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"A true story, honestly told, can change lives." |
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Our lives weren't always dominated by the clock. But that was before Frederick Winslow Taylor brought his stopwatch onto the shop floor. Yet the man who thought everything should run like clockwork was also a quirky cross-dresser who spent the last years of life in ignominy, studying the growth of grass. The story of Taylor’s rise, fall and phoenix-like rise again is a tale of conflicting ideologies, labor-management disputes and strikes, Congressional investigations and, ultimately, great human drama. Taylor himself was an enigmatic figure. The son of a privileged family, he was expected to attend Harvard and take his place in the leisurely upper class. However, Taylor eschewed that path and learned a trade by becoming a working-class machinist. Yet he could not abide by the status quo and began working on ways to induce workers to be more productive — ultimately developing his scientific shop management system and alienating most workers. In 1880, at the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Taylor began his first experiments. Taylor developed a reputation as an unyielding controller in the workplace, yet he was constantly late for meetings and had a penchant for cross-dressing. He claimed his shop management system would bring greater happiness to workers’ lives and professed great respect for laborers yet repeatedly said he did not want them to think on the job. And he believed that any worker who disagreed with his system was simply ignorant. But by 1910 Taylor’s ideas had taken hold of American and he became a household name. Housewives adopted his scientific management principles, rearranging their kitchens to “save steps” and to be more efficient. Scholars and labor experts featured in Stopwatch discuss the impact of Taylorism on many social activities, including the management homes, farms, businesses, churches, philanthropic institutions and government. Trotsky, Lenin and Mussolini all embraced Taylor’s theories, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis hailed him as brilliant. But a workers’ strike in Watertown, Massachusetts and a subsequent Congressional investigation into Taylor’s management system put his ideas to a severe test. Labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers viewed Taylor as the devil incarnate, and author Upton Sinclair publicly criticized him. Bitter and angry after enduring the long Congressional investigation process, Taylor finally withdrew from the public arena, retiring to his home to conduct other studies, including one that literally involved watching grass grow. When he died of complications from a cold at age 59, he was working on a project to grow the perfect putting-green grass. Though Taylor himself died a broken and discouraged man, labor leaders could not stem the tide of “Taylorism” or the efficiency movement. From auto-production plants that plan each task workers perform to fire fighting companies that use Taylor’s theories to reduce their response time, Taylorism permeates the modern workplace. Funding for Stopwatch was provided by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The program was co-produced by Quest Productions. | | | | | | | |  | | | | |
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To order a DVD of Stopwatch for institutional use by phone, please call 1-800-853-6077.
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| Stopwatch was broadcast nationally on PBS on November 7, 1999. |
| | | | | | Science, Medicine and Technology |
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Kikim Media has produced numerous programs for national television broadcast on a wide variety of subjects, including science and technology, health, medicine, religion and other contemporary social and political issues. |
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