Increasing Efficiency is Your Best Route to Employment Security

The cheapening of any article in common use almost immediately results in a largely increased demand for that article. Take the case of shoes, for instance. The introduction of machinery for doing every element of the work which was formerly done by hand has resulted in making shoes at a fraction of their former labor cost. Now almost every man, woman, and child in the working classes buys one or two pairs of shoes per year, and they wear shoes all the time. Formerly, each workman 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 matter of the sternest necessity. In spite of the enormously increased output of shoes per workman, which has come with shoe machinery, the demand for shoes has so increased that there are relatively more men working in the shoe industry now than ever before. The workmen in almost every trade have before them an object lesson of this kind, and yet, because they are ignorant of the history of their own trade, they still firmly believe, as their fathers did before them, that it is against their best interests for each man to turn out each day as much work as possible. Under this fallacious idea, a large proportion of workmen deliberately work slowly so as to curtail their output. Almost every labor union has made, or is contemplating making, rules which have for their object curtailing the output of their members. Those men who have the greatest influence with the working people, the labor leaders, as well as many people with philanthropic feelings who are helping them, are daily spreading this fallacy and at the same time telling them that they are overworked. -Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) From the time I was 18 until I was about 27, I spent most of my summers working as an asphalt sealant and maintenance contractor around Detroit, Michigan. One of the main jobs I did involved putting an asphalt sealant on parking lots and driveways. At the beginning of my first summer doing this work, I used to purchase the sealant in five-gallon pails. Then I starting purchasing the sealant in 55-gallon drums and installing a pipe on the drums to drain [Read more]