How did Taylor create the "Taylor System"?

From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, blast furnace ironmaking in the United States still required workers to manually deliver coal to the furnace one spade after another. Taylor found that loading the furnace was a stressful and tiring job. Not long after working in front of the furnace, he was unbearable by the fire and exhausted. No one wanted to do this kind of work. Workers who are forced to work due to the pressure of life are not very motivated to work. They have a lot of opinions and complaints about wages, funds and various aspects of treatment.

Engineer Taylor took the initiative to become the workshop director of a blast furnace, personally leading the shift and directing production. He pondered over and over again, whether he could make the furnace workers labor-saving and get away from the blazing fire faster? After repeated observation and thinking, he found that the work efficiency of the furnace workers was not directly proportional to their physical strength. Some workers with thin bodies often work much more efficiently than those who are tall and strong, and it is not as strenuous as some people throw a shovel of coal. Their postures can even be said to give a sense of coordination and grace. So, he came to a conclusion: work efficiency has a lot to do with operating methods. Some people have a moderate range of movements when adding coal, and the movements of their body and arms are coordinated and flexible. When shoveling coal, the angle of the shovel is also moderate. When feeding coal, they move steadily and are good at using inertia. This not only saves physical strength but also increases speed. Some people, however, move too much and dig deep with the shovel when shoveling coal. However, when they lift a shovel of coal, they spend much more effort than others. When transporting coal, they swing either left or right or up and down. When adding coal, they measure it in front of the furnace for a while before throwing it in, which consumes more energy and affects the speed.

No one paid attention to this objective phenomenon before, but Taylor paid great attention to it. He divided the entire operation of the furnace worker into three actions: shoveling coal, transporting coal, and retracting. He stipulated the posture of the worker's hand holding the shovel handle when shoveling coal, the angle of the shovel when shoveling coal, the amount of force used when feeding coal, and the advancement of the arm. The amplitude, the posture that should be maintained when retracting, etc. Taylor used this to develop standard movements and then trained workers. As a result, work efficiency was greatly improved.

Can the operations of any type of work be decomposed into a series of actions, study the best behavior for each action, and use the best behavior as the standard to train workers to improve labor productivity? Taylor later conducted observations and experiments at construction sites, metal cutting and other different industries. He used a movie camera to record the work of some construction workers laying bricks and walls, and found that some of their actions were purely ineffective labor. He then helped these workers improve their operating methods, selected the most dexterous, strongest, and most standardized workers among the trained workers, and recorded their scenes of extremely intense labor into documentary films. While watching the film, Taylor accurately recorded the time of each action, calculated the operation time to complete a process, and based on this, he made production labor specifications and necessary standard labor hours for various tasks. Under the premise of standardized operation, workers whose actual time consumption is lower than the standard time can receive one day's wages and a certain amount of bonus; workers whose actual time consumption is higher than the standard time can only receive wages at a greatly reduced piece rate unit price.

The production organization and wage system created by Taylor are called the "Taylor System".

Taylor's implementation of his own management system at Midvale Steel Company greatly improved labor productivity, and he was promoted to chief engineer. Since then, some large companies in the United States have successively hired talented people like Taylor to serve as management consulting engineers. In this way, the emphasis on and strengthening of scientific management has been promoted in the corporate world. The piece-rate wage system implemented by state-owned enterprises in our country in the 1950s and 1960s was actually a wage payment method formulated based on the Taylor system and combined with the specific conditions of our country at that time. Taylor retired at the age of 45. He spared no effort to publicize and lecture on his principles of scientific management. With his perseverance, the emerging discipline of management science was widely promoted and applied. Lenin pointed out that it is "on the one hand the most ingenious and cruel means of bourgeois exploitation, and on the other hand a series of the richest scientific achievements."