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Show Disy It of e TH PRINCIPLE O SCIENTIFI MANAGEMEN 3 is hardly worth living. His workman friends came to him continually and asked him, in a personal, friendly way, whether he woul them advis for their ow best interest to tur ou mor work And, a$ a truthful man, he had to tell them that if he were in thei place he would fight against turning out any more work, just as the wer doing becaus unde th piece-wor syste the woul b allowed to earn no more wages than they had been earning, and ye they would be made to work harder Soon after being made foreman, therefore, he decided to make determined effort to in some way change the system of management so that the interests of the workmen and the management shoul become the same, instead of antagonistic. This resulted, som three years later, in the starting of the type of management which i described in papers presented to The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, entitled ‘"A Piece-Rate System' and "Shop Management." In preparation for this system the writer realized that th greatest obstacle to harmonious cooperation between the workme and the management lay in the ignorance of the management as t what really constitutes a proper day's work for a workman He full realized that, although he was foreman of the shop, the combine knowledge and skill of the workmen wh> were under him was certainl ten times as great as his own He therefore obtained the permissio of Mr. William Sellers, who was at that time the President of th Midvale Steel Company, to spend some money in a careful, scientifi study of the time required to do various kinds of work Mr. Sellers allowed this more as a reward for having, to a certai extent, "made good' as foreman of the shop in getting more wor out of the men' than for any other reason He stated, however that he did not believe that any scientific study of this sort woul give results of much value Among several investigations which were undertaken at thi time, one was an attempt to find some rule, or law, which woul enable a foreman to know in advance how much of any kind o heavy laboring work a man who was well suite to his job ough to do in a day; that is, to study the tiring effect of heavy labo upon a first-class man Our first step was to employ a young colleg graduate to look up all that had been written on the subject in English German and French Two classes of experiments had been made one by physiologists who were studying the endurance of the huma animal, and the other by engineers who wished to determine wha fraction of a horse-power a man-power was These experiment ha been made largely upon men who were lifting loads by mean |