Taylorism

Question 1

Subcontracting

Answer 1

An owner contracts with a set of skilled tradesmen - subcontractors - for the completion of some task, for a fixed sum.
The subcontractors hire less skilled labour to complete the task at rates of pay set by the subcontractor. In this way, the owner evades the problem of controlling labour.
Note that this organization structure distances the owner from the technical issues
involved in the work.
However this was deemed to be beneficial because skilled workers are better suited to supervise specialized technical labour
The assumption is that the owner does not understand the labour processes in his own factory, he also wouldn’t know how to supervise them

Question 2

Ordinary management

Answer 2

a boss hires craftsmen (either directly or through subcontracting) who understand the nature of the work tasks in the workplace, while the owner/employer does not.

Question 3

Solutions proposed by Taylor to improve employee performance

Answer 3

1. You need to relocate knowledge of work processes
   → You get trained people to analyze and find ways to improve work processes
   → By doing this, you break the monopoly of knowledge in the lower parts of an organization
2. Redesign work
   → Reduce skill levels required to perform tasks by decomposing tasks into smaller separate elements
   → This reduces the amount of knowledge and skill needed by an employee to perform a task
   → Led to an increase in the relative supply of workers for each job (you could pay them less)
   Workers would be more readily substitutable so that turnover would cause less of a problem.
3. Incentive Pay
   → Simplified tasks usually make it easier to monitor work and to count output.
   → Where output can be counted, pay can be tied to output.
   These changes are tied to economic efficiency, but not engineering efficiency

Question 4

Harry Braverman’s arguments

Answer 4

→ Argued that Taylorism was designed to reallocate knowledge to reunite expertise and position and to replace skilled with unskilled labour.
→ The consequences of this were:
→ Closer and more effective management control of work
→ Lower pay
→ ‘spiritually impoverishing’ work
→ Both Marglin and Braverman would argue that this is a case of economic efficiency, rather than engineering efficiency. That is to say, Taylorism increased output, but only by increasing inputs (making employees work harder) and cutting the price of inputs (that is, pay).
→ Taylorism, then, was not distributionally neutral.
Argued that production organization is focused around collective bargaining, if employees think changes in organization are distributionally motivated, they will be less cooperative