AN ESSAY IN "SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 103, 17 September 1912, Page 4

AN ESSAY IN "SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT."

About thirty years ago a man who was employed as a machinist in running lathes in the Midvale Steel Company in America wa's promoted to "gang-boss." Having been a workman himself, he knew that the workmen were not getting one-third, of a -good day's work out of the machineii. Keeling, that lie was now r on the side of the management, lie en--3 gaged for three years in gn incessant and c bitter war with the workmen in order, i to get'a fair clay's work out of. the , ; lathes. That war, ended in a victory for the gang-boss. J3ut Mr Taylor, the gangboss who subsequently became a chief engineer ancf President of the American ) Society of Mechanical Engineers, had during .that war beeraie profoundly iin- ( pressed by 'tin? evils of the ordinary system of Industry and management. He n has spent tire last thirty years in devising a remedy, for these evils, the inefficiency of production and the perpetual discord between employer and employed. The remedy has -lately attracted ; so much'attention in, America-claims to be a new science, and is called by its inventor . "Scientific Management." The. science of management in. industry, if 5, there is such a science, is really only a s. part of the larger science of efficiency. To do any operation with the minimum expenditure of strength or material, and in the. shortest tiitae possible, in to do it efficiently; the'greater the 'expenditure and tlfe longer the time, the less etfi'n ciently ifc it" performed. The difficulty ft, iS to strike the mean between tlie'e.xli penditure and time. 'Mr Taylor tells us ;e tjiat there is a Science of doing anything, a science of .cleaning one'tj teeth, of handa- ling pig-iron, of' shovelling dirt. If .we know the laws of these sciences we' can regulate our actions in order to attain the mean which is efficiency. Ordinarily in life and in industries nobody troubles ' about science of-doing tilings: we yj learn to walk and clean our teeth by walking and ploaniing our teeth, or by Watching other people do it; and the workman learns to handle pig-iron by »n handling pig-irjjn, or by watching other r » g workmen handle pig-iron. Now, in faetorieg everything is done according to t\iese rule-of-thumb or traditional rootling ods; and nothing is done efficiently, bee(j cause the workman lias not the time or the intelligence to acquire the science of doing it.' .Many people may doubt the truth of this, when stated generally. "Mr Taylor gives instances which show that it is true. "I daresay," were hit? words ! to a conference, "that you think that tliere is no science in shovelling dirt, that anyone can shove] dirt. 'Why,' you say, 'to shovel dirt you just shovel, that is all there is in it.'" And even if there were more in it than . that, one wtuld certainly suppose that as people must have been shovelling dirt ever since Adam delved, someone would hare hit upon the best way to shovel it. Rut no one ever did, before Mr Taylor "started to think on the' subject of shovelling." And it took some days thinking even to find "the most important element in the science of shovelling." The most important element is: At what shovel-load will a man'do his biggest day's work? And then it took many more days experimenting to discover the answer to that question. Two men were 'kept shovelling dirt for two or three months, while another man stood- over them with a stop-watch,' timing them, counting the shovel-loads, telling them what to do. They began with an ordinary shovel and a full shovel-load, which averaged thirtyeight'pounds. [n this way it was found how much they could do in a day when they were shovelling at thirty-eight pounds to tilt, shovel. Then the same thing was done with shorter shovels and smaller shovel-loads, averaging thirtyfour, thirty, twenty-eight, down to fourteen pounds. And as the shovel load was reduced from thirty-eight to twenty-one pounds, the total tonnage shovelled by each man in a day increased; after twenty-one pounds it began to decrease again; the answer to the question had been discovered, At twenty-one pounds to the. shovel- load, a man will- do his biggest day's work. But that is only the beginning of the matter. In an ordinary factory the workers use the same shovel to shovel everything, -from "rice-coal, three and a-half pounds to a shovel-load" to ''heavy wet ore, about thirty-eight pounds to the shovel-load." Mr Taylor lmilt a shovel room, in which were eight, or ten different kinds of shovels, made so that whatever a mail was shovelling, from rice-coal to heavy iron ore. he couid use a shovel which would give him an average shovel-load of twenty-one pounds. This example shows only the first principle of scientific management, namely, the development of a science for each element of a man's work. In every case it begins with an elaborate' study of men. machinery, and material. The question to be settled is: "What w the best; way of doing this, and if a man does it in that, way. what might his output to be? Every movement nf workman and machine is timed, and the time required for such movement is known (u the smallest fraction of a second. The object of the other three principles of scientific management is to get the w»rk

done in accordance with the knowledge obtained under the first .principle. The first is to select instruments and men and to train and teach the men; the second to co-operatc with the men so that the work is done in accordance with the principles of the science; the third to redistribute the responsibility between the management and the men. In practice this entails a complete reorganisation of industry. The management takes over entirely the responsibility for arranging how the work is to be done. The daily task of each man in the factory is planned for lam one day before in a central office. He receives written instructions as to what die has to do, where lie has to do it. A "functional foreman" stands over him to show him exactly how he has to do his work, every movement in accord-ance with the knowledge, in the hands of the management,, of the best way of doing it. The workman is on a "task wage"; that is, he knows that, if he completes the task set him, he will get the ordinary wage plus a bonus- of from thirty to one hundred per cent.; if he fails, be will get only the ordinary wage. Such, in outline, is Mr Taylor's system. It has 1 been adopted in many and various large industrial companies in America. The results are spoken of with enthusiasm bv its inventor and by many of the capitalists and manufacturers who have adopted it. They claim that it revolutionises industry and business, it reconciles labor and capital, it enormously reduces cost of production, and increases wages. The system has been in operation long I enough to make it possible to verify . some of these claims.