Labor, Devaluation of

Scientific Management

The devaluation of work is closely connected to the emergence of scientific management, a theory of design and management of the work process developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the second half of the 19th century. The efficiency movement of the times hoped to eliminate labor interference with employers’ efforts to speed up work and streamline production costs. Employers had become very concerned with the control that skilled workers exerted over work processes. Their efforts to slow down production and resist new methods of organizing work were bypassing workers’ knowledge in order to pay lower wages and increase productivity. In many workplaces today, Taylor's methods can be seen in time study or time measurement, as well as in the lean production systems first developed in Japan. They are all tools for finding quicker ways of doing [Page 497]jobs, simplifying and standardizing work, and transferring control over the work process to management.

Perhaps the clearest explanation of Taylorism is Harry Braverman's landmark study Labor and Monopoly Capital. Citing Taylor, Braverman summarized what he argued were the three principles of scientific management. The first involved gathering knowledge and translating it into rules and laws, what Braverman called “the dissociation of the labor process from the skills of the worker.” The second principle rested on the transfer of planning to the engineering department, thereby creating “the separation of conception from execution.” The third principle, considered the most important, was the task system that defined not only what the worker did but also how it was to be done. Braverman explained this as “use of this monopoly over knowledge to control each step of the labor process and its mode of execution.”

Taylor found that highly skilled workers carried out numerous tasks as part of their jobs, many of which did not require their advanced skills, but for which they were nonetheless paid high wages. As the father of time management, Taylor observed and broke jobs down into their most basic tasks, so that work could be deskilled and divided up among unskilled workers who could be easily replaced and paid the lowest wages. Each task would require little skill and no knowledge of the work process as a whole, and would be repeated over and over. This detailed division of labor—as compared to a social division of labor—produced a task system that denied the worker a meaningful role in production and an understanding of the process as a whole, and that limited worker interactions. The efficiency experts saw their goal as standardization, although this process led directly to the dehumanization of work. Taylor hoped to convert workers into cogs, easily replaceable and cheap. The outcome was what Karl Marx had described in his 1844 Manuscripts as alienated labor, the objectification or reification of the worker through work without consciousness, without human fulfillment or significance.

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