Treating people as machines

The economic tragedies involved in unemployment of skilled workers like the Luddites were only the most obvious and "material" (financial) negative outcomes of mechanization. Though many of these out-of-work labourers became beggars and criminals, some were able to be absorbed into new jobs operating the machines, or doing part of the mechanized process that there wasn't a machine for.

As the 1800s progressed many people of conscience began to think critically about more spiritual costs to workers as well – the costs of a specifically human kind that mechanization brought with it. Humans were still needed to do parts of the work for which there wasn't a machine available yet. The owners of the machines began to resent the ways in which humans were not like machines. Humans could be lazy and intractable. They could be stupid or intentionally get things wrong. They could be resentful or even rebellious. They had emotions, and sometimes believed they had "human rights" that needed to be respected. Above all, humans were terribly "high maintenance" and inefficient compared to machines. The people running the factories and other businesses wanted workers that behaved more like machines. But behaving like a machine is not a very fulfilling way for a human being to spend their day, and as time went on, the owners tended to want the people to be more efficient, like a good machine. Many people found this to be a disheartening way to live, spending long hours every day (some people worked 16-hour shifts!) denying their humanity and needs.

The dehumanized work of factories often led to people feeling disconnected from their fellow workers. When working fields before the Industrial Revolution, people mostly saw themselves as equals, collaborating for an understood goal: having food to eat. Nobody was going to "get ahead" of anybody else, and the workers typically relied on each other for their communal survival. With the industrial forms of work, people began to see themselves as in competition for jobs and wages, and some had ambitions to rise above the status of ordinary worker.

Meanwhile, the people running the businesses continued to press for more machine-like productivity from the humans who worked for them.

By the late 1800s the inefficiency of human beings came under scrutiny by the people who would become the founders of the discipline of Scientific Management. Most famous and influential of these thinkers was a man named Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer who spent most of his adult life trying to make human workers approach the efficiency of machines.

Taylor seemed to be a Capitalist success story, having worked his way up from the shop floor to become a manager. But he had a middle class upbringing and education behind him. This allowed him to talk to the managers and owners in their own language and align himself with them against his uneducated and uncultured fellow workers. Taylor himself worked hard and long hours on his way up. He clearly valued hard work, in himself and others. The behaviour he saw in his fellow workers often let him down: they would slack, continue to do things their own way when they had been shown a more efficient way, and so forth. In short, they were human beings, not just workers.

Taylor was convinced that the only way to increase productivity and profit was not through paying workers even less, but rather through making the work done for the wages paid more efficient. This was in the interest of the worker as well as the factory owner, as Taylor saw it. Indeed, some of Taylor's thinking about how one might "ease" labour is a kind of precursor of modern thinking on ergonomics.

Nevertheless, the bottom line was not to make the worker's life easier, and certainly not to make it more meaningful, socially rewarding, or enjoyable - or to treat it with more respect. Taylor was famous for carrying a stopwatch around and conducting minute analysis of slight variations in work behaviour. The goal was to increase the "mechanical" efficiency of the production line, so that any time and energy that could be capitalized upon would not go to waste. Back when human beings had mostly grown crops and raised animals, no one followed them around with a stopwatch. (Indeed, as mentioned in the first lesson, there weren't even clocks at first!) When that kind of work was "efficient," it was because people were working together toward a common goal that was very clear to them and relevant: eating, having enough food for the winter, and so forth. Now people's work was often not meaningful in itself (assembling products, for instance) and they needed to be treated like malfunctioning machines if they were not maximally productive.

In his richly detailed analysis Mechanization Takes Command (1948), social historian Siegfried Giedion summarizes the late 19th-century drive behind Taylor's work:

The problem he deals with is the thorough analysis of a work process. Everything superfluous must go, for the sake of efficiency and, as Taylor is ever stressing, for the easing of labor, its functional performance.

Work should be done easily and so far as possible without fatigue. But always behind this lies the constant goal to which the period was magically drawn - production, greater production at any price. The human body is studied to discover how far it can be transformed into a mechanism. (Giedion 1948, 98)

The nineteeth century's focus on production and efficiency at the expense of all else has not diminished in the years since Taylor did his ground-breaking work in the science of management. If anything, this primacy of efficiency has only become more pronounced and is now so taken for granted that one would scarcely think to question it. One of the most universal appeals made in our world is to the sanctified – rarely scrutinized – values of efficiency, productivity, and economic growth.

What happens to the common worker in Taylor's system? There is definitely room – at least as Taylor originally envisioned things – for the talented or motivated drudge to distinguish himself and perhaps rise to the loftier heights of middle management, as Taylor had done. Workers with bright ideas could be encouraged to bring them to the managers, and would supposedly be rewarded if the idea seemed to increase productivity. (As an aside, however, Montgomery [1987] has shown exhaustively how Taylor's ideas about the "lower" workers actually tied in with classist, racist, and sexist assumptions about human worth.)

What objection can there be for using scientific methods to determine the best practices for workers, practices that will allow them to do the most work with the least fatigue or potential for injury? Surely, the efficiency expert might argue, more efficient work by the workers will lead to a more successful company and more secure employment for those same workers, a stronger economy in the workers' town and country, and overall better life not just for the owners and managers but also for the workers themselves? This was the ideal of the captains of industry, or at least what they told the people who questioned the new focus on machine-like efficiency at the cost of all else.

The negative effects of Taylorism (as it came to be known) are not so much in the practical sphere as in the harder to scrutinize realm of the soul. Whether or not it is a positive thing from the point of view of economics for a human worker to function like a well-oiled machine, there have been many objections to this whole way of viewing human beings – as elements of an efficient system of production and profit – objections that come from a humanist point of view as opposed to an economic one.

NEXT