How Middle Management Made the Modern World

Late nineteenth-century American machine shop foreman Frederick Winslow Taylor had a problem: his friends didn’t like him. Rather like Samuel Bentham a century earlier, he began his career in a facility defined by working-class solidarity but did not himself come from the working class. Workers in Taylor’s shop at Midvale Steel Company collaborated to determine exactly how fast labor in the shop would be.

Opposing the market imperative to work faster and faster required workers to cooperate—and supervisors to know their place. When Taylor worked his way up to the low-level supervisory position of “gang-boss,” his coworkers, whom he described as his “personal friends,” immediately reminded him of his expected role and warned him against exceeding their agreed-upon productivity rates. He responded that he was “now working on the side of the management” and would do “whatever he could to get a fair day’s work” out of the machines, and by extension out of their workers.

This began what Taylor called a “war.” He wielded every weapon of management against his former friends, from firing workers and reducing their wages to personally teaching new recruits. Workers resisted him with false reports of incompetence, machine sabotage, and especially social pressure—something that worked on new recruits but not on Taylor himself.

The utility of science in Taylorism was its rhetorical power rather than methodological rigor: it legitimized managerial tyranny as objectively necessary and ultimately mutually beneficial.

He wasn’t one of them, he had not “lived where they lived,” and he was “not of working parents.” During his conflict with workers, he found time to win the 1881 US National Championships in tennis as one half of a doubles team—the other was banking heir and future streetcar magnate Clarence Clark, who was also Taylor’s brother-in-law. One of their opponents in the finals was Alexander van Renssellaer, whose family fortune went back to seventeenth-century America.

After around three years of conflict with workers, Taylor had succeeded in dramatically increasing productivity and was rewarded with a promotion to foreman of the shop. But this was “in no sense a recompense for the bitter relations” his manage-ment activities brought him. When his “workman friends” came to speak with him, he conceded that if he “were in their place,” he too would fight to keep productivity down.

Ultimately he became determined to “in some way change the system of management, so that the interests of the workmen and the management should be the same, instead of antagonistic.” Taylor set about this task using scientific knowledge, which he felt distinguished him from the craft mindset of the working class. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering through a correspondence course in 1883 and devised a number of new technical and managerial techniques at Midvale in subsequent years.

In 1890, he moved on to a paper manufacturer and eventually to independent consulting. A broader theory of management began to come together: like Samuel Bentham, Taylor combined social engineering, technical innovations, and improved accounting practices. Possibly as early as the 1880s, Taylor engaged in “time studies,” quantifying tasks with a watch in order to optimize them. When Bethlehem Steel Company became a Taylor client in 1899, it offered special opportunities for testing Taylor’s theories.

As much as possible, workers were meant to be mere appendages of decision-making managers, components of capital’s machinery.

According to Taylor, Bethlehem was in a stronger financial position than previous clients and more open to change. With the help of James Gillespie, who had previously worked with Taylor, and Hartley C. Wolle, a Bethlehem supervisor, he embarked on an important study that later became a famous anecdote in his Principles of Scientific Management.

On March 13, 1899, Gillespie and Wolle tasked ten men who they felt were particularly fast workers with moving pig iron as fast as they could. Multiplied across a day, their rate would have been over seventy-five tons per day per man. Gillespie and Wolle recognized this pace was unsustainable, though, and so cut it by 40 percent to allow for rest. This was an arbitrary cut, the kind of “rule of thumb” method Taylor loathed—why not 60 percent, or 55? However, his own attempts to calculate a scientific law of human exhaustion were similarly dubious.

The utility of science in Taylorism was its rhetorical power rather than methodological rigor: it legitimized managerial tyranny as objectively necessary and ultimately mutually beneficial. Science also justified Taylor’s project of centralizing all decision and thought about work. Under what he called the “task idea,” the worker has specified for them “not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it.”

As much as possible, workers were meant to be mere appendages of decision-making managers, components of capital’s machinery. The goal was not new, and Taylor’s methods were not all that effective in achieving it. The calculations and conclusions of his time studies were remarkably haphazard, and it appears that his organization of physical space and his accounting practices made a far greater material difference for his clients than his worker control schemes did. But Taylor’s impact was ideological and political as much as practical. His poorly controlled experiments and confused averages epistemologically distinguished enlightened and rational managers from their subordinates, legitimizing class distinctions.

Whether his methods were properly conducted science is immaterial. What mattered was that Frederick Winslow Taylor could present a convincing and convenient figure for management—approximately 45 tons per man day—and workers could not. Once Taylor and his assistant arrived at this figure, they set about making it a reality. This was no easy task: it was four times what workers were then averaging. The obvious move was to shift workers from day work—pay by day—to piecework, or pay by ton loaded.

By setting the rate carefully, they could entice workers to do several times as much work for more pay per time but proportionally less per ton. This was the kind of win-win Taylor felt made his program appealing to workers: in theory, everyone was better off.

In practice, as Taylor himself had written in an 1895 article, piecework schemes were frequently opposed by workers, since the employer could lower the piece rate over time, eventually leaving workers with the same pay they had started with for significantly greater effort.12 The market race to the bottom encouraged this—why would any employer ever pay more than they had to, especially as increases in output across an industry would naturally lower the price of the goods any company sold? Taylor’s article urged employers not to lower rates, appealing to vague principles of justice and insisting that “MEN WILL NOT DO AN EXTRAORDINARY DAY’S WORK FOR AN ORDINARY DAY’S PAY.”

“What constitutes a fair day’s work will be a question for scientific investigation, instead of a subject to be bargained and haggled over.”

But ordinary and extraordinary are relative terms. Bosses taking Taylor’s advice could interpret these conditions flexibly or simply ignore them. Moreover, Taylor himself clearly defined a “fair day’s work” as the maximum amount a worker could perform without long-term physical harm. At best, Taylor’s scheme left workers working as hard as they could without injuring themselves; at worst, because it deliberately excluded workers from having any power over the process, it allowed managers to work them even harder.

Naturally, workers resisted: the Hungarian workers that Gilespie and Wolle originally studied immediately figured out what was afoot when they were asked to work by piece on March 16. They refused to work by piece, forcing their foreman, John Haack, to allow them to work by day. Taylor’s assistants returned the next day with orders to fire anyone who would not accept the new terms. Once they were fired, Haack’s former gang pressured other loaders not to comply, presumably using similar tactics to what Taylor had seen at Midvale.

Ultimately Gillespie and Wolle had to rely on seven workers, all of whom were either Pennsylvania Dutch or Irish, meaning they had fewer social ties to Haack’s work gang. They assented to work by piece beginning on March 30. Only five of the seven actually showed up, however, and the day after that only three of them did. Only one of these was found suitable (and willing) to continue, and though Taylor’s team found other workers, he became “the only one who continued with us from the start and at times constituted our whole piecework gang. He worked to his maximum from the beginning and by this means demonstrated that a good day’s wages could be made at the existing rates by a good man.” His name was Henry Noll.

A warped version of his story became the central example of “scientific management” in Taylor’s 1911 Principles, in which Taylor recounted his hiring and used Noll as an example of the kind of worker his system could produce. Taylor pitched scientific management as a solution to what was then called the “labor problem”—laborer resistance to management discipline. Scientific management, Taylor claimed, would result in “the elimination of almost all causes for dispute and disagreement” between workers and employers. “What constitutes a fair day’s work will be a question for scientific investigation, instead of a subject to be bargained and haggled over.”

In practice, worker management was—in the words of historian Daniel Nelson—the “least well-developed” part of Taylor’s program, which included the kind of technical innovations that had made him wealthy, as well as the reorganization of work facilities and improved accounting. Making workers into machines was an ambition more than a reality. But labor control was scientific management’s best selling point because it was the hardest problem facing any boss. Taylor consistently emphasized the harmony that his system supposedly produced: in Principles, he told readers that “there has never been a single strike among the men working under this system.”

This was immensely appealing to many, given events at the time. Labor-capital conflict in the United States continued to be bitter and violent during this period. When California manufacturers wielded police and newspapers against iron-workers, they responded with dynamite, including an October 1, 1910, bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. The resulting explosion killed twenty-one people and prompted President Taft to propose, and Congress to approve, the creation of a federal commission to inquire into labor–management relations, since they were poor enough that buildings were exploding. In this era of growing labor radicalism and open conflict with capital, Taylor promised docile and happy workers alongside high profits.

He presented pig iron loader Henry Noll, whom he referred to as “Schmidt,” as the “first illustration” of his practice in Principles. Pig iron loading was not a central part of his practical efforts—this was why he had offloaded much of it to assistants. But politically it offered the ideal example for his purposes. Principles includes a dialogue with “Schmidt” that, while entirely fictional, is emblematic of the system, worldview, and political program that “scientific management” represented. It begins with Schmidt being taken aside and asked: “Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?”

“Schmidt” responds in a caricatured accent, and with errors in tense, perhaps to emphasize Taylor’s opinion that “he was a man so stupid that he was unfitted to do most kinds of labor work, even.” It takes Schmidt a few repetitions to answer the question, and he only begins to do so after an agitated fictional Taylor impatiently explains that a high-priced man receives higher wages. When Schmidt expresses interest, Taylor clarifies in warning:

A high-priced man has to do exactly as he’s told from morning till night . . . if you are a high-priced man, you will do exactly as this man tells you tomorrow, from morning till night . . . Do you understand that? When this man tells you to walk, you walk; when he tells you to sit down, you sit down, and you don’t talk back at him. Now you come on to work here tomorrow morning and I’ll know before night whether you are really a high-priced man or not.

The real-life Henry Noll was a human being, with hopes and dreams, friends and family. He worked as a volunteer firefighter and may have spent Sundays building his own house. In Taylor’s narrative he becomes “Schmidt,” a confused and obedient “man of the type of the ox” doing a job an “intelligent gorilla” could do better.21 This is not just the purpose of Taylor’s story but also his method: what Taylor promised bosses was a world of Schmidts. He infantilized workers, claiming that they could not even properly choose for themselves how long to rest for. Noll’s wages did improve, but no doubt so too did his exhaustion—perhaps not coincidentally, he lost both his house and his job a few years later due to alcoholism.

Principles of Scientific Management’s success illustrates the utility, and the power, of the appearance of empiricism. At best, empirical work in economics or management consulting could identify and address social problems rather than merely justify boss power. But at worst, the empiricism of the growing “efficiency” movement in this period was a sham. Taylorism had the air of science but with few of its qualities.

But because it appeared to address complicated problems, scientific management took off. Soon, not only was business a subject for scientific management, in the eyes of progressive elites, but so were schools and even churches and, naturally, cities and nations. Efficiency experts fanned out from academia and the emerging world of think tanks to advise and administer government.

Efficiency’s role in politics grew further with the election of former political economy professor Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in 1912. The rhetoric of scientific efficiency and “free market” competition allowed him to sound like someone who would pursue change . . . while keeping that change within tightly confined boundaries. As Wilson put it in a 1912 campaign speech, “the whole business of politics is to bring classes together upon a platform of accommodation and common interest.” Class conflict could be overcome by compromise. But it could not be ignored. In Wilson’s first term, Taft’s previously approved Commission on Industrial Relations began its work.

Workers had no power over the system because they did not need a say: scientific management was for their own good.

At ten in the morning on April 13, 1914, Frederick Taylor sat down as a witness before the Commission on Industrial Relations. They were investigating whether scientific management and other “efficiency systems” improved or worsened labor-management relations. By this point Taylor was a wealthy man who could have done whatever he liked, but he chose to continue pursuing his political vision because he believed in it. He claimed to the committee that “as many as a thousand or two thousand men annually come under the principles of scientific management” and “become the best friends that their employers can have. That is to say, instead of being enemies of their employers, they become warm, firm, friends.”

This was a lie: committee investigators later determined, contrary to Taylor’s direct claims otherwise, that several workplaces under scientific management had seen strikes.

After lengthy introductory testimony, Commissioner Harris Weinstock opened with a simple question: “Under this system of scientific management does the worker have a voice in determining the premium he is to receive?” The straightforward answer came first: no, “the worker had no voice in that.”

Taylor followed this straight answer with a lengthy defense, which included an insistence that his system was not like slavery. Repeatedly, commission members and staff asked or pointed out the ways scientific management disempowered and harmed workers, and Taylor vigorously denied these. When Commissioner O’Connell claimed certain workers under Taylor’s system had gone on strike, Taylor quibbled that they were not truly under his system, due to failed or incomplete implementation. O’Connell shot back by paraphrasing Taylor on the purpose of business, pushing Taylor to offer the full quote himself: “All employees should bear in mind that each shop exists first, last, and all the time, for the purpose of paying dividends to its owners.” He raged against being quoted out of context. The core of his system, Taylor insisted, was mutual benefit.

Workers had no power over the system because they did not need a say: scientific management was for their own good.

After the commission returned from lunch, its legal counsel, William O. Thompson, launched into a series of questions about power. He began by asking Taylor how his system calculated and divided work. His answers relied on abstract scientific authority: from their time studies his “investigators” produced “time laws,” or average expected work rates.

Who determined these laws became the focus of subsequent questions by Thompson: “Who hires the investigator?” “Who pays the investigator?” “Who installs the use of your system in the factory?” “If the owner should decide that he did not want your system, it would not be put in”? Taylor squirmed and attempted to evade each question, answering the latter with “I do not know how you can in any way make a man do what he doesn’t want to do,” which prompted another rebuke from the chair. With repeated browbeating, Taylor was finally forced into short and straightforward answers, and Thompson went in for the rhetorical knockout.

The implication Thompson was attempting to force out of Taylor was this: whether it was mutually beneficial or not, scientific management was autocratic. It gave new powers to bosses and none to workers. It was the boss, Thompson asked, who would select the system his operation followed, correct?

“Yes, perhaps,” Taylor conceded.

And the boss would decide whose advice would be considered on the system?

“Yes,” Taylor admitted.

Could the worker choose the investigator behind this “code of laws?”

“No,” Taylor replied.

“That is all I want now,” stated a satisfied Thompson, who then asked: if the worker and the shop owner disagreed over the time studies Taylor’s laws were based on, it was the employer-hired investigator who would decide the matter, was it not? Taylor again gave him the runaround, claiming that his team would listen to workers’ objections. This led to the following exchange:

Mr. THOMPSON: But you finally decide whether the work-man’s objection is well-taken to your ruling, do you not?

Mr. TAYLOR: I do not. This code of laws decides it—this code of laws that has been proved to be right decides it.

Mr. THOMPSON: A code of laws is an inanimate thing and cannot decide anything.

Mr. TAYLOR: There is nothing in the world more powerful than a code of laws. The whole United States is run by a code of laws. This code of laws that has been developed deter-mines, and we ask these men to go to these various shops and see whether it is right. That is our answer. The code of laws is above all people. That is what I want to impress.

Mr. THOMPSON: But the workman does not recognize that code of laws framed by Mr. Taylor and his associates in several shops as ruling human action.

Mr. TAYLOR: It is not framed by us.

Taylor believed there was an objectively correct productivity level that could be ascertained as certainly as gravity. Discovered laws, rather than designed policies, were at work. “These laws are not laid down by me,” he insisted, but rather had been produced by “gradual evolution.” In line with control science’s long-standing naturalization of capitalist hierarchy, and its war on intention itself, this reasoning made employers’ and consultants’ responsibility to their workers irrelevant. Taylor felt that efficiency could replace goodness.31

Thompson, in contrast, kept attention on the human beings behind and beneath scientific management—human beings who had a proper representative sitting in the hall during Taylor’s testimony as well: John F. Tobin, Boston-based president of the Boot and Shoe Workers’ Union, who sat through Taylor’s ques-tioning before testifying himself later in the day.

Tobin’s argument was difficult to deny: scientific management was hardly solving the problem of industrial unrest and was probably exacerbating it.

He probably won over some in the room with a joke early in his questioning. Asked whether he was familiar with “efficiency systems” like Taylor’s, he responded to the tired commissioners, who had already sniped at Taylor for being long-winded: “I have tried to study the efficiency systems, but I find the lack of efficiency in presenting them to be an obstacle to understanding them.” What Tobin did understand was employer self-interest, and he used it to flip Taylor’s arguments on their head.

In Tobin’s view, it was “the employer [who] is the greatest obstacle to the introduction of a rational efficiency system,” by refusing to con-sider workers’ interests and rights. Commissioner Delano responded that this ran against Taylor’s own stated “principles.” Tobin riposted that employer exploitation was “contrary to what Mr. Taylor claims for the principles”: in practice, employers would resist any effort to respect workers’ needs. The commission’s final report agreed with him—it found that there was “no reasonable basis” for a wide variety of claims about scientific management’s respect for worker health.

Capitalists would have to be compelled to respect workers. Through laborer power, John Tobin offered an alternate path to the “common ground” Delano and the committee were seeking: collective bargaining. Tobin resisted the dehumanizing quantification of control science, stating in an example dialogue with an employer: “the workman has just as much right to decide what he is worth as you have.” These were the competing views the commission had to deal with: top-down quantification versus bottom-up negotiation.

Tobin’s argument was difficult to deny: scientific management was hardly solving the problem of industrial unrest and was probably exacerbating it. When the commission finally concluded, it was unable to come to a consensus on how to achieve labor-management harmony—but the negotiations Tobin proposed saw broad agreement. Scientific management’s calculations and accounting, the commissioners broadly agreed, might have some place in the factory. But its political vision did not. Workers needed a voice. The commissioners differed on how this should work, splitting into three broad camps with some overlap and intersection particular issues.

First, Frank Walsh and a number of other commissioners supported Manly’s 141-page report, which exhaustively documented inequality and injustice. The Manly report was a landmark call for “industrial democracy.” Highlights included proposals for social housing and utility nationalization, a call for legislation mandating equal pay for women (and for state action on their behalf before then), praise for unions for improving the lives of their members, and criticism of union-busting employers’ associations as “not only antisocial but even perhaps illegal.”

Second, in a report of their own, the pro-business commissioners whined that all of this was unfair.

Finally, a third report authored by John Commons and wealthy suffrage activist Florence Harriman argued—correctly—that Manly’s group wanted unions to be engaged in mass politics rather than just workplace negotiations. Commons and Harriman disapproved. They instead proposed empowering mediating labor boards rather than unions.

This third report evolved out of the “institutionalist” school of economics then dominant in the profession in America. Com-mons’s mentor Richard T. Ely, one of the founding figures of economics as a professional discipline in the US, was originally trained in the German tradition of historical thinking. He and his students, including John Commons, Edward Ross, and President Woodrow Wilson, believed deeply in competition, often in decidedly Spencerian terms.

But unlike Spencer, they believed that competition had to be managed and that empirical science could help us understand how to do so. This empiricism made it possible for them to promote relatively proworker policies—like those in Commons and Harriman’s report—despite their class status and faith in existing hierarchies. John Commons was a racist technocrat skeptical of working-class power, but his willingness to engage with economic reality made it possible for him to do better than market dogma or narrow class interest.

What was clear to everyone from what came to be known as the Walsh Commission’s discussions was this: for all its luster in the eyes of managers and intellectuals, Taylorism did not appeal to workers or the working masses. Regarding such disapproving workers, Taylor’s associate Carl Barth huffed during his own testimony before the commission, “It is a false idea among the public, that every man has a right to his opinion. I believe there are very few men who have a right to their opinion.”

But in America’s democracy, those masses mattered.

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From Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World. Used with the permission of the publisher, Verso Books. Copyright © 2026 by Henry Snow