that the predetermined task has been accomplished and that bonuses have been earned by foreman and workers, he does not answer our demand to learn the effect upon the workers.

Mr. Gantt, for instance, in his interesting book, shows by graphic charts how the working capacity of men and girls in a variety of establishments was remarkably increased. He insists upon the benefit accruing to the workers under scientific management, not only in efficiency and wages, but in habits of industry, in self-respect and improved personal appearance. He states in general, that this improvement is more marked in girls than in men, and that under the new system the "girls invariably acquire better color and improve in health."

But with a system whose possibilities for harm as well as for good are so striking as the new efficiency, we are justified in asking for more specific data. The burden of proof is upon the new system to show that its marvelous results have been attained by legitimate means, as in the case of the carefully observed pig-iron handlers, without extra strain upon the vitality of the workers.

As applied to women, scientific management is so recent and has, as yet, affected such a comparatively small number, that it is perhaps unreasonable to expect much accumulated evidence. An open-minded and painstaking investigation into the effects of scientific management upon working women was recently made by Miss Edith Wyatt, and yielded results more or less inconclusive as to the effect on health. In three large establishments studied, the new management seems to have "resulted fortunately for the health of the workingwomen in some instances and unfortunately in others." To this impartial observer "the best omen for the conservation of the health of the women workers under Scientific Management in the cotton mill was the entire equity and candor shown by the management in facing situations unfavorable for the women workers' health, and their sincere intention of the best practicable readjustments."

• Clark and Wyatt, op. cit., pp. 260 and 266.

What we need as regards both men and women (and the only answer which will allay the suspicions aroused by scientific management) is more knowledge as to the ultimate physical adjustment of the workers to the heightened intensity of their tasks.

This was a subject which preoccupied the attention of the man who was in some sort a forerunner of the efficiency engineer-Ernst Abbé. He, too, was a student of working capacity. He, too, sought the optimum in which men accomplished most in the shortest space of time. But he was concerned with the effects of heightened intensity upon the development of his workers not only as economic vessels and units of production, but as men and citizens.

Now, it is clearly self-evident that the efficiency engineer desires the permanent welfare of his employes. Permanency of the labor force is a part of efficiency, since the training of employes represents a concrete investment of money, time, and effort. Scientific management would brand as essentially inefficient such management as that in many department stores, where the army of employes shifts almost like an army of tramps. In one large and well known department store in Boston, for instance, during a single year, from among less than 1,000 regular employes, 708 left after employment averaging fourteen weeks.* Only 279 worked an entire year. Such a record, resulting largely from underpay, is a fair gauge of inefficiency. The "system of drive" also, which merely keeps replacing its workers as they are used up or worn out by overwork and unrelieved intensity of effort, is condemned by the engineers as essentially inefficient. They aim to set tasks which the workers may accomplish and "thrive under." In comparison with this, the difference in Abbé's attitude towards his workers was only a matter of emphasis. Yet, as we all know, nothing is in the end more potent or revolutionary than the intangible spirit which animates a new system and sets its tone, and of this emphasis upon the work

*This did not include the temporary employes engaged for the Christmas season.

ers as independent social units, scientific management has still much to learn.

The practical difficulties of gauging the individual adjustments to work are undoubtedly huge. But it is the business of scientific management to approach such problems of employment in the same spirit which has solved the vexed problems of equipment.

What observation of the workers is comparable to the genius for both details and underlying principles shown in the maintenance of belting, in a railroad shop described by Mr. Harrington Emerson? The care of belting at one of the main shops had cost about $12,000 a year, or $1,000 each month.

"It was so poorly installed and supervised that there was an average of twelve breakdowns each working day, each involving more or less disorganization of the plant in its parts or as a whole.

Scientific management then entered:

"The worker in actual charge of belts, a promoted day laborer, was given standards, and took his directions from a special staff foreman, only one of whose duties was knowledge as to belts. The foreman had received his knowledge and ideals from the general chief of staff, who had made belts a special study, and this general chief of staff had been inspired and directed by a man who had made a nine years' special study of belts and who was the greatest authority in the world on the subject. The belt foreman had as much of this knowledge at his call as he could absorb, but he in turn was in immediate contact with each individual belt, with the machine it was on and with the worker using the machine. The chief of staff learned as much from the belt foreman as the belt foreman learned from the chief of staff. The belt foreman learned as much from the machinists as they learned from him. The cost of maintaining belts fell from $1,000 a month to $300 a month; the number of breakdowns declined from twelve each working day to an average of two a day, not one of them serious."

Emerson, Harrington: Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages, p. 61. Published by The Engineering Magazine, New York, 1909.

Here we have the greatest authority in the world sought as consultant for the life of belting. What first class authority, nay, what specialist at all, is called in as consultant for the lives of mortal men and women singularly responsive and singularly influenced by the new and unstudied forces released by the new system of production?

4. SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT AND COLLECTIVE
BARGAINING

The solution of these problems, connected with the determination of strains upon the workers, will probably be contingent upon the solution of another, which it is the reproach of scientific management to have left so far unsolved. This is its relation to labor organization; its failure to enlist the forces of a devotion as passionate as the instinct for selfpreservation itself.

In a recent valuable paper on "Organized Labor's Attitude Toward Industrial Efficiency,"* John R. Commons observes that the conflict between unionism and scientific management is found at the point where management weakens the solidarity of the labor unions. Where, for instance, the principle of individual bargaining replaces collective bargaining, the instinctive and reasonable hostility of labor arises. It is true, as evidence showed before the Interstate Commerce Commission, that in a number of important establishments, union and non-union men have worked peaceably under the new management. Nor is there any reason why they should not do so. The hostility of labor which resents the stop-watch of the engineer, his impersonal and unfeeling measurement of human powers in mechanical and psychological terms, is bound to yield to tact and persuasion. This is a hostility bred of sentiment, which

*The American Economic Review, Vol. I, No. 3. September, 1911. †Tabor Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia; Canadian Pacific Shops at Angus, Montreal; Manhattan Press of New York; Plimpton Press of Norwood, Massachusetts, and contract work under Frank Gilbreth and others.

it is reasonable to suppose that time and education may gradually dissipate. But the unionist's desperate dread of losing his hard-won collective bargaining power (the essential basis of his solidarity) can be met only by "converting this craving for harmony and mutual support, as well as the impulse of individual ambition, into a productive asset."*

The material results of industrial efficiency are such that the new system is inevitably bound to spread and affect the fortunes of a constantly growing number of wage-earners, men and women. This is the reason why its attitude towards collective bargaining is of such vast consequence now, while the relations between the engineers and the unions are still uncrystallized and in process of formation.

The unions themselves have, on the whole, failed as yet to grasp the significance and inevitableness of the new order of production. They have confused its outward forms and economies, such as the bonuses, with the old system of "drive." They often resent, as indeed it is only human at first to resent, the enforced substitution, however desirable, of new habits for old. They have belied the system and wilfully closed their eyes to its marvelous possibilities; but in such opposition the forces of unionism are beating against a dead wall. Scientific management is bound to triumph with them or despite them. Labor has thus before it a unique opportunity, still largely unrecognized, to strengthen its cause and to gain for itself a fair share in the new benefits of science. Its bitter experience in the past, especially in relation to new inventions such as the introduction of machinery, whose benefits capital and not labor has so largely absorbed, explains in part the opposition of labor to scientific manage

ment.

The forces of repression so threaten unionism on all sides, perverting even industrial efficiency itself to their malign uses, that the leaders of the new order, free to realize its wider implications and benefits to laborer as well as to employer, are under special obligations to spend their best ef• Commons, op. cit., p. 472.