BAD. Capitalists get to privatize their profits, while socializing their losses. A chunk of these losses are covered by the government using the worker's wage via taxes.

Ford did go too far in controlling the lives of workers. While it can be argued that having total control over your workers while they are on duty is justified since they contractually offer their time to you, but it is unacceptable to assume that the contract extends to the worker's time outside of work.

Only the time that I'm contractually obliged to work for the employer. Any other time should be voluntarily accepted by me on a case by case basis. In other words, no employer should assume that by working for them for 40 hours a week, I'm allowing them to control any other time outside of those 40 hours.

According to Adam Smith, why does specialization and the division of labor in the pin factory lead to greater productivity

Adam Smith believes that humans are generally more inclined to naturally work hard. Which is why he points out the flaws in his own pin system by calling it "blah blah quote that mentions that rote tasks make men the dumbest they will ever be". He believes that it is unnatural for men to perform these easy, menial tasks all their life. And after spending their life making pins in the long run, a worker will work hard to reach self-actualization.

Taylor on the other hand believes workers are naturally lazy or something i need to back this up

I swear i answered this somewhere before in week 6, see if you can find it

The Merriam-Webster definition of scientific is something that is "practicing or using thorough or systematic methods." Based on that, Taylor's method IS scientific.

NO. Taylorism, with its history of maximizing efficiency in various of work, has sewn itself into the fabric of today's knowledge economy. However, it is not compatible with the "knowledge economy" of today and the goals of future workers that would participate in this economy.

Taylorism is deadening. This should be about Adam Smith's pins and needles paragraph where he states that rote work makes men stupid as hecc

Taylorism is unemotional. The future workplace is trending to place a higher emphasis on the mental and physical health of their workers. Taylorism, on the other hand, seeks to only optimize variables that increase efficiency, with no emphasis on preserving the worker's health and ability to keep up with the work.

Companies that continue to follow Taylorism and follow Taylor's principles of scientific management are not going to be the new "knowledge worker's" first choice. Former Amazon fulfillment center workers interviewed in BBC's "Truth Behind the Click" state that it was "a disgusting place to work" where "people are just in line like robots" and "the only way I [the worker] would ever go back is if I had nothing left" (The Truth Behind the Click). These former workers describe working in the Amazon warehouse as an undesirable, gloomy, high-pressure field of work. One worker even went as far as to say that they would only consider working there again if they "had nothing left." Across all workers interviewed, there is a consistent amount of aversion to the Taylorist-esque Amazon warehouse work. With more and more of the "knowledge industry" workers populating the workforce, companies such as Amazon may face an increasing employee turnover rate as these menials, robotic "Taylorist" jobs fall out of favor of future workers who'd seek work elsewhere.

Taylorism is largely based on the scientific method. One of the core principles of Taylorism stated that managers should take up the "duty to set out deliberately to train the workmen in their employ to be able to do a better and still better class of work than ever before" (Taylor, 208). Taylor stated that managers should play a very active role in monitoring their employees and experimenting with different work styles to maximize that worker's efficiency. This iterative process of selecting and training workers is very similar to the scientific method. Taylorism also requires that workers should be incentivized to achieve their employer's targets of higher efficiency by offering them "better treatment, more kindly treatment, more consideration for their wishes, and an opportunity for them to express their wants freely" (Taylor, 208). These factors would all be variables in Taylorism's "scientific method." By controlling these variables, such as increased working conditions, the manager may alter the worker's efficiency as they see fit to satisfy their hypothesis. The ultimate goal for employers is to find a set of variables that maximizes the worker's output.

Taylorism, however, goes directly against the worker's desire to own their work. Employers, under Taylorism, sought to control as much as they could about a worker's work. Taylor, explaining his principles of scientific management, states that "all of the work which formerly was done by the workmen alone is divided into two large sections, and one of those sections is handed over to the management" (Taylor, 209). Here, the section of work "handed over to management" refers to management's active role in determining how employers should work. Even though employers sought to gain control, the workers historically sought to gain autonomy. This clash between the employer's desire for control and the employee's desire for autonomy would likely lead to protests from the workers in the future, just like it did in the past in Homestead.

Workers, even after employers like Ford implemented Taylorism, fought for autonomy in their workplace. One example of this is the Homestead steel strike of workers under Andrew Carnegie. Workers had next no no control over their work and workplace. Even though Homestead was touted as "the most technologically advanced steel mill in the nation," the mill's workers worked "seven-day weeks holding down 12-hour shifts, every two weeks they do a turn working 24 hours straight" (10 Days, 8:25). Although their facility was getting new technologies and was supposedly the best in the nation, the workers still worked the same poor conditions. They couldn't control where the funds to develop the facility went, so it all went to improving the machinery instead of working conditions. This exemplifies how little control workers have over the industrial facilities they worked in, since the industrialists like Carnegie are the ones that make all the decisions that affect the workers without their approval. This lack of control was a fundamental driver for the Homestead strike.

Taylorism revolutionized the way workers worked. Instead of being left to their own devices, workers were closely managed by their employers in order to collaboratively increase their output. Under Taylorism, industrialists such as Carnegie and Ford were able to scale their business’s outputs greatly by having managers think about how to best do the worker’s work, and having workers simply execute that workflow. However, even though Taylorism allowed employers to achieve previously unfathomable production goals, the goals of workers were still left largely unfulfilled. With its history of maximizing efficiency in various of work, Taylorism has sewn itself into the fabric of today's knowledge economy. However, Taylorism is not compatible with the "knowledge economy" of today and the goals of future workers that would participate in it; just like how it wasn’t compatible with the goals of workers of the past.

Taylorism, although able to bring great achievements to industrialists such as Ford and Carnegie, did so by going against the wishes of their workers. Their workers wanted autonomy and control over their work. However, under Taylorism workers were stripped of the little control they had and "collaborated" with their managers by following their instructions with little flexibility. This lead to clashes between employees and workers that played out as violent strikes in the past and could continue to cause tension in the future if Taylorism is still adhered to by companies in today's "knowledge economy." Ultimately, however, these companies will struggle to survive if new workers, craving more autonomy, see the company's jobs as stifling, they will take their labor elsewhere as more companies in the new knowledge economy allow workers to own their ideas and work.