American Rifle - Alexander Rose [144]
A second incidental effect concerned the arsenals. Because Crozier was desperate to reduce his officers’ workloads, he sought more efficient means of production and tougher managerial control. In a tradition stretching back to James Stubblefield’s lax tenure at Harpers Ferry, arsenal employees had long enjoyed certain perks with their jobs, not least of which were eight-hour days (compared to the nine or ten common in private business), 28.5 paid days off annually, congenial working conditions, a seeming inability to get fired, and government-guaranteed wages. Owing to their extremely low rates of employee turnover and the relatively small salaries of the senior management, the arsenals were able to produce armaments at about the same price as their commercial competitors—but only when their production runs were long (as with 100,000 standardized rifles) rather than short (as with a half-dozen artillery gun carriages each with 4,500 separate parts). But their productivity rates were unspectacular by any standard, primarily because as life was so comfortable, there was no imperative to ruin it by working harder.
The mooted introduction of the Taylorite system threatened this agreeable status quo. But there was no question, to Crozier’s mind, that scientific management worked wonders. After bringing in Frederick Taylor to analyze their operations, both the Bethlehem Steel Company and the Midvale Steel Company had realized significant gains in savings and productivity. The price of one of their gun carriages, for example, was quoted as $51,062.15—including a profitable markup—while the same equipment was sold by Watertown Arsenal to the government for $56,987.18. Crozier, continually besieged by his competitors’ allies in Congress asking penetrating questions about Ordnance’s mismanagement and cost overruns (or worse, about major royalty payouts to German companies, if they’d heard about it), thought it vital to cut costs and raise efficiency, even if that meant upsetting the settled way of doing things. What the unions would say, however, was quite another matter.
When Crozier first contacted Taylor in late 1906, he was particularly worried about the last point, but the management expert dismissed his concerns. There was no “occasion to bother much about what the American Federation of Labor wrote concerning our system.”47 Alas, Taylor was overly cavalier. His system had not yet been introduced into a workplace that had a strong union presence or where skilled craftsmen’s associations could call on the support of sympathetic congressmen. Moreover, downing tools at, say, Bethlehem Steel, could be classed as a private management-worker issue, but a labor stoppage at the government arsenals might be defined as a matter of national security, thereby giving even the threat of a strike rather greater leverage than Taylor apprehended.
Crozier selected Watertown Arsenal, eight miles west of Boston, as the first place to receive the Taylor treatment. Detailed preparatory studies of the arsenal’s workshops, machinery, accounting practices, and manufacturing processes, as well as the finalizing of the executive staff, began in April 1909, and the preliminary installation of the complicated new system was finished just two months later. By December 1910 the first phase (including inventory control, refurbishment of the tools and machinery, and construction of the central