Taylorist Fordist Principles Essay
This essay was written for my Social Problems class at UC Davis. It received an "A", surprisingly.
It is property of me, Seth DuVernay.
Eccentric though he was, Henry Ford pioneered a new form of labor control to help standardize the auto industry in the early 1900s. This labor structure, along with theories from Frederick Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management, helped to create the Taylorist-Fordist principle of labor control. Through the use of technology and strict work organization, corporations are able to employ Taylorist-Fordist principles of labor control to manage their employees.
Taylorist-Fordist principles of labor control can be defined as a way for an employer to standardize workplace organization in order to gain a higher rate of production. Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter put forth the idea of lean production, also known as management by stress, which can be easily compared to the Taylorist-Fordist principle. Lean production is just that: lean. In it employers wish to cut out indirect labor, which increases the workload on those employees left over. Employees end up overworked, with typically fewer benefits and less vacation time. Parker and Slaughter argue that lean production is not used to promote the wellbeing of employees; it is used to drive those employees to do precision work in less-than-perfect conditions.
Technology in the workplace is one way employers use Taylorist-Fordist principles of labor control. By using technologies such as cell phones, email, beepers, and timers, employers can effectively extend an extra arm of control over their employees. Corporations try to shape technology so they can get the most out of their workers; one of the most obvious ways of doing this is to improve communication. Thus, they provide company cell phones and email address to keep track of employees and upper management. What these technologies also do is extend working hours, allowing
employers to contact workers on the bus, the train, the car, and even at home. Cell phones come in particularly handy to corporations, because they allow employers to contact workers wherever they are. While employed at a Burger King in northern California, I had a first-hand example of this tactic: employees were encouraged to give the management their home and cell phone numbers. When the management needed extra help (even if it was your day off), both numbers would be tried several times. If you were unreachable at either of those phone numbers, shift mangers would ask friends of yours on the job as to where you might be. Sometimes, if the management were “desperate” enough, they would even call a restaurant number they were informed you might be at. From a social point of view, technologies like cell phones and email, while seemingly meant to help workers, only add to employee stress and job dissatisfaction.
One of the key aspects of Taylorist-Fordist principles is that of on-site job surveillance. Employers can monitor voice conversations of telemarketers, and can read emails and track what websites one visits while on the job. There is an account of how one airline reservation agent came to work, sat down at her station, plugged in her headset and proceeded to tell a friend about a health issue of hers. A short while later, her supervisor called her into his office and asked if there was anything the company could do for her during her time of need. This type of close, uninformed monitoring gives employees a feeling of powerlessness, like a Big Brother is listening over your shoulder, grading your every action. By monitoring what tasks employees are engaged in on the job, employers can scientifically look at what is getting done and how they could have fewer employees accomplish such tasks.
At the heart of Taylorist-Fordist principles is the idea that management can gain increased control over labor by dividing work into a uniform set of sequences, then embedding those sequences into machines. By standardizing a labor process, and how employees work, employers like Henry Ford could achieve greatly increased labor output. However, the standardization of most labor processes can mean combining certain jobs, and splitting other jobs apart; jobs that get the axe are often skilled labor positions. Employers have found that if they can take a highly paid skilled labor position and split it into two or more lower cost and easier-to-learn positions they can cut production costs and increase profit. Furthermore, employees are expected to put out extra effort to maintain normal production levels when their fellow employees are absent. Work organization tactics such as these help employers achieve a high level of control over the labor process and, eventually, realize a higher profit.
At the root of it all, corporations use Taylorist-Fordist principles of labor control to separate the skills and implicit knowledge of skilled crafts workers into a series of disaggregated tasks that can be standardized and assigned in a sequence. By using technology and work organization to control the labor process, corporations are able to employ Taylorist-Fordist principles of labor control to manage their employees.
Sources:
Garson, Barbara. The Electronic Sweatshop.
Parker, Mike and Slaughter, Jane. Lean Work. 1995
Thompson, John. “What is Taylorism?”. 2001. .
