Word: workers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Manhattan's Daily Worker faithfully follows the Communist Party line, however suddenly it may swerve, wriggle or tie itself into knots. Last week, in the aftermath of Joseph Stalin's tumble from grace (TIME, March 26), the Worker gave the weird impression of having come to the end of the line-or at least the end of its rope...
...grievance cases the American Arbitration Association handled last year, 23% were caused by disputes over job standards, wage incentives and time studies. In the past six years "more than 25% of all man-hours lost from work stoppage were directly caused by arguments about measuring a worker's performance...
...case histories of labormanagement relations, the time study has run up a long record for making trouble. The practice of clocking a worker began in the 1880s with Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, about the same time that Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor...
Through war and depression unions looked on the time study men with cold suspicion, believed them to be company spies trying to force the "speedup" (requiring a worker to produce more to earn the same pay) or the "stretchout" (putting a worker in charge of more machines). More often than not the "expert" lacked both technical training and knowledge of the job he judged, and even today some companies ask for trouble by using untrained white-collar workers to make time studies. Not until World War II did unions take the first steps toward cooperation with management on the problem...
...many labor leaders are beginning to agree that they can not only live with time studies but profit from them. At one Chrysler assembly plant, for example, time study men watched a worker assemble a rear-view mirror and bracket at a work bench with a hand screwdriver. They replaced this method with an air-operated screwdriver and a fixture to hold bracket and mirror, thus free the worker's hands. Result: production tripled, Chrysler saved $9,000 yearly, and the worker raised his incentive pay while reducing his physical labor...