On this May Day, I propose to salute poor Frederick Winslow Taylor of Philadelphia, long maligned by labour historians and activists as the man responsible for the evils of the 20th-century workplace.
No one else remembers him at all, though in his day he was revered among industrialists, and few men have left such a lasting legacy. Taylor was only 16 when destiny was precipitated by failing eyesight which forced him to drop out of Harvard Law School. He took a more visually restful job in a machine shop, rapidly rose to chief engineer, and en route discovered his true vocation and great passion - the science of management.
It was an novel idea, and American industrialists were desperate enough to try anything. The Industrial Revolution had spawned machinery that could produce goods on a scale previously unimagined, and railways that could distribute them in every direction. The intractable problem was how to organise factories full of immigrant labourers, not only unskilled but unfamiliar with the English language.
Simple hypothesis
Taylor's basic hypothesis had the stunning simplicity of genius: workers should be organised to work just like the machines they operated. He thought this could be done in two easy steps. The first was to break every job down into small component parts, train each worker to become proficient at only one task, and then linking all of them into a production chain. Thus was the assembly line born.
The second step was to find the single method that maximised efficiency in every task, and stick to it. Not for Taylor the messy maxim, "Don't forget your shovel if you want to go to work". When workers arrived on the job with their own shovels, they could be put to shovelling anything from ore, at a hefty 30 lbs per shovelful, to rice coal, at a mere 4 lbs per shovel full. The first was too tiring to be productive and the second far too slow.
The optimum shovel load, Taylor's experiments showed, was 21 lbs. Efficiency was simply a matter of having different shovels designed for different materials, each capable of hoisting just 21 lbs.
But Taylor's most crucial premise, and the one that eventually blackened his name, was that "planners" and "doers" were two separate species. Planning was for engineers. It was they who would develop the methods, set the productivity goals and train managers.
The rest of the workforce were consigned to doing. As they were mostly incapable of understanding the science involved, and inclined to shirk their single allocated tasks, Taylor accepted that they would need rules and supervision - the stick of punishment as well as the carrot of pay.
Enthusiastic converts
All this was set out in Taylor's epic work of 1911, The Principles of Scientific Management. Employers became enthusiastic converts. Reason and organisation replaced chaos. Productivity soared. New departments sprang up in such previously unknown fields as industrial engineering, personnel, and quality control.
Workers, on the other hand, were never very impressed. The time-and-motion expert with his stopwatch and the manager with his clipboard rapidly became figures of hate and mockery, magnificently satirised by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.
Shortly after Taylor's death in 1915, the flaws in his theories became all too evident when the munitions factory hands began to crack under the relentless war production pressures. As early as 1920, theoreticians had begun to suspect that there were other factors influencing productivity - mental and nervous fatigue, monotony, boredom, suspicion, hostility.
By the 1940s, when occupational psychology was the all the rage, Taylorism was a tainted word.
But history is unfair. Taylor himself was acutely aware of the human face of the workplace and knew his methods could be abused. He favoured, for instance, not only a shorter working day but profit-sharing schemes, and he constantly warned managers to be positive and co-operative in dealings with workers, to enforce rest periods and tea-breaks.
For every employer who took his advice, however, thousands didn't - including, most notably, the Irish-American entrepreneur Henry Ford.
Middle management
Nor did Taylor anticipate the way his idea of separating planning from execution would take on its own spin. It is hardly his fault that it spread beyond industry to professions and services, with a commensurate expansion in middle management.
I'm not such a revisionist that I want Taylor banners carried or May Day marches or Taylor ballads sung; just a little recognition, in the enlightened age of social partnership and industrial teamwork, that like other geniuses Taylor was misinterpreted by lesser and meaner mortals.
And there are blights on modern working life that have nothing to do with Tayor's theories. At about the same time as he was designing his methods, a German sociologist named Max Weber was busy identifying the core elements of the organisational innovations of the German leader Bismarck - formal rules, uniform operations, impersonal orientation, employment based on merit. Weber called his technique "bureaucracy".