(2) How far will any increase of human costs of labour be offset by the greater human utility of the higher wages they receive?
(3) How far is any balance of human costs, which is imposed on special classes of producers, compensated by the increased wealth at the disposal of society at large?
There is some tendency among the advocates of Scientific Management to burke a full discussion of these issues by asserting that their policy is only a fuller and more rational application of that principle of division of labour which is by general consent the economic foundation of modern civilised society.If some sacrifice of individual freedom in industrial work is involved, it is assumed to be more than compensated by gains to society in which every individual, as a member of society, has his proper share.
But we cannot consent thus to rush the issue.For it may turn out that the new method, though but a stricter and finer application of the old, carries this economy so far that the increased human costs imposed upon the producer grow faster than the human gains which the increased productivity confers either upon him or upon society at large.In other words, the human indictment brought by the mid-Victorian humanists against the factory system of their day and rejected on a general survey of the economic situation, might be validated by the increased standardisation and specialisation of labour under scientific management.For though the division of labour under modern capitalism in all its branches has narrowed the range of productive activity for the great bulk of workers, a survey of those activities shows that within their narrowing range there may and does survive a certain scope for skill, judgment, and initiative, a certain limited amount of liberty in detailed modes of workmanship.Moreover, the conditions of most organised work form a certain education in discipline and responsibility.
It is only a small proportion of the workers who are converted into mere servants of the machine.Though large classes are engaged in monotonous routine, the paces and the detailed movements are not rigidly enforced upon them.Different workmen will be doing the same work in a slightly different way.
Now the standardisation under the new method is expressly designed so as to extirpate these little personal equations of liberty and to reduce the labour of the ordinary employee to an automatic perfection of routine.
It is, indeed, contended by Mr.Taylor that the knowledge of each man that he is working at his highest personal efficiency will be a satisfaction to him, that the attention he must pay to the detailed orders of the taskmaster will evoke intelligence and responsibility, and that his initiative in the way of suggesting improvements, which has hitherto been prized as an element of liberty and a source of industrial progress, can be conserved under scientific management.But a careful examination of the illustrations of the method compels our rejection of these claims.The knowledge of a routine worker that he is speeded up to his highest pitch by a method whose efficiency is prescribed by others, does not yield a sense of personal efficiency.Mere meticulous obedience is not a proper training in the discipline of a 'person', and a workman operating under these conditions will not have the practical liberty for those little experiments in trial and error on his own account which makes his suggestions of improvement fruitful.
Mr.Taylor, however, carries his defence so far as to deny all narrowing effects of subdivision of labour on the worker.Admitting that the workmen frequently say when they first come under the system, 'Why, I am not allowed to think or move without someone interfering or doing it for me,' he seems to think the following answer satisfactory: --'The same criticism and objection, however, can be raised against any other modern subdivision of labour.It does not follow, for example, that the modern surgeon is any more narrow or wooden a man than the early settler in this country.The frontiersman, however, had to be not only a surgeon, but also an architect, house-builder, lumber-man, farmer, soldier, and doctor, and he had to settle his lawsuits with a gun.You would hardly say that the life of the modern surgeon is any more narrowing or that he is more of a wooden man than the frontiersman.The many problems to be met and solved by the surgeon are just as intricate and difficult and as developing and broadening in their way as were those of the frontiersman.'10Now as to this we can only reply, first that it is untrue that the surgeon's life on its productive side (the issue under discussion) is as broad and as varied as that of the frontiersman.In the second place, even if we accepted the view that a narrow field of activity admitted of as much variety and interest as a wider field, provided liberty of action were equal in the two, that view is quite inapplicable to the case at issue.For there all liberty of action in the subdivided field of labour is excluded.
