Meditações - taylorismo

The users of other people’s time, who change it into money of their own, found the voice of the annunciation in the person of Frederick W. Taylor, gang boss in a Pennsylvania steel mill who in 1903 published Shop Management, a treatise declaring that “the natural laziness of men is serious, but by far the greatest evil” was the tendency of workmen to perform their task at a pace that “they think will promote their best interests,” an inclination equivalent to the idleness identified by St. Benedict as “the enemy of the soul,” and one that clearly needed to be checked. To do so, armed with stopwatch and notebook, Taylor followed workers around factory floors in Pennsylvania, timing their every move, establishing the methodology that made him a best-selling wonder of the age, prompting the Encyclopedia Britannica to name him “the father of scientific management,” influencing the twentieth-century development of “virtually every country enjoying the benefits of modern industry.” Benefits accruing to time hardened into money, not to the perception and passage of time as experienced by people locked down on assembly lines or securely bound in the abstraction of unforgiving debt.

Lewis H. Lapham