“There are,” F Scott Fitzgerald once observed, “no second acts in American lives.” Except when there are. Exhibit A in this connection is Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), the founder of a religion originally called “scientific management” and now colloquially known as Taylorism. Its founder believed that there was no such thing as skilled work, only “work”, and that all work could be analysed the same way. His idea, set out in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), was that every worker should be trained into new working habits “until he continually and habitually works in accordance with scientific laws, which have been developed by some one else”, such as managers or time-and-motion experts.
The formula could be boiled down to this: stopwatch plus coercion minus trade unions, and in an age of mass production, it created the world memorably satirised by Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. The management guru Peter Drucker once wrote that Taylor should be ranked with Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud as one of the “makers of the modern world”.
Taylor died in 1915, but – guess what? – he’s back, with an updated formula in which the stopwatch has been replaced by the algorithm and coercion by one-sided contracts. The aversion to unionisation remains, though. Plus ça change.
The first outing of Taylorism 2.0 was the gig economy – think Uber, Deliveroo, etc. In this, workers are not employees (with the kind of rights protected by employment law) but independent contractors who enter into formal agreements with tech platforms to provide services to the platform’s clients or customers. Without many of us noticing it, this economy has been growing rapidly. One in six adults in the UK now does a gig economy job at least once a week, for example. Nearly half of gig economy workers also have a full-time job; a third of young people returning to work after the pandemic did so via gig economy work; and in economic terms, the sector is about the size of the aerospace industry.
These numbers suggest that gig economy work meets the employment needs of many people; it provides flexibility for those with family and caring commitments, additional income during a cost of living crisis and so on. But it is also insecure, provides little or no work-related benefits and puts workers at the mercy of the inscrutable (and unaccountable) algorithms that determine their tasks and remuneration. Just as patrons of gambling casinos (should) know that the house always wins, gig economy workers know that the platform is always the winner in determining what they do and how much they are paid.
Precariousness is built into the gig economy, which I guess is why people in conventional white-collar employment look condescendingly on those who work in it. Such complacency may be unwise, because Taylorism 2.1 is coming for lots of them, especially if they are luxuriating in the flexibility of working from home. In that sense, the pandemic was a pivotal moment in the evolution of employment because companies became paranoid about the need to make sure that remote workers were actually working. And so they installed monitoring software – “bossware” – on their machines.
This software is often very intrusive, enabling employers to monitor keystrokes, listen to conversations and track employees’ movements. Wired reported that in June, the UK-based online résumé builder StandOutCV analysed 50 of the most common monitoring tools to find what kind of data they collect and how. Compared with 2021, when it last ran the study, a quarter of tools have more invasive features. There’s been a surge in mechanisms that facilitate location tracking (up 45%), video/camera monitoring (a 42% rise), document scanning (a 26% increase) and attendance tracking (up 20%). Welcome to the future of white-collar employment.
What’s driving this dystopian trend? One is the fact that the technology enables surveillance in hitherto unimaginable detail and, as the saying goes: “If it can be done, then it will be done” – unless privacy and employment law prevents it. Another is the obsession with efficiency and cost-cutting that drives corporations in a world where maximising profit is the prime goal of executives and directors. But over all of this is the chronic lack of trust that has come to characterise corporate life in the 21st century.
Which brings us back to Fred Taylor. His fans included Henry Ford and Vladimir Lenin, who saw scientific management as a key building block of socialism. Taylor’s appeal, says the Economist, “lay in his promise that management could be made into a science and workers into cogs in an industrial machine. The best way to boost productivity, he argued, was to embrace three rules: break complex jobs down into simple ones; measure everything that workers do; and link pay to performance, giving bonuses to high achievers and sacking sluggards.” How very modern of him.
What I’ve been reading
Grave new world
We’re Sorry We Created the Torment Nexus is a wonderful article by Charlie Stross about the way science fiction, from Star Trek to Knight Rider, has shaped the current generation of tech bosses.
Searching questions
Bradford DeLong’s The Attention Economy Goes to Court is a sharp essay on the Project Syndicate site about the Google antitrust trial.
The human factor
Humanity Is Out of Control, and AI Is Worried is a lovely satirical Financial Times column by Robert Shrimsley.
