Passage 4
For all their tremendous worldwide impact Fredric Taylor and Scientific Management have had a bad press, especially in academic. One reason, perhaps the main one, is the unrelenting campaign America’s labor unions waged against both in the early years of the last century. The unions actually succeeded in banning any kind of work study in army arsenals and naval shipyard, where in those years practically all defense production was done in America.
The unions of 1911 did not oppose Tayler because they thought him pro-management or anti-labor (he was neither). His unforgiveable sin was his assertion that there is no such thing as skill in making and moving things. All could be analyzed step by step as a series of unskilled operations that then could be put together into any kind of job. Anyone willing to learn these operations would be a “first-class man,” deserving “first class pay.” He could do the most highly skilled work and do it to perfection.
But the unions of Taylor’s time—and especially the highly respected and extremely powerful unions in arsenals and shipyards—were craft monopolies. Their power base was their control of an
Apprenticeship (学徒) of five or seven years to which, as a rule, only relatives of members were admitted. They considered their craft a “mystery,” the secrets of which no member was allowed to divulge. The skilled workers in the arsenals and navy yards in particular were paid extremely well—more than most physicians of those times and triples what Taylor’s “first-class man” could expect to get. No wonder that Taylor’s denial of the mystery of craft and skill infuriated (激怒) these “aristocrats of labor” as subversion and pestilential heresy.
Most contemporaries, eighty years ago, agreed with the unions. Even thirty years later the belief in the mystery of craft and skill persisted, and also in the long years of apprenticeship needed to acquire either. Hitler, for instance, was convinced that it would take the U. S. at least five years to train optical craftsmen, and modern war requires precision optics. It would therefore take many years, Hitler was sure, before America could field an effective army and air force in Europe—the conviction that made him declare war on America when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
We now know that Taylor, was right. The U. S. did indeed have almost no optical craftsmen in 1941. And modern war does indeed require precision optics, and in large quantities. But by applying Taylor’s Scientific Management the U. S. trained in few months semiskilled workers to turn out more highly advanced optics than the Germans with their craftsmen ever did, and on the assembly line to boot. Any by that time Taylor’s first-class men with their increased productivity also made a great deal more money than any craftsmen of 1911 could even have dreamed of.
Eventually knowledge work and service work may turn out to be like work making and moving things—that is, “just work,” to use an Old Scientific Management slogan. At least this is the position of the more radical proponents of Artificial Intelligence, Taylor’s true children or grandchildren. But for the time being, knowledge and service jobs must not be treated as just work. They cannot be assumed to be homogeneous. They must be treated as falling into a number of distinct categories—probably three. Each requires different analysis and different organization. In making and moving things the focus in increasing productivity is on work. In knowledge and service work it has to on performance.
1.According to the passage, Fredric Taylor’s Scientific Management ____.
2.According to the passage, which of the following statements is not true?
3.According to the passage, Taylor’s Scientific Management made it possible that ____.
4.From the passage we can infer that Hitler declared war on America because ____.
5.The purpose the author wants to achieve in this passage is to illustrate that ____.