If you’ve ever lost your job thanks to a management consultant coming through your company or been timed for how fast you work, you can thank Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management. If that field sounds made up that’s because it is.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, timing us, telling us to hurry up, scowling at us even, which makes this another average episode of Stuff You Should Know. She said, get this in 45 minutes on the nose. No more, no less. And then she went and walked out of the room holding a pillow.
Was that me or Jerry? That was Jerry. Okay. I'm usually the timekeeper.
Are you? I never noticed. With your new swatch?
Yeah. No, I just feel like I'm the one that's like 45 minutes and you're like, no, let's make it three hours.
I don't like three hour podcasts, but I also don't like living under the clock, which is why I probably would not have personally liked Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Yeah. Should we talk about this guy?
I don't think we have any choice. And by the way, this is not a biopic. It's not a biography or a profile. It's about a man that you can't not talk about, but really this is about his whole system. Okay. I just want to make that clear to you specifically.
Well, I don't want to hear about that guy.
Well, T.S., you're going to have to.
Big thanks to Livia because she pushed out another banger here. Thanks in part by this great, great article in The New Yorker from Jill Lepore, who Livia calls a genius. Absolute genius, in fact, is a quote.
She definitely is.
Great article anyway. I think the setup that Livia gave is kind of worthy of going over a little bit, because when you look at the, you know, 1900 through the 1920s and 30s, you looked at an America that was really changing in that these huge industrial revolution born industries were all of a sudden like, hey, now we're.
Now we're kind of corporations and now we have middle managers and CEOs and things. It's a little different than it used to be.
Right.
And so we need to start kind of really thinking about how to squeeze every dime out of this company we can and make these workers. We'll call it efficiency. But between us, let's say let's call it working them to the bone until they're near exhaustion so we can maximize profits.
Yeah, and I could just hear our left-leaning listeners going, boo-hiss. But efficiency was not in and of itself a naughty word on either side of the political spectrum at the time because you could also hope that a more efficient factory or a more efficient workforce or a more efficient whatever –
would increase productivity but also give workers more free time and then ideally a larger share of the profit in the form of higher wages. Yeah, that's how that works, right? Exactly. I mean, I can't imagine a more naive progressive movement than that, but that's exactly what they were hoping for.
But not just hoping for, they were fighting for it, agitating for it, doing whatever they could, taking it to the courts. Sometimes they were successful, but I think we all know, spoiler alert, in the long run, they lost thus far.
That's right. And a lot of the work being done on efficiency can be laid at the feet of a person and then some other people. But initially, at least this guy that you mentioned, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was from Philadelphia, born in 1856, had an attorney father, an abolitionist mother, a very smart guy and was all set to take Harvard by storm before his eyesight started to fail. Right.
After that got better, he may not have gone to Harvard, but he was still a really smart guy and ended up studying engineering at night and became a chief engineer for the Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philly and then Midvale Steel Company.
Yeah, at Midvale Steel Company, that's where he really made his name. I think that's where he became the chief engineer.
And one of the things he did as he was working his way up was he was, I guess, out of the gate obsessed or at least deeply interested with the idea of doing something in the least number of movements, the most precise way, the most foolproof way, and that if you studied a task closely enough – and understood it well enough, you could find the most efficient way to do it.
And so over his 26-year career at Midvale, he conducted more than 30,000 experiments in metal cutting, figuring out which tool went with which motion, went with how to grab the tool the best way. And from that, he ended up writing a book called On the Art of Cutting Metals in 1907. And from what I saw for years and years, that was considered like a Bible in the metal cutting industry.
And so he definitely put his money where his mouth is. And that's how he first kind of got into the idea of becoming an efficiency expert.
Yeah, I think this is a certain kind of brain because I am on that spectrum a little bit in trying to weed out inefficiencies with certain things. But I'm on the side of the spectrum that is also it comes from laziness. So I'll try and do that because I'm inherently kind of lazy, I think. So I'm like, I look for ways to cut corners to still get the job done.
Right.
And I've had people compliment me in the old days, like on film sets. Like, hey, you know, I see what you're doing there and you're the kid I would hire twice. Whereas the guy next to you who's just like, no, man, let's just make eight trips and just hump it and do it.
Right.
He's like, I know he thinks he's getting it done just the old fashioned way. He's like, but you're the guy we would hire a second time.
And your response is like, well, can I go home early? Probably so.
But that was always my aim. But it's interesting that, you know, I had that a little bit in my brain. But not like this guy did. Like he was obsessed with efficiencies such that he thought and he's kind of right in some ways that one of the biggest threats to getting something done in a productive, efficient way was slacking off and what he called systematic soldiering.
And I kind of agree with that to a certain degree.
Yeah, remember in our Peter Principle episode, we talked about a corollary to that called Parkinson's Law, which is like a tongue-in-cheek law that work expanded to fill the time allotted. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, if you're sitting there like making widgets, sorry to be cliche, but that's what I'm going with, eight or ten hours a day, you're not going to be the most efficient you can be.
You're going to be about as efficient as as ambitious as you are. Like your ambition, how far you want to go, is basically equal in some weird ratio to the amount of efficiency that you produce at your job, right? So if you're like, I'm happy here, I'm not going to bust my hump like that guy to go an extra half mile because I'm not going to get anything in return.
So I'm just going to do my job at a pace that I find – And that the people I work for find acceptable. And I mean, if you want to call that slacking off or being lazy, fine. And Frederick Taylor definitely did. But it's also just kind of like being a human being, you know.
Yeah. And to be clear, because I think it seems like I might have been mischaracterized here. The film set thing, I was I wasn't like, let's just do the minimum. I was I was in a situation in this specific incident where I was trying to do a little extra work by getting a cart loaded rather than just making a ton of trips. And the guys and he was like, no, don't mess with getting that card out.
Let's just hump all this stuff back and forth. Right. And they were like, hey, guys, or to me, hey, guy. And I said, my name's Chuck.
Right.
And they said, hey, Chuck, you're the guy I would hire twice because you were taking the time to do it more efficiently. Not like, hey, I admire like the lazy side of you. Right.
And they appreciated your soft touch with the donkey that pulled the cart.
Right. But it was lazy and that I didn't want to do all those trips. That's where it initially sprang from was I don't want to have to tote all that stuff eight times. Does that make sense?
Yeah. I think the reason you're – man, we're really going deep on this. But I think the reason that you're feeling mischaracterized is because you're misusing the word lazy. That's not lazy. That's what they call work harder – or work smarter, not harder.
Yeah, but you only do that if you've got a little laziness in you.
No, that's not necessarily true. I think it's just sensible.
Okay. But I'm also lazy then. How's that?
Okay. There you go. But they're not necessarily inextricably tied together in that instance. Okay. Anyway, I don't think what you just described qualifies as laziness. But what Frederick Taylor considered laziness, he called something called systematic soldiering, which I still can't make heads or tails of. It does not make any sense to me. Does it to you?
Well, what does soldiering mean?
I don't know. I mean, you go off and fight battles or you go and follow orders. I don't know. I don't know what he means.
Did you look up soldiering?
Uh, no, I didn't. I just accessed my brain databanks.
Uh, well, I'm going to look it up. Go ahead. We'll do a rare, uh, a rare look. Okay.
Well, that's what-
Oh, well, no, that doesn't make any sense either. Like soldiering on. Right. Persevering. Yeah, I don't, doesn't make any sense to me officially as well.
It makes no sense because that was his term, systematic soldiering.
I would call it systematic leaning against something.
Yeah. Right. That's what he called slacking off. And like this guy was an aristocat through and through. Right. His mother's family came over in the early 1600s, I think, to America. So like he was a wealthy, blue blooded. A quicker boy who, because his parents were like do-gooders, his mom certainly was. She was a suffragette, an abolitionist.
He was raised to care about humanity, but he also didn't have that spark of compassion that it takes to care about humans individually. So he cared about creating a better society for humans, but he couldn't really help but look down on other people he considered lower than him, including immigrants. So he did notice things like, you're not working as hard as you can.
I'm going to see to it that you work harder. And he felt totally comfortable with filling that role. And he actually created that role for himself to fill, which is pretty remarkable if you ask me.
That's right. So he was at Midvale and he sort of started breaking down the operations of the jobs that they had there at Midvale. And he was like, you know, there are some elementary operations that happen here. So we're going to form an estimating department where we're going to sit around and do time studies, which he got from class at Phillips Exeter.
And we're going to time workers doing all these little small tasks. We're going to add that up to the to the whole. And kind of average it out and say, hey, you should be able to do this in that amount of time. And we'll adjust accordingly. We'll incentivize accordingly. And he said, and you know what else? This is now a new career. I'm going to be a consulting engineer in management.
And I'm going to charge you to tell you how bad you're doing things.
Yeah. And so those management companies like KPMG and McKinsey, they would not exist ostensibly had Frederick Taylor not created that field. Like that's what he created. These huge just mega world influencing companies came from this guy basically making up the profession.
Yeah. And you know what? We should we should give a good example here, because what he was really most or not most well known for, but something he became very well known for was his work at Bethlehem Steel.
And he started looking at the process of loading iron onto rail cars, pig iron, and said, all right, we need to figure out how much of this stuff is reasonable for one of these men to load onto a rail car. The average right now is 12 and a half tons a day. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get 10 large, powerful Hungarian workers to and say, hey, load as much as you can, as fast as you can.
16 and a half tons is your goal. And they did that in 14 minutes, whereas 12 and a half tons was the daily rate for their average worker. So that's 71 tons in a 10-hour day. He rounds it up to 75 and then said, yeah, but you know what? People get tired and they need breaks. So let's whack off 40% of that.
And we'll just call it even at 47.5 tons per day, which is four times as much as you've usually been doing. That's the new expectation.
Yeah. And that thing about people getting tired, he called the law of heavy laboring. And from what I can tell, he made up that law that I just put into scare quotes. And this is a really good example of what he did.
Like he was supposed to be precise in finding like ultimate efficiency, but he was arbitrarily rounding up and arbitrarily coming up with 40 percent off based on this law that he made up. And now you kind of start to get to see like behind the veil or like the meat that's on the bones. I don't know the analogy I'm looking for, but you can pull back the curtain. That's the one.
And see that this stuff is actually not what Frederick Taylor cracked it up to be.
The great Oz is not so much.
Right. It wears no clothes.
All right. So when this happened, some people said, I ain't doing this. They quit. They got fired. Some people tried and couldn't do it. Some people were so tired from trying to load that much or that they couldn't come back the next day. And things got really heated. He needed he hired armed guards to walk him home at night. Taylor did because he was so worried.
And then he said, all right, I'm going to create a new fake scenario. And this is something that I've seen businesses do that I hate when they create like, you know, here's our worker, Todd. And Todd, you know, and it's all just made up BS. And that's what he did with Schmidt.
Here's the thing, though. So Schmidt, yes, was a fictional invention, essentially, of Taylor's making. But he went around the country giving this lecture or wrote in his books, like, as if Schmidt, this actually happened. About Schmidt? Yeah. It was a great movie. I really felt uncomfortable when he made a pass at the wife of the friendly couple that he met.
Other than that, I thought it was a great movie. Yeah. I think at that point, that was actually just an outtake of Jack Nicholson doing his thing.
Keep rolling the cameras.
This is great. So he put out there that the Schmidt character was like a real deal thing, not a made up thing, not a made up anecdote to prove his point. And he actually did consult at Bethlehem Steel where Schmidt supposedly worked. But the upshot of all of it was this. There was this guy named Schmidt who is known to work very hard.
And he was also very motivated by money because he was building his own house and he needed as much money as he could get to build said house.
But not too bright, right?
Not too bright. That's a really important point that Taylor would hammer home any chance he got. This guy was sluggish, mentally speaking, is the way that he put it. But he got through to him with a pep talk, where essentially he said, are you a high-priced man? And Schmidt was like, I don't know what you're talking about. And when he wrote about Schmidt, he replaced his W's with V's and stuff.
He was a German immigrant. And he said, well, this is what a high-priced man does. He does everything that his manager tells him to do. If your manager tells you to pick up that pig iron and take six steps and then set it down over there, you do that.
If your manager tells you to sit down and rest for 90 seconds, then after 90 seconds he tells you to get up and then go grab that piece of pig iron, you do that too with no backtalk whatsoever. Right. That's a high-priced man. You want to be a Mr. Big Boy Pants? Exactly. And high-priced men make more money. So we'll give you not just the $1.15 an hour that you're making.
We'll give you $1.85 for making this 47.5-ton quota. And all you have to do is do what your manager tells you. And this is the other thing that I guess Frederick Taylor revolutionized in a way. He divided the workforce into two parts, managers who had the brains and did the bossing around and workers who were, according to Taylor, meant to do exactly what their managers told them.
And if you put the two together, you would have the most efficient way to say like load pig iron onto a railroad car.
That's right. In this anecdote that he sort of preached around as if it were real, he said, then I did this. It worked so great. Schmidt was so happy and rolling in dough.
Right.
I got all of his coworkers to jump aboard because I showed them what a Mr. Big Boy pants look like. And everybody wanted big boy pants. And so everybody, as long as you just do what your boss says, then you're going to make more dough. And forget the fact that I'm choosing, you know, the very strongest workers to set the standard for everyone. And then in 1911, a U.S.
House committee said, yeah, but we can't just forget that because you can't just pick the strongest worker and say that's the standard for everyone. And so he got into a bit of a tit for tat in that process. committee meeting, I guess, with Chairman William Balshop Wilson. And he said, you know, what about if you don't have big boy pants men on your staff and like or all big boy pants men?
And he said, well, it has no place for a bird that can sing, but won't. And he kind of got smacked down for that because he was just lifting lines out of books that he had written.
Well, yeah. Also, William Wilson said basically like we're not dealing with singing birds. We're dealing with men here who are part of society and for whom or for whose benefit society is organized. Right. So you can't essentially you can't treat people like automatons and drones and robots. You have to consider them as human beings.
And the lines from his book that you mentioned, apparently Jill Lepore reported that. that he did so poorly in this committee hearing that, by the way, if you want to ever be nervous about a committee hearing you have to go testify at, go to one that's literally named after you.
This hearing was called the House Committee to Investigate Taylor, not Taylorism, Taylor and other systems of shop management. And so he actually ordered one of his underlings to go steal William Wilson's copy of his book. and I guess wasn't successful and just kind of went ahead with the terrible testimony.
But as we'll see, he used it to turn bad publicity into any publicity, which is good publicity.
That's right. The long and short with Bethlehem Steel, at least, was that they fired him. They quit the Taylorism methods that he had brought in. And he said, all right, pay me $100,000 and we'll call it even. Yeah. Which is about three and a half million bucks today. And that's probably a good time for a break, eh? Agreed. All right.
All right.
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Okay, Chuck, you mentioned that we're going to talk about the Gilbreths, so I say we do that now. We're talking about Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. And anyone who has ever read the book or seen the movie or the remake, Cheaper by the Dozen, this is the family that that movie and that book were based on.
Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were one of the more amazing, interesting couples that came out of the 20th century.
Yeah, for sure. And two of their kids wrote that book in 1948. And, you know, it was fun. It's a classic for a reason. They remade it for a reason. For sure. To make money. Frank was a bricklayer in his earlier life, and he was one of these people that thought, including too, but not limited to cat skinning, that there was one best way to do any task.
And so he was one of those guys where he was like, hey, that scaffold for laying bricks is kind of great. But what if there was a shelf on the scaffold for those bricks and mortar? You don't got to bend over and pick that stuff up. And what if you had some really low paid laborers that would stack the bricks on the frames for them positioned in the right direction?
So they don't even have to turn the bricks like really drilling down on these efficiencies.
Yeah, and it seems like Frank kind of came up with this interest independently of Frederick Taylor, even though he and Lillian and Taylor would essentially form kind of a cadre of cohorts, I guess.
Wow.
Yeah.
What a band name that is.
This is like an independent thing. These were two independent groups who eventually came together because they helped develop this field out of thin air. So what the Gilbreths did, Lillian and Frank together, they formed the Gilbreth Inc., a management consulting firm. they got really, really in the weeds about the movements it took to carry out a task.
And they figured out that you could break any task down into 18 different kinds of movements, right? So you're not necessarily gonna have all 18, but no matter what task you're talking about, It's going to be made up of no more than those 18 specific kind of movements. Things like searching for an object with your eye, grasping an object, reaching for it, disassembling it.
And they call these things therbligs, which is their name roughly spelled backwards.
Do you think when they met Taylor initially, they were just like, oh, my God, you're into efficiency and so are we. And Taylor said, I think you mean a fish. And they just like fainted.
Yeah, I think they're right. They're like, you're our guy.
Yeah, Thurbligs. So they were also big into Rich Hall and Sniglets. Not to date myself, but yeah, they made up a word and they said, any action you can take is a Thurblig. And we want to get rid of as many Thurbligs as possible to make efficiency the most, to maximize it as much as one possibly can.
Yeah, and to do that, so they would use their kids. They ended up having a dozen kids, 11 of whom made it to adulthood. One of them died at age five of diphtheria, sadly. And I don't know how, but they planned to have six boys and six girls. And I think they were successful at that. No idea how they did that because we're talking about the beginning of the 20th century.
It's called luck.
OK.
There is no way to do that.
And they decided to raise their kids in the under these principles of efficiency. But they weren't weirdo clinical types like this was a tight, cool family. Like the kids were participatory, like they would have family meetings. Um, and each kid had a vote. And so they would have a family meeting and someone would put forward a motion. Like I say, we get a dog and someone would second it.
And then they put it to a vote and then, you know, the eyes had it. So they ended up getting a dog. They named Mr. Chairman. Like that was how they ran their, their family, but they were all very focused on efficiency because they were obsessed with it, but not in a, a, a deleterious way, um, or deleterious way. They, they were, um,
So it was a really different viewpoint of the same thing compared to Frederick Taylor. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, Taylor, you kind of talked about a little bit early on, but he did think it was a win-win. He was like, this is great because it'll run more efficiently and it'll trickle down, essentially.
They didn't call it that yet, but that's sort of the same notion that it'll just trickle down to the worker, all this efficiency, and they'll get better wages and stuff will be cheaper and stuff like that. Management will never, ever take advantage of that and make you work harder just to increase profits. Exactly. And of course, that's exactly what happened in every case. But Um, I don't know.
Like, I'm kind of wondering about Taylor's heart and like what was in there, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. I think I explained it already. I'm sticking with my idea.
I don't know. I think he's one of those guys that was so brain obsessed on efficiency. I don't know that he had like, I don't know if he thought that part through such that he was like some evil person set out to exploit a worker.
No, I don't think he was evil. I don't think that he set out to exploit workers. But I think even after he saw what his invention was being used for, he was indifferent to that. And that says volumes about him. He never denounced it. He never called people out for misusing it. And he actually helped foster its misuse to exploit workers. So I think he was a bit of a misanthrope.
Not evil, and that wasn't ever his intention to be evil, but when it turned kind of evil, he was like, sure, let's keep going if you guys are giving me money.
I wonder if he might have been in an age where there weren't certain diagnoses available for what he, you know, may have had going on.
Yeah, maybe. For sure. I mean, it's possible. I think that we're barreling toward a future where every single person has a diagnosis of some sort or another.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah.
It'll be interesting. You mean like there's no perfect person and everyone has an issue that they're dealing with?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think we already know that. But we haven't we haven't come up with a label for every single one of those types of issues that people are working with. That's the difference that I'm talking about.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don't know. I think sometimes that thing empowers people.
I agree. I don't think I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm just interested to see like where we're going. But yes, I agree. We've in large part as a society scuttled the idea of the Ubermensch and Nietzsche is very unhappy about that.
Yeah, you know what Nietzsche can do.
What?
I'll tell you all fair. Okay. Ironically, it was a Supreme Court justice who we've talked about, I feel like, quite a bit on this show, who kind of bumped Taylor up to celebrity status. Yeah. How did we pronounce his name the first 25 times we said it? It's Brandeis. Okay, that sounds right.
Like light ice, but a little different. Right. Yeah.
Like Bud Ice?
Yeah. Didn't Miller Lite have an ice too? Didn't everybody have an ice for a while? Light ice?
I don't know.
No, I screwed it up then because I should have said Bud Ice. But yeah, that's what I was going for. I know Milwaukee's best had an ice.
What does it do with that? Ice brewed? What even was that?
I think it got you tanked faster.
Really?
Yeah, I think it had something. It messed with the alcohol content or the way it was delivered or something like that.
So you had to drink 17 Miller Lights instead of 14?
Exactly. No, the opposite. You had to drink 12 instead of 14.
Oh, okay. All right. Anyway, back to 1910. Brandeis, Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, called a meeting with the Gilbreths. And the Taylorites, Taylor couldn't come, but he sent his representatives and said, I want to talk about what I'm calling scientific management. And I am concerned because I see what's happening with big business. And I think it's getting out of hand.
I want to break up these monopolies. And I think the consumer and the worker should be served. And I think I called one couple here who's probably interested in that and another group of people who sounds like they probably aren't.
Yeah. And Brandeis is ironic because he was dyed in the wool progressive. Like you said, he was worried about big business. And so the idea that he's the one that made this concept that's historically viewed as exploitive of workers. famous and introduced to the world and essentially gave it its breakout moment. It's just terribly ironic.
But the whole basis of that is that he was arguing before the Interstate Commerce Commission, which is holding hearings on railroad rate hikes. The railroad said, Stuff's getting expensive. We need to increase the prices that we charge to carry freight, to move freight. And of course, that has cascading effects all throughout society and prices were going to go up.
And Brandeis represented a bunch of companies that were going to have to pay those increased rates. And Brandeis' argument was that the railroad companies don't need to raise their rates. They need to get more efficient. And here's how they can do it. This guy named Taylor has figured out a scientific way of getting more efficient.
And that's how they can keep their prices low and still keep their profits high.
Yeah, and there was a lot of press coverage on this, and this is really what pushed Taylor over the edge as far as becoming kind of famous for what he was doing. And that is the year – I'm sorry, the next year is when he put out The Principles of Scientific Management, which was –
Probably easily the biggest business book, maybe at the 20th century, but at least the first half of the 20th century.
Yeah, for sure. And he was riding on the publicity from that Interstate Commerce Commission hearing, but also that congressional hearing that came, I think, later that same year. He saw an opportunity to get his name out there, even though his name was kind of being dragged through the mud.
That's right. And one thing about Taylorism that we would learn soon enough, and I guess Gilbreathism, did they even call it that?
No, I don't think so. They weren't those types.
Well, I'm going to call it that. Gilbreathism was that it didn't have to be kept to the workforce because Lillian Gilbreath found herself alone for the last 48 years of her life when Frank died of a heart attack at the age of 55 in 1924. And she said, all right, Don't tell anybody. I'm no homemaker myself. Not into it at all. I don't even do the cooking in my house.
But I think I can shift these efficiency ideas to the house and make the home place a more efficient workplace for getting everything done from like vacuuming to baking biscuits.
Yeah. Have you ever heard of the work triangle in a kitchen?
Oh, yeah. That's a classic kitchen chef thing.
She came up with that as far as I know.
Yeah. I did not know that, but yeah.
But for those of you who don't know what it is, the kitchen triangle is like the places where you do the most work. And so the idea is that they should be all within a step or two from one another. The sink, the oven, and the ice cream maker. I don't remember what the third one is. The dishwasher. Dishwasher.
Interesting.
I think those are the three, today at least.
Oh, OK.
So anyway, she came up with that. If you have a kitchen island, you can thank her. I've seen. So, yes, she's just kind of pivoted because people were finding out that there was a woman that ran Gilbreth Inc., the management consulting firm, and were just walking away from their accounts because it was run by a woman. So she had no choice. She had 12, 11 kids to raise. And so.
had to provide for him. She wanted to send them all to college. So, yeah, she pivoted to home ec. But it wasn't just her. It's not like she invented home ec out of whole cloth. It was already being developed by a very famous or should be famous lesbian couple, Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer. Yeah, Rensselaer, right?
I have no idea how to pronounce that.
R-E-N-S-S-E-L-A-E-R. Rensselaer. Yeah, that's what I'm going with. And the reason I specifically called them out as a lesbian couple is because they were out as a lesbian couple in, I believe, the 1920s or 30s. I mean, you just did not do that. And they were like, say something. Just bring it. And they just went unchallenged for their lifetime from what I knew.
But they wanted to turn working in the home into something scientific, domestic science, which kind of elevated its status as well as made things easier for the woman working in the home.
Yeah, and eventually you could even find Taylorism in public schools. And it's interesting to think of it this way. There was a Massachusetts superintendent who told the National Education Association that educators needed to analyze the returns of their investment rationally. We ought to purchase no more Greek instruction at the rate of 5.9 pupil recitations for a dollar.
The price must go down or we shall invest in something else. And it sounds silly, but I get that. It just sounds like a funny way to talk about it. Right. But it's basically like we need to invest in these kids the things that really matter and not necessarily reciting a Greek poem or something like that.
Sure. The only question is who decides what really matters. And I think one of the things about that is that at the time when that guy was talking like that, kids in public schools were viewed as being trained and molded into the workers of tomorrow. So it was the government and the economy who decided what was important.
And, yeah, we were making a lot of money off of reciting Greek poems, like you were saying. So that would get scuttled in the face of, say, I don't know, shop class maybe. What class? Shop?
Shop, yeah. Yeah. I had shop. We didn't have auto shop, though. Did you guys have that?
No. I was just fascinated by that. They had one on Saved by the Bell, and I always thought that was the coolest thing.
It felt like something that was in generations previous to us. We just had shop class where you made lamps and stuff like that.
Well, there was a huge shift in the American economy from car making to lamp making in the early 80s. So I'm sure that's what the result was.
Shall we take our second break or soldier through?
Systematic soldier? Yeah. I say we take our second break.
Thank you.
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Okay, we're back. By the way, I think the kitchen triangle is probably the fridge and not the dishwasher would be my guess.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot about the fridge. Yes, yes, absolutely.
Thank you. I bet you're right, though. I bet it's sink, stove, oven, and fridge would be my guess.
Sure. Yeah, I think you're right.
Because what if you don't have a dishwasher?
Right, and I'm sure that she didn't have a dishwasher in the 1930s and 40s, so, you know. Yeah, so you're right, Chuck. Just say it again. I think it was the fridge. Okay.
All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about just sort of what did Taylorism accomplish ultimately. There is a lot of irony in that, you know, a lot of it was so scientific supposedly, but a lot of the stuff was made up or just sort of, you know. Yeah. Made up or kind of a sham. Right.
This wasn't new stuff like timing people on tasks and teaching people to do more specific things had been around for a long time. But one of the effects of Taylorism is definitely like. You know, de-skilling a worker, making them feel and not that working is all about emotions, but you don't want to make your employee feel like a robot that can be replaced by a robot.
You want to give them a little bit of agency, ideally, in a job and not just say, move your body this way, move your hand that way, punch that thing and then return back to position one.
Yeah. And so de-skilling workers, taking away the overall understanding of making, say, like an oven and just giving them the one job of putting the door on the oven as it's coming down the assembly line. Not only does that take away from job satisfaction, it also makes you way more replaceable. Because you don't have to train somebody to build a whole oven.
All you have to do is train them to put that oven door on and then you train somebody else to put the thermostat in the oven and so on and so forth. And you, the owner of the factory, has that oven you want, but you have a bunch of replaceable workers that you can pay fairly low wages, even combined, compared to somebody who builds the oven from scratch.
That is a huge, like you said, that was already underway. But Taylorism and the fact that it was so pervasive and widespread, especially in America in the first half of the 20th century, really solidified that as like a basis of the American workforce.
Yeah. Another effect. I mean, I guess we've kind of said it in several different ways from the beginning. But, you know, the idea that the Gilbreths had that there would be a happiness quotient involved and where you could do work more efficiently so you could just have more time and better wages to spend with your family.
It just, you know, it didn't work out that way, even though the whole idea of Taylorism and it's at its base isn't. inherently anti-worker, it sort of ends up being that way when the profits are being spread around the top tier and all they want is more and more of those profits.
Yes. And so to be clear, it wasn't like every single time Taylor showed up, like that's just how it went. There were some successful pushbacks over the years. There's one specifically at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts in 1911. They made guns, I think, for the government. It was a federal arsenal. And Taylor sent one of his emissaries, essentially told him to just make up a number.
You don't even need the stopwatch part. And I think word of that got out and really kind of undermined that. But also just the process of being timed, doing your job. One of the workers said, I'm not doing that. You can't time me. And he was fired on the spot. And the rest of the workers were like, oh, yeah, well, we're going on strike.
And they ended up being successful because, again, this was a federal arsenal. And those congressional hearings to investigate Taylor, one of the results of them was that the U.S. federal government banned Taylorism from being used in any way, shape or form in any kind of federal facility or agency.
Yeah.
But but overall, I mean, Taylor certainly won the day. I mean, that's that's just how the economy is in America and other like minded countries. Like even though we've kind of walked away from it overtly, it's just gotten more and more entrenched over the years rather than further and further away.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, probably the most, you know, the biggest contribution was it just raised the awareness and an obsession with productivity and productivity is great. It's not like that's a bad thing. But again, like when you're dealing with human beings to feel like a cog and to feel completely replaceable.
There's no way like you're not serving your own purpose as a as a business owner because you're not going to have good and happy employees ultimately and replacing employee after employee, even if you're just training them to put the oven door on. That's still an inefficiency, you know.
Right. No, for sure. And yeah, that's a really great point. But some studies have shown, from what I saw, just briefly reading about this, that The happier your workers are, or I should say economies that have happier workers, like more fulfilled workers, typically have, they're richer for the most part.
I guess America is an outlier because I think overall workers are not necessarily happy with their jobs or lack of job. But supposedly, if you invest in your workers' well-being and actual happiness and fulfillment with their job, they're going to work more for you. They're going to work harder because they care about what they're doing.
Totally.
Totally. Yeah. And then one of the other big things that shows that Taylorism is still alive and well today, Chuck, is computers, AI, whatever you want to call it, they're fulfilling the role of managers that Taylor envisioned. So remember, the manager was in charge of figuring out the best way to do something and then instructing the worker to do it exactly that way at exactly that time.
That is what computers do today for workers, which is a bizarre reversal of authority, I guess, if you think about it. But that's the way it is, especially in places like, you know, big warehouses or call centers. There's computers essentially running the show.
Yeah, for sure. And it created the management consultant industry. I think we should do one on that. I don't I'm sure you remember. And I won't be very specific here, but because we've been owned by a lot of companies over the years. But one of one time, one of the companies that just hired a dude that came in and we're like, who's this guy?
And I can't remember someone who knows how these things work took us aside and they were like, he's, I guess, I don't know if he was a management consultant or what his official job was, but they're like, his job is to come in here and fire people and rip this place apart and then probably get a nice exit and move on to another job where he'll do that exact same thing.
Yes. That's what the industry does.
Do you remember that guy?
No, I don't remember that guy. You got to tell me. I'll remind you. Okay. Please do.
I know Jerry is like screaming his name off air right now.
Just one last thing. Do you have anything more about Taylorism? No. OK, great. Well, then I do have just one last thing. If you want kind of a lighthearted look, a comedy with heart efficiency, check out the 1991 film The Efficiency Expert starring Anthony Hopkins.
I thought you're going to say gung ho.
That was, yeah, kind of a different one. But, yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of crossover for sure. What's this Tony Hopkins picture? What is it? The Efficiency Expert. It's exactly what you just described. And he ends up in, I think, a factory where the workers make, they change his view of things. I think they kind of turn him around. Oh.
If I remember correctly.
I haven't seen it before.
That wouldn't have worked with the other guy that I mentioned. He was unflappable.
Well, anyway, we're about to end. Well, wait, hold on. We got to do listener mail, don't we?
Yeah, and then I'll tell you.
By the way, Chuck, I got to tell you that we ended on 45 minutes on the nose. Holy cow. Yeah. Way to go, champ. Oh, since I said way to go, champ, of course, that means it's time for listener mail.
This is just a nice thank you. Hey, guys. Heartfelt thank you. Started listening in 2012, and although my time spent listening to podcasts has fluctuated, yours has been one of the constants.
Started listening to keep my mind occupied when I had hours of mundane tasks in the lab where I worked after college, and I've continued to listen through a career change, relationship changes, getting my first dog, Luna. He sent a picture of Luna this week. And becoming a homeowner. I'm listening still as I'm planning a second career change and going through a little lonelier stretch of my life.
And your podcast has kept me laughing and feeling connected to the world through challenging times. And I sometimes feel like there isn't the right combination of words to express my gratitude completely.
I feel like they just put those words together.
I feel like you're right. Some of my favorite moments in recent shows have been Chuck's throwaway line about a fairy hoax confession happening at a Men Without Hats concert. I got Josh chuckled not once, twice, but three times.
And in the 15th annual SYSK Halloween Spooktacular, the curious sound like laughter, yet not laughter that Josh made, which sounded like it had Chuck literally crying with laughter, which is absolutely true. That may be the... Most I've ever laughed at something that you did. I think it is, man.
I hope that you know for some of your listeners, your podcast has been as meaningful to us as The Simpsons or Peanuts may have been to you.
Wow. Wow. Wow. Who was that?
Stanley knows how to drive it home. He signs it all the best. Stanley, a hayseed.
Oh, nice. Thanks, Stanley. You're a true listener through and through, aren't you? I love that humble, like, I can't figure out how to put the words together, but here they are.
Yeah, in perfect order.
Exactly. Well, if you want to be like Stanley and make me say wow, not once, not twice, but thrice, then you can try your hand at it. Send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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