OCR Text |
Show TH PRINCIPLE O SCIENTIFI MANAGEMEN 1 Second. The defective systems of management which are i common use, and which make it necessary for each workman t soldier, or work slowly, in order that he may protect his own bes interests Third. The inefficient rule-of-thumb methods, which are stil almost universal in all trades, and in practising which our workme waste a large part of their effort This paper will attempt to show the enormous gains which woul result from the substitution by our workmen of scientific for rule-of thumb methods. To explain a H{ctle more fully these three causes First Th great majorit of workme still believe that if the were to work at their best speed they would be doing a great injustic to the whole trade by throwing a lot of men out of work, and ye the history of the development of each trade shows that eac improvement, whether it be the invention of a new machine o the introduction of a better method, which results in increasing th productive capacity of the men in the trade and cheapening th costs, instead of Sthrowing men 0u_'5_0£_ work makes in the end wor for more nién The cheapening of any article in common use almost immediatel results in a largely increased demand for that article. Take the cas The introduction of machinery for doin of shoes, for instance every element of the work which was formerly done by hand ha resulted in making shoes at a fraction of their former labor cost and in selling them so cheap that now almost every man, woman and child in the working-classes buys one or two pair of shoes pe year, and wears shoes all the time, whereas formerly each workma bought perhaps one pair of shoes every five years, and went barefoot most of the time, wearing shoes only as a luxury or as a matIn spite of the enormously increase ter of the sternest necessity output of shoes per workman, which has come with shoe machinery the demand for shoes has so increased that there are relatively mor men working in the shoe industry now than ever before -The workmen in almost every trade have before them an objec lesson of this kind, and yet, because they are ignorant of the histor ~ of their own trade even, they still firmly believe, as their father did before them, that it is against their best interests for each ma to turn out each day as much work as possible Under this fallacious idea a large proportion of the workmen o both countries each day deliberately work slowly so as to curtai Almost every labor union has made, or is contemplatin ¥ the output |