American Rifle - Alexander Rose [145]
The time studies started in June 1911, and initially all seemed well. The only machinist who complained about having one of Taylor’s nerdish experts standing next to him and clicking his stopwatch was a famously ornery, elderly employee. But by mid-July trouble had emerged from the foundry, where the molders began objecting to any imposition of Taylorite control. The justice of their case was somewhat weakened by the foundry’s reputation as a sinkhole of negligible productivity and towering costs, and their complaints went ignored. Taylor’s inspectors reported that certain molders, despite the obvious benefits of the incentive-payment program, were actually reducing their output and taking more time to do their tasks. The workers retorted that the inspectors may have known a lot about keeping score with a stop-watch but they knew nothing about molding; each movement that an inspector noted down as superfluous, the molders demonstrated was not.
On the evening of August 10 the molders congregated after hours to compose a petition to Lieutenant Colonel Wheeler, commandant of Watertown, noting that the time study was “humiliating to us, who have always tried to give to the Government the best that was in us.” Taylorism, they said, was “un-American in principle,” and they were reaching “the limit of our endurance.”
The petition was submitted early the next day. Management, which called it an “ultimatum,” refused to budge, and by midmorning the molders were on strike. Later that afternoon the International Molders’ Union and Boston Local No. 106 sent letters to every Massachusetts senator and representative requesting their support for a “fair deal” from Ordnance. Crozier rather quickly promised to investigate the molders’ complaints, and on August 18, exactly a week after downing tools, the men were back at work.
On the face of it, the seven-day Watertown strike was not world-shakingly important, but it was in fact the first shot in the revolt to come against Taylorism in the workplace. The American Federation of Labor, contra Taylor’s offhanded dismissal of any such possibility, took up the case, and its influential leader, Samuel Gompers, began agitating against this form of control, which he said would turn men into machines while reducing their wages. The International Association of Machinists joined him, threatening national strikes by its members if Taylorism continued to be introduced into American factories.49
Initially, organized labor could boast of making some telling hits on Crozier. Public opinion was naturally sympathetic to desperate tales of skilled artisans being underpaid and subjected to humiliating supervision with stopwatches, and later that summer the House Committee on the Taylor and Other Systems of Management held hearings into the matter. Reading its report in March 1912, Crozier was disappointed to find that the congressmen had reached no conclusion, and three years later the Senate prohibited Taylorism, in its most objectionable forms at least, in government work.50
The Senate ruling was but the latest in a series of setbacks for Crozier. In the summer of 1914 his deputy Thompson had finally run out the clock regarding Ordnance’s alleged infringement of Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken’s Spitzer bullet patents. DWM had made repeated offers to Thompson asking him to settle quickly, and each time they had been rebuffed (as per Crozier’s directions). On July 18, 1914, less than a month before the outbreak of the cataclysmic Great War, in which millions of men would be killed by pointed bullets, DWM finally lost its patience and sued the government in the U.S. Court of Claims for royalties on 250 million Spitzers totaling $250,000. Ten days later, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, the suit was deferred.51
Crozier’s position was saved by the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and the U.S.