Rapid progress by a society of imperfect people

I've been thinking about Michael Barone's latest column since I came across it earlier this morning.  He makes a supremely noteworthy point, which is that, for all the nostalgia one hears about the days when an 18-year-old could get an assembly-line job at a good wage, with benefits such as health insurance and retirement money, the fact is that most people hated those jobs.  They slogged away for decades in a scramble for security.  And Barone knows whereof he speaks.  He's a native Detroiter.

In the course of crafting his argument (that the world of work no longer looks anything like that), he mentions Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management.  I looked up his bio and refreshed myself on what he was about.  His careerpath was a bit odd for a guy from a well-to-do Quaker family whose mother was a leading abolitionist.  But instead of reading law at Harvard, he went to work in a machine shop and became a mechanical engineer and the first real industrial consultant.

There's no way to deny the strain of contempt and cynicism that runs through Taylor's worldview.  He once testified to a congressional committee that anyone who would make a lifelong occupation out of shop-floor work was too stupid (his word) to grasp the big picture behind the tasks he performed, the role his efforts played in a larger scheme.

So Taylor did no favors to the effort to make labor and management feel like they were on the same team.  He saw two entities: brains and mules.

Lest the argument be put forth here that such is exactly the justification behind the union movement, it must also be affirmed that thousands upon thousands of Americans did indeed sign up for jobs of mind-numbing tedium of their own volition.  The production schedulers at General Widgets are not responsible for the worldviews of applicants who come seeking employment.

A true all-on-the-same-team management approach did not get underway until the Six Sigma push, with its teams of black belts and green belts and improvement projects, got going at Motorola in the 1980s.  Just in time for the twilight years of America's manufacturing focus.

Retrospect can tell us a few things.  Industrial theory would have benefitted from taking a more hopeful view of the stock of people entering the shop-floor ranks.  That would have required a different kind of educational system, however.  As we know, John Dewey thought American education should cultivate just enough human refinement to make the masses suitable for, well, mass production.

The big-picture arc of how humans - particularly in the United States - organize themselves to get things done does indeed show a trend toward greater choice, greater affirmation of individual sovereignty and emphasis on the fact that one's choices are really one's own.

And that's how it needs to be, since the shop floor is not where many of us are headed anymore.