Frederick Winslow Taylor

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0200

The best-known scene in the literature of management opens with a question: “Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?” A labourer at the Bethlehem steel works in Pennsylvania, paid $1.15 a day for carrying 92-pound bars of pig iron up a plank into a railway wagon, is called out of his gang. He is offered $1.85 if he will do exactly as the man with the watch tells him, “and no back talk”. He answers in stage German, “Vell, I don’t know vat you mean.” By half past five the next afternoon he has loaded 47½ tons, where the gang had averaged 12½¹.

Labour on The Prosperitist

Frederick Winslow Taylor