By then, both specialization and hierarchical supervision were ensconced in business practice. Unions accepted them and concentrated on protecting their members against abuse. The newly negotiated contracts spelled out the requirements of each job, for example, to the letter. U.S. Steel's 1946 contract with the United Steel Workers of America specified matters such as how much river sand -- moisture content approximately 5.5% -- a sand shoveler was expected to shovel (12.5 15-pound shovelfuls per minute). Union work rules and grievance procedures, similarly, set limits on foremen's and supervisors' authority but took for granted that all employees would be told what to do.
Beyond such rules, unions explicitly disavowed any interest in how a company was run. Paragraph eight of a typical contract between the United Auto Workers and General Motors read, "The products to be manufactured, the location of plants, the schedules of production, the methods, processes, and means of manufacturing are solely and exclusively the responsibility of the corporation."
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II
What was created by this history, of course, was a mind-set. You could call it the mentality of wage labor, except that it affected employees and managers alike. And it persists today.
The mind-set's most visible manifestation is the feeling of us against them, management against labor, bosses against workers. From 1960 to 1980 more than a million employees a year were involved in large-scale strikes. Some strikes forced companies to shut their doors. Some companies shut their doors voluntarily rather than accede to labor's demands. Though union membership has declined in recent years, disputes are still bitter. (Last year's Caterpillar strike involved 12,000 workers and ran 163 days, ending only when the company threatened to bring in strikebreakers.) And union or nonunion, most workplaces live with a certain amount of daily in-your-face hostility.
But mistrust and malevolence between labor and management are only a part of the wage-labor mind-set, and not always the most important part. Even in the kindest and gentlest -- or the smallest and most familylike -- workplaces, the assumptions of specialization and supervision create characteristic ways of thinking and acting.
To an employee, the most important facets of any workplace are "my job" and "my boss." Doing the job well and satisfying the boss constitute success at work: they govern one's job security and chances for raises and advancement. Doing anything else may interfere with those goals. So even the best employees may balk at a task not in their job description or cringe when a manager other than their own supervisor gives them extra work. ("What's my boss going to think?") Less-than-diligent employees have ready-made excuses for not doing all sorts of things. It's not my job is a favorite. I didn't know I was supposed to do that is another.
Since employees are human beings, they may find themselves caught between what they feel they ought to do and what their job calls for. An insurance-company clerk confessed to Barbara Garson, author of a book about work, that she OK'd a store owner's policy calling for $5,000 protection against fire and $165,000 against vandalism -- exactly the reverse of what she figured the right numbers were. "I was just about to show it to Gloria [the supervisor]," the clerk admitted, "when I figured, Wait a minute! I'm not supposed to read these forms. I'm just supposed to check one column against another. And they do check. So it couldn't be counted as my error." Garson says she must have looked disapproving, because the clerk suddenly got mad. "Goddamn it! They don't explain this stuff to me. I'm not supposed to understand it. I'm supposed to check one column against another."
Rifts and resentment are built into the system. By common consent, for example, it's management's job to organize the work and provide the tools. Management, also being human, periodically screws up. Employees get conflicting instructions. Equipment doesn't get fixed. Parts aren't where they need to be, the phones aren't being answered promptly, the department is understaffed and overworked. The employees' verdict? They have messed up. They don't know what they're doing. They is every workplace's most common name for management. It's heard in hospitals and software companies as frequently as in grimy metalworking shops.
Managers experience the system's flip side, which is often equally thankless. They are supposed to get the work done, mainly by giving instructions and seeing they are carried out. But supervision as a method of management has built-in limits, particularly since driving has gone out of style. Managers may be poor instructors, or employees poor learners. No one can specify what to do in every eventuality, yet employees may decide to do exactly as they are told and nothing more. ("You never said I had to do that too.") And no manager can be everywhere at once.
Ever since Taylor, those difficulties have spawned an industry of advice peddling. A good manager, so it is said, won't just supervise but will motivate workers to superior performance. How to do that motivating? Read the books; call in the consultants. Some urge exhortation and inspiration, which they often call leadership skills. Others rely on performance reviews, still others on incentive-compensation systems (Taylor's favorite, and still fashionable today). Managers in most companies practice a mixture of techniques, with varying degrees of success. Many conclude that employees are inept, poorly educated, lazy, rigid, and dumb -- in a word, unmotivated.
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For most of the 20th century, the inefficiencies and foul-ups of the traditional system didn't matter much. Work was done; goods were produced and services provided, often in astonishing quantity. Competitors, virtually all of them domestic, faced similar costs and conditions. Conventional management practices were part of the landscape; companies took them for granted. Many still do. But for a lot of U.S. businesses, competition has stiffened dramatically. Suddenly, corporate survival was in doubt and management practices were up for grabs.
