic. Given the conditions, what besides a foreman's wrath or beneficence would induce workers to work? Or to do anything beyond a bare minimum? This was not the age of the loyal employee -- or of the loyal employer.
The invention of "scientific management," by Frederick Winslow Taylor and his followers around the turn of the century, gave both assumptions the imprimatur of the industrial engineer. Scientific management -- the TQM of its day -- sought to eliminate bottlenecks and inefficiencies in production. Analyze every step of the production process, preached Taylor. Scrutinize every worker's every motion; break jobs down into their smallest components. Then set up a central department to standardize production methods, job descriptions, and pay rates. ("All possible brainwork," he wrote, "should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department.") Though Taylor was in effect curbing foremen's authority, he had no thought of abolishing close supervision; indeed, he felt more foremen than ever were needed to make sure workers did what the planners prescribed. Businesspeople evidently agreed. Between 1910 and 1920 the ranks of supervisory employees grew nearly two and a half times as fast as the ranks of wage earners.
None of that sat well with workers, who continued to feel (sometimes rightly) that management was trying to screw them. Unions howled about specialization. They protested arbitrary authority and excoriated scientific management. (Molders at the Watertown, Mass., arsenal walked off the job in 1911 at the very appearance of a Taylor disciple with his stopwatch.) But employee protests had little impact on the development of wage labor. Not until after the Wagner Act, in 1935 -- and after a series of often-bloody strikes -- did unions establish themselves in major industries. And not until after World War II did they set the patterns of collective bargaining that characterized labor relations for the next few decades.
