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.
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 forty five minutes on the nose, no more, no less, and then she went uh and walked out of the room holding a pillow.
Was that me or Joe?
That was Jerry?
Okay, I'm usually the timekeeper.
Are you? I'd never noticed with your new swatch.
Yeah. No, I just feel like I'm the one that's like forty five 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 use people likely, Well, I don't want to hear about that guy.
Well, ts, you're gonna have to.
Big thanks to Olivia because she pushed out another banger here, thanks in part by this great, great article in The New Yorker from Jill Lapour, who Lvia 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, nineteen hundred through the nineteen twenties and thirties, you looked at in America that was really changing in that these huge Industrial Revolution born industries where all of a sudden, like, hey, now we're kind of corporations and now we have middle managers and CEOs and things, and 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 his. 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 like more free time and then ideally a larger share of the profit in the form of higher wages.
Right, 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, 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 eighteen fifty six, had an attorney father an abolitionists mother. It's 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. Like his twenty six year career at Midvale, he conducted more than thirty thousand experiments in metal cutting, figuring out which tool went with, which motion went with you know, know, 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 nineteen oh seven. 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 and trying to weed out inefficiencies with certain things. But I'm on the side of the spectrum that is also it comes from laziness. Oh yeah, 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.
In your response is like, we'll kind of 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 in what he called systematic soldiering. And I kind of agree with that to a certain degree.
Yeah. Remember in our Peter Principal 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 as ambitious as you are. Like your ambition how far you want to go is basically equaled 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 acceptable 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 was, I wasn't like, let's just do the minimum. I was in the 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, now I'm mess with getting that cart out. Let's just hump all this stuff back and forth. And they were like, hey guys, or to me, hey guy, And I said my name is 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. So 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 get 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 describe 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 a soldiering mean?
I don't know. I mean you're 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?
No? I didn't. I just access to my brain data banks.
Well I'm gonna look it up. Go ahead, we'll do a rare uh a rare look Okay, Well, serve as a soldier to aha. Oh well, no, that didn't make any sense either, like soldiering on right persevering, Yeah, I 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 aristocrat through and through right. His mother's family came over in the early sixteen hundreds, I think, to America. So like he was a wealthy, blue blooded Quaker boy who because his parents were like do gooders. His mom certainly was. She was a suffragette and 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 him. 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 phill 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's 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 a 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 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 and 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 Mackenzie, 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 railcars 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 railcar. The average right now is twelve and a half tons a day. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to get ten large, powerful Hungarian workers to and say, heyde as much as you can, as fast as you can. Sixteen and a half tons is your goal. And they did that in fourteen minutes, whereas twelve and a half tons was the daily rate for their average worker. So that's seventy one tons in a ten hour day. He rounds it up to seventy five and then said, yeah, but you know what people get tired and they need breaks. So let's whack off forty percent of that and we'll just make we'll just call it even at forty seven and a half tons per day, which is four times as much as you've usually been doing. That's 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'd 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 forty percent off based on this law that he made up. And now you kind of start to get to see like 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 exactly 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 arm 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 this lecture or wrote in his books like as if Schmidt this actually.
Happened about Schmidt.
Yeah, that was a great movie. I really felt uncomfortable when he made a pass at the wife of the fiby 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 like so he was 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 was known to work very hard, and he was also very motivated by money because he was building his own house and he 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, whereas 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 replaces w's with VS and stuff, and he's 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 ninety seconds. Then after ninety seconds he tells you to get up and then go grab that piece of pig iron. You do that too, with no backtalk whatsoever. That's a high priced man.
You want to be a mister big boy pants.
Exactly. Press men make more money. So we'll give you not just the dollar fifteen an hour that you're making, we'll give you a dollar eighty five for making this forty seven and a half tone 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, who that he, you know, sort of reached around as if it were real. He said, Then I did this. It works so great. Schmid was so happy, and Roland in dough I got all of his coworkers to jump aboard because I showed him what a mister 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 nineteen eleven a US 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 committee meeting, I guess with the chairman, William Ballshop 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 Jillipoorr reported 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 was 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 didn't 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 inshort with Bethlehem Steele, at least was that they fired him. They quit the tailor's and methods that he had brought in, and he said, all right, pay me one hundred thousand dollars and we'll call it even, which is about three and a half million bucks today, and that's probably a good time for a break, eh, agreed. All right, we'll come back and move on from Taylor for a moment to talk about the Gilbreaths right after this.
Okay, Chuck, you mentioned that we're going to talk about the Gilbreaths, So I say we do that. Now. We're talking about Frank and Lillian Gilbreath, 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, Lily and Gilbreath were one of the more amazing interesting couples that came out of the twentieth century.
Yeah, for sure. And two of their kids wrote that book in nineteen forty eight, 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, yeah, this is like an independent thinks this is an independent. These were two independent groups who eventually came together because they helped develop this field out of thin air. So what the Gilberts did. Lillian and Frank together they formed the Gilbert 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 eighteen different kinds of movements. Right, so you're not necessarily going to have all eighteen but no matter what task you're talking about, it's going to be made up of no more than those eighteen specific kind of movements, things like I'm searching for an object with your eye, grasping an object, reaching for it, disassembling it. And they called these things third bligs, 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.
Uh yeah. Third bligs. So they were also big into rich hall and sniglets. Uh not to date myself, but uh yeah. They made up a word, and they said any action you can take is a third blig, and we want to get rid of as many third bligs 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, eleven 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 twentieth century.
It's called luck. Okay, 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 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 mister Chairman. Like that was how they ran their family. But they were all very focused on efficiency because they were obsessed with it, but not in a dileterious way or a deletrious way. They were I guess the best way to put it is Lilian was searching for the most efficient way to do something so that you have more free time to go do happy things, she said, So it can increase your happiness minutes essentially. So it was a really different viewpoint of the same thing compared to Frederick Taylor.
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 you know, it'll trickle down essentially. They didn't call it that yet, but that's sort of the same notion that like 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, Like 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 I don't, 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 it's misused to exploit workers. So I think he was a bit of a misanthroat, not evil, and that wasn't ever his intention to be evil. But when it turned kind of evil, he was 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 tests 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 entanted to see like where we're going. Yeah, but yes, I agree, But we've in large part of the society scuttled the idea of the uber minch and Nietzsche is very unhappy about that.
Yeah, you know what Nietzsche can do. What I'll tell y'all fair, Okay. Ironically, though, it was a Supreme Court justice who we've talked about I feel like quite a bit on the show, who kind of bumped Tailor up to celebrity status. Yeah, how did we pronounce his name the first twenty five times we said it?
It's brand Ice. Okay, that sounds right like light ice, but a little different.
Right like bud Ice.
Yeah, didn't Miller Light have an ice too? Didn't everybody have an ice for a.
While light Ice? I don't know.
Oh, 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 deal with that ice brewed? What even was that?
I think it got you tanked faster. Really, yeah, I think it had something that it messed with the alcohol content or the way it was delivered or something like that.
So you had to drink seventeen Miller lits instead of fourteen.
Right, exactly, No, the opposite, you had to drink twelve instead of fourteen.
Okay, all right. Anyway back to nineteen ten, brand Ice Lewis brand Ice, Supreme Court Justice, called a meeting with the Gilbreaths and the tailor Rights. 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 workers 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 died in the world 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 like introduced to the world and essentially gave it it's like breakout moment. It's just terribly ironic. But the whole basis of that is that he was arguing before the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was holding hearings on railroad rate hikes. The railroad said stuff getting expensive. We need to increase the prices that we charged to carry freight to move freight, and of course that has cascading effects all throughout society, and prices we're going to go up, and Brandeis represented a bunch of companies that we're gonna have to pay those increased rates. And Brandeis's 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.
I know, it's 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 twentieth century, but at least the first half of the twentieth century.
Yeah, for sure. And he was riding on the publicity from that inter State 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 Gilbreatheism. Did they even call it dot No.
I don't think so. They weren't. They weren't those types.
Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna call it that gil Breath. Theism was that it didn't have to be kept to the workforce because Lily and Gilbreath found herself alone for the last forty eight years of her life when Frank died a heart attack at the age of fifty five in nineteen twenty four, and she said, all right, don't tell any money. 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 back, came in 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, for those who 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 ideas 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. Okay, So anyway, she came up with that. If you have a kitchen island, you can thank her. I've seen. So. Yeah, she's just kind of pivoted because people were finding out that there was a woman that ran Gilbert Inc. The management consulting firm, and we're just walking away from their accounts because it was run by a woman. So she had no choice. She had twelve eleven kids to raise, and had to provide forms she wanted to set model to college. So yeah, she pivoted to home EC. But it wasn't just her. It's not like she invented homeck out a whole cloth. It was already being developed by a very famous or should be famous, a lesbian couple, Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer. Yeah Rensselaer, right.
I have no idea how to pronounce.
It r e n s s e l a e R. Rentler. 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 nineteen twenties or thirties. I had a I mean, you just did not do that, and they were like, say something, just just bring it, and they were They just went unchallenged for their lifetime from what I knew. But they they wanted to turn working in the home into something scientific, domestic science, which kind of elevated at status as well as made things easier for the woman working at the home.
Yeah, and eventually you could even find Taylorism in public 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 five point nine pupil recitations for a dollar. The price must go down, or will she, 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. 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 weren't 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 a car auto shop though, did you guys have that?
No. I was just fascinated by that they had one unsaved by the bell, and I always thought that was the coolest thing.
It felt like something that was in generation's 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 the early eighties, 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.
Okay, let's do it. Be right back. Okay, we're back by the way. I think the kitchen triangles is probably the fridge and not the dishwasher, would be my guess.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I forgot about the fridge. Yes, yes, absolutely, than.
I bet it's I bet you're right, though, I bet it's sink, stove of 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 nineteen thirties and forties, so you know, yeah, so you're you're right. Chuck just say it again.
I think it was the fridge. Okay, all right, So we're gonna talk a little bit about just sort of what like what Detaylor is 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 do more specific things had been around for a long time. But one of the effects of tailorism 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 and 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 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 thermostad 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 twentieth 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 Gilbress 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 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 nineteen eleven. They make 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 stop watch part, and I think word of that got out and really kind of undermined that, but also just the process of being time 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 US federal government banned Taylorism from being used in any way, shape or form in any kind of federal facility or agency.
Yeah.
Yeah, 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 gonna 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.
Do you want to keep employees?
Yeah, but I'm sure some being counter at some company somewhere was like, oh, yeah, I still make more money hiring and training employees than you do making them happy, although that seems to not be the case. I was reading up on management consulting, which I think deserves its own episode down the line because apparently it's just totally fraudulent, So I think it'll be a really great interesting episode. 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 their richer For the most part. I guess America as an outlier because I think overall workers are not necessarily happy with their jobs or lack of job. But supposedly if you make 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.
So 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, is they've fulfilled or 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. 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 I'm just hired a dude that came in and we were 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. You remember that guy?
No, I don't remember that guy. You got to tell me, 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?
Uh?
No, okay, great, well then I do have just one last thing. If you want kind of a lighthearted look comedy with heart efficiency, check out the nineteen ninety one film The Efficiency Expert starring Anthony Hopkins. Oh.
I thought you're gonna 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 never described. And he ends up in a I think a factory where the workers make they change his view of things. I think they kind of turn him around. Oh I remember, correctly, I haven't seen it.
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 gotta tell you that we ended on forty five minutes on the nose.
Holy cal yep.
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 twenty twelve, and my time. Although my time spent listening to podcast is 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 continue to listen through a career change, relationship changes, getting my first dog, Luna. He sent a picture of Luna sweet, 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. In your podcast 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. It's got Josh chuckle not once twice, but three times. And in the fifteenth annual s YSK Halloween Spectacular, 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 maybe 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 seed.
Oh nice. I 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 Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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