The Effort Bargain in Industrial Society

Abstract

Irns paper discusses the factors that influence the determination of industrial effort. Among these factors are the company's conventional work pace and translation of this pace into output requirements for specific jobs. The pace of doing work differs from industry to industry and to lesser extent between companies in the same industry. There are variety of reasons for this, the most important being economic and technological. Work measurement, the process of interpreting the company's conventional work pace to set output requirements for specific jobs, is subjective and yields inconsistent results. This paper shows that bargaining enters the determination of industrial at both the general pace level and the level of specific output requirements. In his auguries of innocence concluding the Principles of Scientific Manageinent, Frederick W. Taylor enthusiastically predicts that management will mean, for the employers and workmen who adopt it . . . the elimination of almost all causes for dispute and disagreement between them. What constitutes fair day's work will be question for scientific investigation, instead of subject to bargained and haggled over.'' It is Taylor's unfortunate fate that the better ideas contained in his writings have generally escaped notice, evaporated through the years, as it were, leaving only such residual indiscretions. Although he misconceived the basis of time study as scientific and exaggerated its possible effectiveness in determining fair day's work, Taylor nevertheless gave industrial society valuable technique for measuring work which, after sixty years of abuse, remains, in almost its original form, widely used management tool. Time study has not answered the question of what is fair day's work, and cannot, since this answer involves value judgment. Yet it makes work measurement something better than sheer guess by providing systematic means for discovering reasonable limits within which the discussion of output requirements can take place. Time study and its derivatives, standard data and predetermined times, provide the management of company with rational system for translating the company's de facto working pace, or general work tempo, into individual production standards or output requirements for particular jobs. This is accomplished not by scientific or wholly objective techniques but by series of estimates, judgments, and agreements. It is the purpose of this paper to show that the question of what constitutes fair day's work cannot be answered by investigation alone but must remain a subject to be bargained and haggled over. The process is referred to as the effort bargain.2 Unlike the wage bargain, which is widely discussed though less widely