“You just got Taylorized” – Why the urge for efficiency may be ruining society

I was sitting in an Operations Management class last week and my really young and energetic professor kept on going on about ”Taylorism” and how complex processes in various sectors can be broken into smaller, repetitive steps and how this makes for more efficient processes. (for the “uninitiated”, “Taylorism” refers to the concept of scientific management of processes and is named in honor of Frederick Winslow Taylor: the father of the industrial engineering). He then proceeded to show a video documenting the implementation of this concept in fields ranging from automobile manufacturing to the preparation of hamburger. Frankly, I thought that breaking the manufacturing of a car into discrete, easily-repeatable processes was cool but I became slightly disturbed with its application in producing hamburgers (with the exact number of ketchup and mustard squeezes on each bun pre-programmed, you can’t make this stuff up!!). That was the highlight of the class as I soon “zoned out” afterwards and started to think about the broader societal impacts of Taylorism and this near-maniacal drive for standardization. While I agree that Taylorism and standardization has enabled mankind make remarkable progress, ensured greater consistency across units of the same product and made every product more affordable. I think the drive for standardized processes - with its chief attendant consequence of “de-skilling” the labor force - has a perverse effect on society, hence it should be viewed with the seriousness that it deserves by policy-makers and businessmen alike.

A key result of increased standardization is the “de-skilling” of the labor force. Starting with Henry Ford’s brilliant move to an assembly line system which ended the era of skilled craftsmen building cars piece by piece and made it affordable. The blue collar labor force has been on a steady march to “de-skilling” as each person on the line needs to only know a particular, simple repetitive process and stick with it. At some point the cook at the local deli needed to know how to make a hamburger and determine –often through trial and error – the exact mix of ingredients that made a good hamburger. Now the dude at McDonalds only needs to follow a detailed guideline that allows for little discretion, in fact he may be only responsible for adding a few squirts of ketchup to the bun as someone else adds the meat!! Its difficult to argue that someone who spends all his day only squeezing ketchup on a succession of buns has any tangible skill, even if he does it for ten years straight. He is probably as good as he was squeezing ketchup as he was on his first day at work, ten years back! This makes labor very replaceable and hence cheap, which works well for companies as they can continuously capture more of the surplus and hand same to shareholders and other providers of capital.

While this seems great at face value: increased standardization leads to greater efficiency and the economy benefits, right? It is however not that simple because the “de-skilling” of increasingly greater array of jobs will lead to stagnation in wages as workers will not be able to demand higher wages because they can easily be replaced with young, novice workers who can also read manuals and operating procedures. The effect is the stagnation in blue-collar wages that is evident in the United States in the last two decades, which has in turn placed pressure on the middle class and widened the inequality gap. While I am by no stretch of imagination a socialist, it is a little bit disturbing to see stagnation in real wages for the lowest income section of society in an era of rising food and energy costs. There is a risk of a “permanent underclass” being created from people whose jobs have been “de-skilled” and this may breed resentment, envy and a general disenchantment with the economic system. The last thing business people and policy makers need on their hands is some sort of class warfare, no one wants that and we all have to work to ensure that this does not happen.

While I have no concrete suggestions of ways of reversing or reducing this trend,, I still believe it is a threat that needs to be taken seriously by society. Efficiency and standardization are great but are we pushing it too far to an extent that it becomes too costly for society as a whole. At the very least, I am frankly disturbed to see that my food has become a sheet in the book of standard operating procedures issued by Hamburger University!!.