Shop Management

Shop Management is by Frederick Winslow Taylor, dated 1911. The writer names two noteworthy facts in the field of management: great unevenness, or lack of uniformity, even in “our best run works,” and the lack of apparent relation between good shop management and the payment of dividends. The writer says a first-class man can do in most cases from two to four times as much as is done by an average man.

The possibility of coupling high wages with a low labor cost, the text says, rests mainly upon the enormous difference between the work a first-class man can do under favorable circumstances and the work actually done by the average man. Functional foremanship is said to be already in limited use in many of the best managed shops. On wages, the text calls any limit to the maximum wages men are allowed to earn in a trade equally injurious to their best interests, and says the “minimum wage” is the least harmful of the rules generally adopted by trades unions.