Taylorism Quotes

“The point was made many times that scientific management benefitted workers not at all, perhaps most clearly by a short statement by John P. Frey, editor of the International Molders Journal and participant in a bipartisan survey of the claims of scientific management,

'If generally applied the craftsmen would pass out of existence, and the workers would become dependent for their existence upon the scanty and insignificant industrial knowledge and experience afforded them by their limited opportunities, regulated by those who in addition to their ownership of machinery, had also acquired possession of craft knowledge and the skilled workers’ methods.”
― Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“The “ideology of Taylorism all but ensured a workplace divided against itself, both in space and in practice, with a group of managers controlling how work was done and their workers merely performing that work,” he writes. “It became increasingly clear . . . from the distance between the top and the bottom rungs of the ‘ladder,’ that some workers were never going to join the upper layers of management. For some, work was always, frankly, going to suck.”
― Nikil Saval