Chapter Two
The Employers' Challenge to Craft Standards

Engineers and machinists of the 1880s exercised a wide range of controls over workshop life. Trade customs and the craftsman's own judgment sharply circumscribed employers' roles in training apprentices, assigning workers to machines, choosing manufacturing techniques, setting the work pace, and supervising workers. Within a single generation craftsmen would see many of these powers won by management and used to enforce employers' standards and interests. By reorganizing and retooling production, managers reduced their dependence on skilled workers. Through new wage payment methods, employers gained greater control over the pace and details of manufacturing operations. By more closely directing and supervising work tasks, managers secured for themselves a large measure of the control over shop life that craftsmen had formerly enjoyed.

Deskilling, payment by results, and new authority relations developed in response to the pressures and opportunities of changing markets, technological innovation, and workplace conflict. The same basic trajectory and causes of change are found in both Britain and the United States from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s. Yet the development of the labor process was uneven. In each country dilution, wage incentive schemes, and novel modes of supervision were more advanced in newer industrial sectors with large, standardized product markets—cycles, autos, electrical goods—than in traditional centers of the trade. Change generally

came earlier in American than in British shops, occurred more rapidly, and assumed more systematic forms (including that of "scientific management"). The position of skilled workers and their unions varied accordingly within and between the two countries. As subsequent chapters show, these variations had important consequences for factory politics. It is best to begin, however, by emphasizing the challenges and discontents that engineers and machinists shared. Contrasting patterns of industrial protest developed from a similar stock of perceived injustices. Juxtaposing craftsmen's common tribulations with their divergent responses demonstrates the limited explanatory power of popular grievances alone.

The diversity of skilled workers' grievances is what makes the development of factory politics problematic. Craft control rewarded engineers and machinists with economic privileges and professional pride. Management strategies threatened both the financial well-being and the collective moral standards of craftsmen. This double challenge to skilled workers helps explain the intensity, if not the specific character, of conflict over industrial change. Craft ethics also prevented employers from resolving these conflicts by sharing the fruits of increased productivity. Economic enticements alone would not lead machinists and engineers to abandon their customary powers and standards at work. And under favorable conditions this moral code would lead craftsmen from a defense of the status quo to demands for workers' control.

Craft Control

Late-nineteenth-century craftsmen in the metalworking trade, as in other industries,^[1] discharged most of what later would be called "management" functions. These included the recruitment and training of skilled workers. Employers chose apprentices, but customs and union rules limited the number they could take on, usually one for every four or five journeymen. Over the apprentice's four-year term he received meager wages from his employer and most of his education from journeymen. At its start this training was not technical—the apprentice might spend the first six months sweeping up—but social, an initiation into the "traditions, customs, and usages" of the workshop and the trade. Loyalty to one's

craft and mates, a manly pride in one's work, a skeptical attitude toward the technical competence of employers, and an outright contempt for unapprenticed "monkey wrenches and Ho Bo machinists" were part of the apprentice's early education.^[2] Under the tutelage of journeymen, apprentices eventually worked their way through the different machine shop tools and techniques. Although young journeymen would probably develop some specialized competence—fitting or turning in Britain, using some class of machine tool in the United States—by the end of their terms they could turn their hands at most machine shop operations. Versatility was the hallmark of the fully qualified craftsman.^[3]

Apprenticeship helped engineers and machinists control the labor market. Its aim was to produce broadly trained workers in sufficiently small numbers to avoid flooding the trade. Particularly for smaller firms doing a variety of work, the system also had advantages for employers. It did produce well-trained, all-around workers, and for the last year or two of an apprenticeship, the employer got the services of such workers for very low wages. In 1896, the American Machinist found active apprenticeship programs in more than 70 percent of firms surveyed, and Charles More finds the system surviving in British shops well into the 1910s.^[4] Journeymen's control over recruitment and training was supplemented in some cases by their powers to hire, fire, and pay their own helpers.^[5]

The extent of craft control was most clearly shown in the skilled metalworker's responsibility for getting the work out. When an order came in, the craftsman might act as his own draftsman and, at the very least, would interpret designs and drawings and determine the appropriate sequence of operations for producing the required pieces. He would plan out each individual operation, setting up the machine, finding and grinding his own tools, and doing the work. Because few shops could afford to provide for every contingency, engineers and machinists often improvised with materials and tools (with union and trade journals proudly reporting the inventive makeshifts of "practical men"). The assembly of individual parts required a fine eye and considerable dexterity with the file to achieve a good fit. With his command of skill came the craftsman's independence. "The machinist was allowed to operate on the particular piece of work given him according to his own ideas of

what was fit and proper, having tools dressed and ground as he wished and choosing his own speeds and feeds."^[6] Similarly, engineers and machinists were often free to move about the shop, from one machine to another, to the grindstone and tool room, and to work at their own pace, according to their own notions of "a job well done."^[7] Employers often objected to their craftsmen's discretion and work pace, but, given the indispensability of skilled workers and the absence of any alternative means for getting the work done, there was little they could do about it.

Craft control of production was formalized in the rule that only craftsmen were eligible to run machines and handle tools. In U.S. shops of the 1860s, "there were but few 'handy men,' so-called—none at all who ever touched a machine tool to operate it, or otherwise than as a laborer to help shift jobs. This would have been resented promptly by the workmen, and though not given to striking they would have left the shop in a body if laborers had been allowed to handle tools."^[8] Such regulations were embodied in the branch constitutions of the International Union of Machinists and Blacksmiths of the United States of America in the 1860s and in the rules of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE). Local practice varied. Where possible, "skilled" work was restricted to apprenticed craftsmen or union members; elsewhere union branches insisted that employers pay the craft rate for skilled work. In neither case could employers assign operators to machines as they saw fit, and machine shop work was generally split between relatively high-wage craftsmen, responsible for most production tasks, and unskilled laborers and helpers, who fetched materials, helped lift heavy pieces, and cleaned up. By ensuring that journeymen were recruited only through apprenticeships, unions reinforced this division over time.^[9]

A final aspect of craft control involved engineers' and machinists' considerable freedom from direct supervision. Their principal overseer was likely to be the foreman, who could be hard on subordinates. But the supervisor's authority had clear limits. By virtue of their skill, craftsmen would not be told how to do their work or (within reason) how long it should take. Bullying foremen would lose their best workers (and see their reputations suffer as a result), for engineers and machinists strongly resented any challenge to

their "manhood" and autonomy.^[10] The foremen, who usually came up from the ranks and often retained their union membership, had some sympathy for craft customs and some tolerance for the idiosyncrasies of skilled men. There were rarely formal rules or explicit instructions from above to direct them otherwise.^[11] The craftsmen's responsibility for training new workers, their management of production, and their freedom from close supervision meant that employers exercised but slight, informal, and indirect control of their own shops.^[12]

Challenges to Craft Control

Engineers or machinists completing their apprenticeships around 1890 would live to see profound changes in their trade. Over the next thirty years craft control would be undermined and management prerogatives emphatically asserted and exercised in new ways. This transformation did not occur all at once, but in fits and starts, varying in character and extent from one shop or sector to another. The trend was clear, however. Indeed, because changes at work were the subjects of wide debate and contention, the trend was perhaps as clear to managers and workers at the time as it is to the historian today. Its principal features were deskilling, the spread of piecework, and more exacting and detailed management supervision of workers. From the craftsmen's point of view, manual skills were parceled out to specialists and transferred to new machines, and knowledge and control of production were centralized in management hands and embodied in specific instructions and finely calculated piece rates.

The most far-reaching challenge to craftsmen's position was deskilling (or "dilution"), three aspects of which are particularly important: the transfer of knowledge and control to management, the transfer of skills to machines, and the fragmentation of craft work into specialized tasks.

Management, not craftsmen, gradually took charge of production. Instead of handing skilled workers rough drawings and leaving the rest to them, management planned out the job before it ever reached the shop floor. The order in which work should proceed, the routing of materials and parts from one machine or department to the next, and even how each individual operation

should be done (which machine to use, the requisite speeds, feeds, and cutting angles) were increasingly determined in the office by management rather than on the floor by craftsmen and foremen. In the well-managed shop of the 1910s and 1920s, materials, tools, and instructions would be provided to machinists or engineers as required; they could then devote their full attention to productive work.^[13]

Skill was transferred to machines as well. Even before the 1890s, specialized machine tools joined other, more versatile machines as part of the standard machine shop equipment. Accomplishing varied tasks on a general-purpose lathe demanded highly skilled workers. Many of the new tools, designed for specific operations (e.g., drilling machines and screw or gear cutters), did not. Others, such as millers, slotters, or grinding machines, performed operations previously done by hand. With single-purpose machines came specialists, operators skilled in a narrow line of work. In their own line they turned out work equal in quality to that of all-around craftsmen, and did so for lower wages.^[14]

Newer machine tools in the 1890s and after took this process further. Where large quantities of a standard piece could be sold, employers increasingly adopted automatic machinery. Once set up, turret or capstan lathes, screw machines, and some milling or grinding machines could conduct a series of operations without human intervention. Operatives, who only had to place the piece in the machine, start it up, and remove the finished product, needed little manual skill or technical knowledge. Moreover, with machine tools able to turn out standard pieces to close tolerances, skilled fitting of parts gave way to less skilled assembly. Eventually, this trend led to assembly lines. And with both specialized manual machines and automatic ones, management claimed the right to assign operators as it saw fit, regardless of union rules or Customs.^[15]

New technology combined with reorganization to change the functions and reduce the numbers of fully skilled workers. If employers were to pay for craftsmen, they sought to get their money's worth. A variety of tasks customarily performed by skilled men (e.g., getting and grinding their own tools, fixing belts, and chasing after work materials) required neither their skills nor their time. Some of these tasks management assigned to specialists in tool grinding or belt repair. Others were facilitated by installing cranes

and trolleys and by making more rigorous provision for delivering the appropriate materials and tools to workers at their machines. Skilled men thus found themselves gradually confined to their posts, working with little interruption for the full day and often at a single machine—or even several machines of the same type.

The goal of many managers was to shift craftsmen out of production altogether. Production departments would be staffed by less skilled specialists and operatives, turning out large quantities of standardized parts. Skilled workers would be responsible for setting up machines, for repairs, and especially for the varied tasks and limited output involved in making tools, jigs, fixtures, and gauges.^[16] Their numbers declined accordingly. In 1910, "nearly three-fourths of all jobs in the auto shops were classified as skilled work. By 1924, skilled workers were estimated as five to ten percent of the work force of the auto shops."^[17] An extreme case—the Ford Motor Company—shows the proportion of skilled mechanics falling from 28 percent in 1910 to 2.4 percent in 1917.^[18] Among firms belonging to the British Engineering Employers' Federation, 60 percent of workers were classified as skilled in 1914, 34 percent in 1928.^[19]

While the numbers of fully skilled workers diminished, the numbers of specialists and semiskilled machine tenders increased. In British engineering firms the proportion of the work force classified as semiskilled stood at 20 percent in 1914 and 53 percent in 1928.^[20] At Ford 26 percent of employees were specialists in 1910, 55.3 percent in 1917.^[21] Between 1910 and 1920, the number of journeymen and apprentice machinists in the United States grew 82.8 percent and then declined by 22 percent over the next decade. By contrast, machine operatives in auto and farm equipment increased 473.1 percent during the years 1910–1920, and their numbers continued to expand at a slower pace over the following ten years.^[22] Semiskilled workers formed a new stratum in the workshops, blurring the traditional distinction between skilled men who operated machines and labors who fetched and carried. The latter also declined in numbers as management improved work flow coordination and installed mechanical conveyances (e.g., cranes, trolleys, and moving belts) to help move materials.^[23]

One corollary of dilution was the decline of union apprenticeship regulations. The value of apprenticeship for employers dimin-

ished as the proportion of semiskilled workers increased. Managers who planned manufacturing tasks, divided jobs, and adopted specialized machinery had less need for broadly trained workers. The ASE and the IAM sought to preserve a system under which a limited number of youths acquired all-around skills and to place only workers thus trained on the machines. With increasing success, employers instead hired apprentices and learners in excessive numbers, kept them in one line of work indefinitely, and assigned them to machines claimed by craftsmen.^[24] In the United States apprenticeship declined to a point where employers complained that they could not find the few all-around machinists still required. By 1910, efforts were under way to increase the supply of skilled labor through company training programs and technical education. Unfettered by union regulations, these schemes promised employers as many workers as needed, with training tailored to the demands of modern manufacture. If, through government-supported technical schools, this cost employers little and removed boys "during the formative period, from the union atmosphere," so much the better.^[25]

Dilution circumscribed the tasks skilled workers performed. Yet it also transferred from craftsmen to management control over assignments to machines and methods for doing the work. On the surface, payment by results seemed merely to base earnings on output rather than on time worked. Here, too, however, a great deal more was involved. Through payment by results employers sought to wrest from skilled workers and foremen their customary control over the pace, character, and costs of machine shop production.

In 1886, 5 percent of men and youths in British engineering and boilermaking were paid by the piece; by 1906, 27.5 percent of them were paid in this fashion; and in 1927, the figure had grown to 49.5 percent. Among specialists, women, and workers in industries characterized by repetitive production, piecework was even more popular with employers. In 1906, 47 percent of "machine men" (specialists), 52 percent of women workers, 52.8 percent of cycle makers, and 67.6 percent of railway carriage and wagon builders were paid by results.^[26] Comparable figures do not exist for the United States; but reviewing the period from July 1, 1907, to June 30, 1909, IAM President O'Connell estimated that more than

50 percent of the strikes involving union members resulted from attempts to introduce piecework and that the IAM had been largely unable to prevent the spread of the system. Certainly, piecework would have been even more prevalent in nonunion shops, and contemporary observers found a greater resort to payment by results in the United States than in Britain.^[27] By 1922, of twenty-eight metal trades plants studied by the Federated American Engineering Societies, sixteen had well-developed wage incentive plans, and only three had no such plan.^[28]

The earliest, simplest, and most widely used system of payment by results was straight piecework. Instead of being paid so much per hour, workers received a certain sum for each piece produced. Particularly after 1900, more exotic systems gained attention and popularity. These differed in operation and name but shared a basic principle. A certain time would be set to complete a job or produce a certain number of pieces. The time saved or the amount by which the quota was exceeded formed the basis for calculating a bonus. Exactly how that bonus was figured varied and could be quite mystifying. In perhaps the most straightforward system (the "Halsey" plan), a job time might be set at ten hours. Workers who completed the job in eight hours earned their hourly time rate for those eight hours plus a bonus of 50 percent of the time saved—that is, they received nine hours' pay for eight hours' work. Other schemes were considerably more complicated.^[29]

Whatever the system, the tendency was to relieve foremen of responsibility for fixing rates, this duty falling instead to specialized personnel ("rate fixers" and, eventually, time and motion experts). If the work resembled that done in the past, rates might be fixed from the office on the basis of records of previous times and estimates of how long a machine "should" take to complete the job, given the relevant variables (the materials being used; the amount of metal being removed; the appropriate speeds, feeds, and cutting angles; and the desired finish). Particularly with new work, the tools of scientific management—the stopwatch and the motion study—were deployed to determine how quickly a job could be done. Depending especially on the strength of union organization in the shop, rates might be subject to negotiation or imposed unilaterally.

Payment by results presupposed a degree of standardization

and repetition in machine shop operations. Where output consisted of only a few pieces of a kind, as in much tool room and repair work, it did not pay to invest the time and money required to estimate rates and calculate bonuses. Elsewhere, however, incentive schemes had considerable advantages for employers. Payment by results helped centralize control over incentives and work pace. Craftsmen would no longer be allowed to define "a job well done" or "a fair day's work."^[30] Increased control over effort levels, in turn, allowed management to lower the costs of supervision and to estimate more accurately costs and delivery dates for prospective customers.^[31]

A final component of the employers' challenge involved efforts to substitute tighter management control over workshop tasks for the discretion and autonomy enjoyed by skilled workers. Instead of relying on their workers' seasoned judgment, managers increasingly issued detailed instructions to their hands, specifying how machine tools were to be set up, the speeds and feeds at which each job should be run, and the specific dimensions of the finished piece. Such orders were necessary above all for less skilled employees, for whom clear directions substituted for personal knowledge. Cheap workers required costly supervision; deskilling thus forced managers to assume new responsibilities. But the detailed direction of tasks applied to skilled men as well. Increasingly, work was given out with job cards attached, indicating precisely how the job should be done and the piece rates or bonus times allowed.^[32] Management sought to dispense with craftsmen's judgment in favor of central planning and direction of work performance.

Once instructions were issued, of course, they had to be enforced. Employees of all skill grades faced closer supervision and scrutiny to ensure obedience to rules, adherence to instructions, and constant application to their work. Time discipline became more relentless and exacting as the Bundy time recorder gained favor, and metalworkers faced the prospect of losing from fifteen minutes' to a half day's pay if they arrived moments past starting time. Once at work they might have to clock in and out of each job to ensure compliance with production standards, provide employers with accurate information on times and costs, and prevent worker "fiddling" with premium bonus times. Later, even this check proved too rough and ready, and time discipline narrowed

its focus to individual motions, measured in hundredths of a second.^[33] All increased supervision was not so impersonal, however. Particularly as firms grew in size and management assumed new responsibilities, engineers and machinists found themselves "watched and dogged by a whole army of non-producers."^[34] At Ford in 1914, one foreman supervised an average of fifty-three workers; in 1917, there was a foreman for every fifteen.^[35] An array of new supervisory personnel—rate fixers, speed and feed men, progress chasers, inspectors—confronted workers at every turn, leaving few aspects of machine shop life to the discretion of employees.

At first new supervisory tasks, together with responsibilities for recruitment, job assignment, and piece rates, were added to foremen's duties. Such power could corrupt, and foremen were often found tyrannical and abusive by their subordinates and unreliable by their employers. Gradually, the foreman's functions were parceled out to specialists and centralized in planning and personnel departments.^[36] The foreman's responsibility slowly narrowed to ensuring that standards set elsewhere were met by those under him. In this way skilled workers, who might have compensated for their loss of autonomy by informal influence with foremen, found even this form of control circumscribed.

Dilution, incentive pay, and tighter authority were familiar to engineers and machinists employed in large or progressive plants and were widely advocated in trade journals by the mid-1890s. The movement for "scientific management," which developed after 1900, was not in practice the revolutionary innovation heralded by its promoters. Scientific management extended trends already under way: deskilling, payment by results, and more exacting methods of supervising work and workers.^[37] The new management systems that gained favor in the United States and to a lesser degree in Britain may be distinguished from earlier developments in three respects.

First, these changes were achieved less through mechanical innovations than through administrative reform. Scientific management did not aim for technical change; it sought instead more efficient means of organizing and disciplining the work force. This reflected a common managerial sentiment of the period: "The greatest problem before us today is not so much the further im-

provement of machinery, but the development of an increased efficiency in men."^[38] Thus under scientific management employers pursued deskilling through organizational and supervisory techniques that transferred skill in the planning and execution of work from operatives to new staff experts. Two such techniques occupied a prominent place in scientific management. One was job analysis, sometimes involving time and motion study and sometimes not. Through a careful scrutiny of machine shop operations, management identified less skilled tasks that could be split off and assigned to less skilled workers. Scientific management also demanded systematic attention to the routing of work, the sequence of operations, and the provision of all equipment necessary for each task. Rather than relying on the operative to determine what tools and equipment were needed and to secure and modify those materials as required by the job at hand, employers would undertake those responsibilities. Once such provisions had been made, the narrowed task of running each machine operation could be left to less skilled men or women.^[39]

Second, changes after 1900 represented a more self-conscious and systematic approach to shop management and were more likely to be introduced by self-proclaimed "experts" brought in for the purpose of improving efficiency throughout the firm. Despite their wary reception of Taylorism, employers increasingly accepted the view that organizational changes could not be made on a piecemeal basis. Unlike earlier workshop innovations, scientific management entailed a more thoroughgoing, interconnecting reorganization of accounting procedures, layout, work flow, and planning, production, and supervisory tasks.^[40] Scientific managers approach to incentive pay, for example, involved more centralized and systematic setting of production standards and premiums. Establishing output quotas and corresponding incentives, in turn, would increase production only if steps were taken to eliminate delays in the movement of materials. And all these tasks required experts.^[41]

Third, and most important, scientific management was intended to be a coherent system of employer control to replace the controls exercised by craftsmen.^[42] Managers sought to decrease their reliance on the manual and mental skills of machinists and to develop reliable mechanisms through which they, rather than their employees, could control the workplace. The first goal necessitated

the second. As employers replaced fully qualified machinists with less experienced and less versatile workers, they had to assume responsibility for planning and organizing production—often in considerable detail. Scientific management was designed to handle these tasks,^[43] and here more exacting methods of supervision played a major role. Closer monitoring of work enabled management to discover the less skilled components of tasks. Combined with more extensive use of time clocks and stopwatches, job study permitted employers to fix production norms on which premium bonus systems then would be based. By issuing detailed instruction cards, tightly supervising workers, and providing systematically for the proper equipment at work stations and the flow of materials, managers hoped to ensure that quotas would be met and tasks performed adequately by relatively inexperienced operatives. Such new functions brought new personnel—rate fixers, progress chasers, speed and feed men, inspectors, tool room clerks, production planners—organized along bureaucratic lines into specialized departments and offices.^[44] Scientific management developed for employers a set of standards and mechanisms of control to replace those of craftsmen.

In the United States, fully developed scientific management systems existed more in theory than in practice. Employers typically picked from among its techniques those that suited their business and seemed relatively easy and inexpensive to install. Scientific management also represented novel approaches to traditional goals—dilution, incentive pay, and closer supervision and control. With these same provisos scientific management appeared in British engineering well before World War I.^[45] Particularly in new sectors of the industry, employers devoted greater attention to organizing and administering work and hired new personnel to devise and implement more systematic production planning. As in the United States, the goal was to preempt craft control in the shops. But in Britain changes in management practices were less systematic and less successful in imposing alternatives to craft control.

With or without the trappings of scientific management, dilution reduced craftsmen's control of production tasks and diminished their hold on the supply and training of skilled labor, piecework eroded their control over work pace, and these together with new

authority relations diminished skilled workers' discretion and autonomy. Responsibility for shop practices increasingly lay in the hands of managers. What accounts for this transformation at work?

Sources and Contrasting Patterns of Change

Above all, changing market conditions shaped the adoption of new production and managerial techniques, although other factors played a role. Technological innovation offered employers cost-cutting, labor-saving equipment, the fractiousness or unreliability of craftsmen and foremen encouraged managers to replace skilled workers and centralize control, and the professional activities of industrial engineers provided manufacturers with convenient models of managerial expertise. Yet market conditions determined whether or not technical and administrative alternatives to craft control were profitable.

The most important market development in both countries involved the emergence of new product lines that generated extensive consumer demand.^[46] Bicycles, sewing machines, typewriters, small arms, certain electrical products, and automobiles included standardized components that could be manufactured on a repetitive basis. Where markets permitted large batch production, heavy initial investments in specialized equipment and elaborate reorganization of shop tasks and administrative duties were amply repaid. This type of manufacture did not require the all-around skills of craftsmen on routine production work, and repetitive tasks favored piecework. New methods pioneered in these sectors gradually spread through the industry.^[47]

U.S. firms created similar opportunities in another way. Machine builders increasingly specialized in some narrow line rather than offering a wide range of products or taking orders for special designs. At the extreme, one American machine tool firm sold only turret lathes, and only in a single size.^[48] Where but few firms shared the market for a given machine, each could plan and equip for standardized parts and manufacture in large quantities. As repetition production in cycles and automobiles stimulated the devel-

opment of single-purpose, automatic machine tools, so specialization in machinery construction contributed to new manufacturing practices elsewhere in the trade: large-scale production made new machine tools cheaper.^[49]

Labor as well as product markets influenced workshop practices. In the United States skilled labor, whether organized or not, was expensive. American managers had incentives to use craftsmen efficiently and sparingly, particularly when competing with foreign firms employing cheaper workers. Where possible, employers replaced skilled men with automatic machinery tended by poorly paid immigrants and women. Machinists remained necessary for some machines and tasks, but employers could at least use the craftsmen economically—assigning them to operate several machines simultaneously and arranging work and piece rates to ensure that machinists applied themselves diligently to the tasks at hand.^[50] British employers, of course, paid similar premiums for skilled labor relative to their own European competitors and from the late 1890 became increasingly concerned with their deteriorating position in the international economy. Managers, trade journals, and government commissions agreed that heightened foreign competition demanded a more economical use of craftsmen—along with greater control over costing, scheduling, and job times to fill orders punctually and profitably.^[51]

A quickened pace in the development and adoption of new metalworking technologies also contributed to changes on the shop floor. Trends in machine tool design were toward single-purpose machines and automatic operation. Only where markets existed to justify long runs were many of these machines worthwhile investments. Still, even traditional sectors and smaller firms allowed room for innovation. Standard machines could be outfitted with "foolproof" jigs and fixtures. The construction of jigs and fixtures and the proper setup of machines required skilled workers, but production runs did not. New cutting tools, economical even for small batch production, accelerated the work pace and (according to production engineers) demanded scientific expertise in machine setup rather than the rule-of-thumb knowledge of practical machinists. Attention to tolerances and interchangeability rather than a handcrafted fit further replaced the craftsman's judgment and fine eye. Working with "go-no go" gauges, semiskilled workers

could produce parts requiring little subsequent fitting and could do so cheaply enough to discard aberrant pieces.^[52]

The implications of new technology went further than deskilling. Expensive equipment increased the importance of accurate costing and encouraged employers to get the most out of their investments through piecework, tighter discipline, closer instruction, and extensive overtime. Costly machine tools increased the importance of eliminating the human bottlenecks—the restrictions on machine assignment and output characteristic of craft control. Technical innovation did not in itself cause all of these changes in metal trades manufacture, but new technologies were available when managers, responding to market pressures, sought alternatives to traditional production practices. Once adopted, new production methods combined with economic incentives developed a logic and momentum of their own.

Fast production with high-speed steel on a turret lathe was of no value unless plans had been made to utilise the time saved. Up-to-date milling and drilling machines were liabilities unless the cutters, jigs and gauges had been planned and made before the job went into production and steps taken to ensure the continuity of production and elimination of hold-ups. New methods would end in confusion unless all parts of the factory worked at a smooth tempo with a steady cooperative discipline. This type of planning called for new men in the workshops, or for old men with new titles and functions. In the offices, works engineers, planners, rate fixers and progress men began to appear.... The office staff had no longer merely to design a detail as in the past but "also to determine exactly how the machining should be carried out," the numbers required, the type of jigs and the estimated time to be taken.... In the workshops these new methods meant job-cards, drawings in place of sketches, gauges, "work hustlers," "speed-and-feedmen," and increased supervision.... Increased inter-dependence of one process on another and higher overheads made time-keeping an economic problem for the employer.... While the craftsman was far from disappearing ... an industry in which the technicians and craftsmen assisted and led a number of less skilled workers, who themselves were developing special skills, was the next stage in the evolution of the industry.^[53]

Less impersonal forces operating within the employer's own plant also contributed to new workshop practices. Centralized control, dilution, piecework, and tighter discipline were prerequisites

for meeting competition and exploiting new machines, but they also might eliminate problems posed by skilled workers and unreliable foremen.

Engineers and machinists presented a number of liabilities to employers, particularly when unionized, as perhaps half of engineers and 11 percent of machinists were in the decade before the war.^[54] They commanded higher wages than less skilled workers—some two-thirds higher in prewar Britain and slightly more still in the United States.^[55] They also insisted on shorter working hours and on enhanced rates (from time and a quarter to double time) for overtime work. But the penalty for relying on skilled labor was not merely financial; machinists and engineers endorsed customary methods and craft restrictions that ran counter to an increasingly strident assertion of employers' unfettered right to manage their own shops. Craftsmen also tended to strike on what seemed slight provocation and without much warning.

Under these conditions, the eagerness with which some employers seized opportunities to substitute new machines and green hands for craftsmen reflected more than a desire to cut labor costs. To be sure, less skilled workers cost less—an important consideration where wages represented about a third of employers' total Costs.^[56] But they were also less likely to be organized, less given to striking, and often more amenable to shop discipline. During World War I employers praised women workers for their willingness to do as they were told. "Once a woman employee is taught how to use a gage or learns what constitutes satisfactory work, the good work produced in the afternoon will be exactly the same as that produced in the morning. The judgment which is frequently so disastrous on the part of our men employees will not enter into the work of the woman operative. She will follow instructions absolutely."^[57]

Similarly, the ideal of replacing recalcitrant men with machines exercised some hold on the entrepreneurial imagination. James Nasmyth, an important mid-century British machine tool inventor and manufacturer, argued that skilled engineering workers gave "an increased stimulus to the demand for self-acting machine tools, by which the untrustworthy efforts of hand labour might be avoided. The machines never got drunk; their hands never shook from excess; they were never absent from work; they did not strike

for wages."^[58] Employers never reached this promised land. Reducing the functions, powers, and independence of skilled men, however, brought management not just profits but a more manageable work force—and perhaps the satisfaction of putting the aristocrats of labor in their places.^[59]

Managers had another headache within their shops and another incentive to centralize control: their foremen. Foremen were seen to err in one of two directions. They were either too hard on the workers or too easy. The "bulldozing" foreman created resentment, caused the best employees to quit, and could spark strikes. At the other extreme, the easygoing foreman too often placed the interests and goodwill of his workers ahead of loyalty to management. Such foremen condoned a comfortable work pace, winked at output restriction, and failed to insist on the observance of directions from above.^[60] Worse still, where foremen belonged to trade unions, they helped enforce union work rules, favored unionists in hiring, and facilitated a thorough unionization of the shop. In their efforts to employ less skilled men and nonunionists during the 1897–1898 lockout, the Engineering Employers' Federation (EEF) noted "how prejudicially in many cases the members' interests are affected where their trusted agents belong to a union."^[61] After a strike in Chicago in 1904, the National Metal Trades Association (NMTA) complained that "one of the greatest difficulties encountered by the manufacturers in their attempts to reorganize the shops with non-union men, was the widespread disloyalty ... of the foremen," foremen who would harass nonunionists and "act as employment agents for union men out of work."^[62] Such "disloyalty" was a serious risk, given the typical foreman's responsibility for hiring and firing, fixing piece rates, and much production planning, as well as discipline. By taking these functions out of the foreman's hands, managers could better protect their own interests. Moreover, not even the most loyal foreman could be expected to retain personal control over shop operations as the scale and complexity of production grew.^[63]

Employers aiming to assume control over functions once exercised by skilled workers and foremen could scarcely take personal responsibility for recruitment, training, job assignment, rate fixing, production planning, and discipline. Such tasks fell to middle-level managers with appropriate qualifications, and they had an

agenda of their own. Most important, this agenda included a strong belief that management tasks demanded experts. Scientific managers such as Frederick Taylor not only denied the competence of workers or foremen to determine the "one best way" to do a job, but they also claimed that employers, too, lacked the necessary scientific training and specialized skills. A second tenet followed: expertise should be recognized by employers and rewarded accordingly in terms of positions, salaries, status, and authority. One scholar finds in scientific management a "strategy of creating and monopolizing bodies of knowledge as a means of perpetuating and expanding professional job opportunities."^[64] Personnel managers, similarly, argued that "hiring men and discharging men are serious affairs. Only big men can handle matters like these."^[65] Third, many industrial engineers and personnel managers advocated opening these positions only to those with formal qualifications and, increasingly, educational credentials. Those engaged in employment management "must prepare, and in time will be bound to prepare, as for a profession."^[66] In fact, a technical education was becoming a prerequisite for the practice of engineering by the early 1900s.^[67] Finally, in such bodies as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the local and national Employment Managers' Associations, aspiring experts had professional societies to lobby for their interests and to instill a corporate identity.

These goals imply a strategy of monopolization, an effort to establish a profession with a lucrative and protected niche in industry.^[68] The niches were administrative positions in which responsibilities formerly undertaken by craftsmen and foremen came into the hands of professional managers. In this way professional strategies reinforced employer incentives to remove control from the shop floor. Through the meetings of professional societies and the countless articles and debates in professional journals, American engineers elaborated alternatives to craft control at a time when employers needed them. However suspicious managers might have been of theoretical "systems," if dissatisfied with hourly wages and a fair day's work, they had well-publicized incentive schemes from which to choose. If they faced bottlenecks in the progress and coordination of work, there existed a wide array of plans for keeping track of jobs, minimizing handling time and costs, and integrating work flow. In addition, men and women knowledgeable in such

fields were always available for hire, as consultants or permanent staff. This body of knowledge developed not just to meet the practical needs of capital, but also to justify and advance the status of a new group of aspiring professionals.

Contrasts in the Development of the Labor Process

Two ideal types have been drawn. One depicts workshops in which skilled engineers and machinists exercise considerable control over the recruitment and training of workers, the production process, and the pace of work; and they do so with a high degree of discretion and autonomy. The second pictures factory production by less skilled workers, with craftsmen, in relatively smaller numbers, confined to auxiliary functions. Here management takes responsibility for training, plans out the details of manufacture, seeks to control effort levels through incentive payment, and closely supervises the work force. This transformation reflects the impact of market forces, technological change, problems within the shops, and the influence of professional engineers and management theory. These factors made it profitable for employers to invest in the mechanical and administrative equipment needed to replace craft control.

Although these ideal types indicate the general trend in both countries during the period, two sets of contrasts in the development of the labor process do stand out: differences between the "average" British and American shop and between advanced and traditional sectors within each national industry. The erosion of craft control began earlier and went further in the United States than in Britain. This was true in most details of manufacturing practice: use of specialized and automatic machine tools and of less skilled employees to run them; assignment of one worker to two or more machines; reliance on jigs, fixtures, and gauges, enabling less skilled operatives to turn out interchangeable parts; centralized direction of work tasks; and payment by results. American firms were also more likely to organize these innovations into coherent policies of "scientific management."^[69]

The more extensive development of the labor process in the United States is clear from a comparison of productivity in both

individual sectors and the industries as a whole. The ratio of net value of output per employed person in the United States (1907) and Britain (1909) was 2.17 for engineering and shipbuilding.^[70] In Britain net output per wage earner in the cycle and motor trades stood at 124 pounds in 1909. Two years earlier the figure for the U.S. bicycle and motorcycle industry (including parts) was 261 pounds, and for automobiles and auto parts, 320 pounds.^[71] Between 1903 and 1904—well before the company's key breakthrough to mass production—Ford employed three hundred workers to make seventeen hundred cars. Before 1914, no British firm exceeded one car per worker per year.^[72]

The reasons for these differences are not hard to find. Virtually all the factors leading to changes at work operated with greater force in the United States. Product markets were larger and more standardized,^[73] individual firms were bigger and more specialized,^[74] and labor was scarcer and more expensive.^[75] To the extent that American shops needed skilled machinists, the unions' relative weakness left employers freer to use them as they saw fit.^[76] Professional engineers were both more numerous and more widely accepted in America.^[77] The U.S. metalworking industry also enjoyed the flexibility of youth. British firms had considerable capital tied up in older equipment and tended to rely on this equipment to turn out new products. By contrast, sewing machine, cycle, or small arms manufacturers, starting from scratch, could utilize specialized and automatic machine tools. A large demand for such tools, in turn, lowered their cost and made it cheaper for firms in other sectors to adopt them.^[78]

The result was not only that comparable sectors of the industry were more advanced in the United States than in Britain, but also that the most progressive sectors in both countries (sewing machines, electrical products, cycles, typewriters, automobiles) developed earlier and employed a larger proportion of metalworkers in the United States than in Britain.^[79] In 1907, less than 4 percent of Britain's engineering operatives worked in the cycle and motor trades; more than 16 percent were employed in shipbuilding and marine engineering. Two years later shipbuilding occupied less than 4 percent of American metal trades employees, as against 6.2 percent in the automobile and cycle sector.^[80] As late as 1907, Britain still had twice as many engineers in shipbuilding as in the elec-

trical, auto, cycle, and aircraft trades combined; and in output, two traditional sectors—textile machinery and railway locomotives—far outstripped all others.^[81] The relative progress of new industrial sectors again reflects America's larger domestic markets. To domestic markets were added foreign ones as more economical production enabled U.S. firms to sell their wares more cheaply than their British competitors—including, in some cases, in Britain itself. From 1897 to 1901, for example, the value of U.S. exports of cycles and cycle parts was nearly three times greater than that of British exports.^[82]

Similar contrasts in the development of the labor process appear within each country's metal trades. Newer British industries manufacturing for relatively large, standardized product markets were more progressive in shop organization and methods than traditional sectors such as shipbuilding and heavy machinery. Thus firms in Coventry—a center for the cycle trade in the 1890s and automobiles thereafter—featured unusually advanced production techniques with a high proportion of semiskilled workers, widespread use of incentive pay, and more methodical management practices.^[83] Being located in a city with little history as an engineering center, Coventry employers, like many American ones, enjoyed greater flexibility in deploying labor and installing up-to-date equipment. In the United States large numbers of machinists found employment in railroad shops, where market conditions did not allow the manufacture of standardized parts in large batches. Such shops engaged primarily in repair work, which could not be consolidated in a single location to permit larger volume production; repair shops had to be widely distributed along the lines. For such bespoke manufacture skilled labor was essential, piecework less widely used, and detailed production planning inappropriate.^[84]

These differences in the development of the labor process had clear consequences for the status of skilled workers. Traditional production methods relied on craftsmen. Less extensive and rapid changes at work preserved the jobs and strength of skilled men. British engineers, accordingly, typically enjoyed greater security and bargaining power than American machinists, as did railroad shop craftsmen compared to those elsewhere in the United States.

The position of skilled workers reflected more than the state of

the labor process; it also reflected the relative timing of workplace change and craft organization. Engineers and machinists alike were under siege. When British employers mounted their offensive against craft control in the 1890s, however, they confronted well-entrenched craft unions. The ASE, for example, was forty years old, enrolled a large proportion of engineers, and had secured through local agreements and customs a substantial measure of control over shop practices. In the United States, by contrast, workshop innovations were well under way before the IAM (founded in 1889) was on its feet, particularly in the technically most progressive industrial centers of the Northeast. Unlike the ASE, the IAM was playing catch-up ball. For machinists, customary practices had neither the support of a strong union nor the sanction of work rules and agreements. Progressive management and a weaker union, moreover, reinforced each other. With the IAM a relative newcomer and its members in a less entrenched position in the shops, U.S. employers had a freer hand both in reorganizing production and in keeping unions out.^[85]

Both the extent and the timing of workplace change enabled engineers to meet challenges at work from a position of strength. Ultimately, the relative development of production techniques is less significant than engineers' greater ability to protect their interests in the face of change. Dilution, for example, was certainly more advanced in the United States than in Britain. U.S. metalworking shops employed a higher proportion of specialists and women, relied less on traditional apprenticeship, and divided more sharply skilled tool room work from semiskilled production.^[86] More important, despite new machinery and an increasing division of labor, engineers more than machinists managed to maintain rights to jobs or machines that once had required skilled hands, even if they no longer did, and more successfully monopolized the financial rewards, if not the substance, of craft work.^[87]

Similarly, incentive pay, and especially the bonus systems associated with scientific management, were more widely used in the United States. But when more than half of engineers in certain sectors and centers experienced piecework, and nearly one in ten ASE members worked under premium bonus systems, quantitative contrasts with the United States had little subjective significance. Engineers, however, managed (through formal agreements,

strong workshop organization, and informal pressures) to preserve collective bargaining over piece rates and bonus times, enforce union wage scales, and prevent a fragmentation of individual earnings.^[88] Machinists, for the most part, did not.

Finally, it appears that U. S. employers relied more heavily on centralized planning, experts, and close direction of work tasks.^[89] These developments were by no means absent in Britain, but engineers were more successful in influencing (or if necessary sabotaging) management initiatives and personnel. Through their unions and shop organization, engineers retained greater control over how work was done, at what pace and price, and by which workers.

The same contrasts appear within each country. Innovative managers faced stiffer opposition from railroad shop craftsmen, and were more often forced to compromise with unions, than employers in most other sectors of the American metal trades. During the early development of the cycle and auto industries, Coventry manufacturers enjoyed a freedom from effective craft opposition to new production methods that was unusual by British standards. This internal contrast is less sharp than that between the two countries, however, for Coventry engineers soon had the backing of a strong national union. Railroad machinists did not.

Dilution, piecework, and centralized control made greater headway in the United States than in Britain and at greater cost to American craftsmen. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that machinists thereby felt more threatened. Engineers evaluated working conditions not with reference to America but in comparison to their own past; and for engineers, too, departures from the workshop status quo seemed radical and abrupt.

The Craftsmen's Grievances and the Craft Ethic

Two themes dominated skilled workers' resentment of managerial initiatives: economic insecurity and moral outrage. Engineers' and machinists' economic concerns were fairly straightforward, for changes at work directly threatened their earnings and jobs. Their sense of injustice is more elusive, partly because of its roots in a craft ethic rare today. It is important, however, to show how in

both countries noninstrumental aspects of the craft tradition^[90] formed a vital component of skilled men's grievances. Without a clear sense of this craft ethos, it is difficult to understand not only the intensity of conflict between skilled workers and their bosses but also the unwillingness of engineers and machinists to exchange craft customs for economic concessions and their receptiveness to proposals for workers' control.

Dilution put the economic position of craftsmen at risk. The use of unapprenticed men ("handymen"), women, or youths on tasks hitherto defined as "skilled" undermined the system of apprenticeship and job rights by which engineers and machinists monopolized privileges and kept wages up. Excessive numbers of apprentices and handymen threatened to flood the trade. Indirectly, so did the practice of one employee running more than one machine, for in the workers' view this meant that one man took the jobs of two. The result in either case would be a surplus of labor, falling wages, and unemployment. Naturally, it was the most highly skilled worker, who had invested time and money in an apprenticeship and commanded the best wages, who stood to lose the most from the influx of cheap labor. More broadly, the result would be to undercut craftsmen's privileged status relative to mere laborers. A New York brassmaker noted in 1885 that "a mechanic was considered somebody, and he felt he was somebody; he was a skilled mechanic, and he was considered above the poor laborer on the street." With the decline in skill and, accordingly, wages in the trade, brass workers were increasingly forced to live among "the cheapest class."^[91]

Opposition to dilution involved more than concern over wages and jobs, important as these were. At stake too were craft control and the standards of "the trade." Dilution attacked skilled men's customary rights to decide how work should be done and by whom. It devalued the all-around skills of apprenticed craftsmen—skills from which they derived not only income but also tremendous self-esteem. "As a rule, [machinists] took pride in their tasks, and considered a bad job a serious reproach upon their ability and worried on it as if it were a personal matter."^[92] A common complaint by the turn of the century was that "the trade has been subdivided and those subdivisions have been again subdivided, so that a man never learns the machinists' trade now."^[93] Specialization de-

nied craftsmen an opportunity to develop or deploy their full capabilities and could threaten their independence by confining them to the one shop in which their specific skills had been learned.^[94] Technical changes inflicted further indignities. "The engineer," lamented a union journal, "is being largely evolved into a mere attendant or looker-on, tending or watching the machine which now—as if possessed with intelligence—automatically takes the place of skill."^[95]

In articulating their grievances against dilution, a code word for engineers and machinists was "the trade." Dilution meant "the ruination of the trade"; the successful defense of craft standards was essential to "the salvation of the trade." Saving the trade, again, meant more than protecting economic positions. "The trade" referred to a set of skills that were acquired with great difficulty over a long period and were the source of great pride. It also referred to a community of craftsmen bound together by common training, shared skills, and collective dignity (along with a good deal of tramping about in search of work). Union charges that handymen spoiled work or turned out shoddy goods had, of course, some public relations value. But these allegations also reflected a commitment to craftsmanship—with a job well done affirming both self-esteem and corporate standards—along with a corresponding arrogance and contempt for those outside the brotherhood. When manufacturers spoke of "the trade," they spoke of aggregate employment, invested capital, output, and sales. "The trade" in the language of craftsmen defined the industry, and the good of the industry, in terms of the moral standards and workmanship of producers. The trade was the craft of metalworking.

The economic and ethical dimensions of craft grievances came together in the antagonism to handymen, green hands, and women in the trade. These workers were threats to the craftsman's standard of living because they brought down wages and reduced employment for skilled men. But they also undermined the standards of the craft. The indignation directed toward handymen who presumed to do skilled work owes a good deal to the fact that they were not brought up to the trade; they had not made the craft their calling. "The handy man spreads himself over everything, and one never knows what he may handle next. He can groom a horse, and drive a tractor engine, and mend watches, and sole boots, and cut

the children's hair, and wash a baby, and peel potatoes and do the Saturday's marketing. He can build anything—from a rabbit hutch to a gasometer, and he fills his spare time making steam engines—and things."^[96] The reference to "women's work" performed by handymen also points to suspicions that they lacked "manhood"—the sturdy independence of craftsmen in standing up for craft rights and union rates and refusing to take work and bread from other men by operating two machines. A fear that skilled workers would be reduced to the same "effeminate" condition comes out most clearly when the dilutees were female. "Employers are placing women on every job that they possibly can, where heretofore men have been employed.... If this keeps up at the rate it is being done, the men can attend the matinees and pink teas and the women can support the families."^[97]

Similar preoccupations run through responses to the introduction of piecework. Craftsmen viewed incentive schemes as a threat to their livelihood: directly, as rates were cut if workmen earned too much; indirectly, as jobs were divided up or done by new machines at lower wages and as a quicker work pace lowered overall employment. Even if earnings remained the same, they came only at the price of greater effort.^[98] Machinists at the Springfield Armory charged that "the piece-work man had things down so fine that in order to make a decent week's pay they refused to respond to the call of nature during working hours."^[99] Particular grievances display a similar concern for earnings. Engineers and machinists complained that under payment by results insufficient allowances were made for poor materials, unavoidable delays, or proper facilities for doing the job; that excessive penalties were levied for spoiled work; that overtime work was not adequately compensated; and that "debts" on one job (where piecework earnings fell below a guaranteed day rate) were carried over to others.^[100]

Yet skilled men's concerns extended well beyond the contents of their pay envelopes. They felt that piecework, by forcing them to rush their work and think only of their earnings, undercut a craftsmanly pride in their work, favoring shoddy products and concealed defects. A machinist at the Watertown Arsenal testified that "on day work I endeavor to do that work to the best of my ability; now, if I am given a bonus or a premium to get out more work it is only natural to suppose that I would slight my work every bit I can, just

to get it by the inspection, in order to make more money.... It would hurt my reputation severely."^[101] The judgment and discretion engineers and machinists customarily exercised were often jeopardized under premium bonus systems, because with each job came cards specifying how to do each operation and how quickly. Payment by results also contributed to the erosion of craft standards as journeymen worked two machines or specialized in some narrow line of work in order to increase their earnings.^[102]

Economic concerns and commitment to craft standards merged in the common charge that piecework undermined collective bargaining and, particularly in the United States, even the union minimum rate. Instead, workers were given a price, take it or leave it, or at best negotiated individually with foreman or rate fixer. Sometimes, too, prices were set according to the fastest man's pace, leaving average operators to struggle for decent pay.^[103] The effect was both to reduce wages and to undermine craft solidarity and shop-floor camaraderie. Men would compete for good jobs, curry favor with foremen, work two machines to run up earnings, and conceal defects and abuse tools to the detriment of those on the next operation or shift. Engineers and machinists feared that piecework would ultimately undercut unionism as well. Piecework "brings out all that is selfish in men.... Under its blighting influence, shop-mates and brothers become Ishmaelites toward each other, one man's hand raised against the other in the fierce competitive struggle.... It encourages greed, is immoral in its tendencies, and does more to create discord and make a perfect hell of a harmonious shop or factory of our craft, than all the evils that escaped from Pandora's box."^[104]

Both themes run through a final charge leveled against incentive pay schemes. The administration of payment by results, engineers and machinists noted bitterly, required a horde of officials—rate fixers, speed and feed men, efficiency engineers—whose salaries came out of the workers' wages. Such parasites were not only an economic burden, however; they were also viewed as nonproducers, "inexperienced clerks" presuming to set time limits from "theoretic charts." For these reasons their power to fix rates without consultation, drive the workers, and tell them how to do their jobs seemed especially outrageous. "The employee is not taken into consideration in setting prices; they are arbitrarily set by the

efficiency engineers, who arrogate to themselves the terms upon which the employee shall work. We believe it is an effort to standardize men and conditions ... to subordinate the mechanical initiative to others.... The workman is simply an automaton, and loses his mechanical identity."^[105]

Grievances regarding new authority relations had little to do with wages and most clearly demonstrate the moral ethos of craftsmen. The exercise of management control threatened skilled workers' customary autonomy in doing their jobs, their sense of manhood, and their notions of fairness and "the square deal." Engineers and machinists were a prickly lot who valued their independence at work. They resented supervisors who watched them too closely, who attempted to speed them up, and who told them how to do their work. "Nothing irritates a man who really knows his business so much as for a manager or foreman to come constantly to him in a patronizing way, and, with considerable assumption of superior knowledge, 'show him how to do it.'"^[106] Orrin Cheney, a machinist at the U.S. government's Watertown Arsenal, protested the imposition of orders from an efficiency expert and told the lieutenant in charge, "I could not follow this man's instructions out and do my work and do it properly. I told him that I never had a man tell me what speed and feed I should run my machine on. My work was always given to me." The commanding officer was not sympathetic: "Shut right up; you will scarry out these instructions to a letter."^[107]

Such treatment was more than an insult to the craftsman's skill; it was also emasculating. Endowed with a strong sense of "manly dignity" and insistent that they should be treated with respect and tact, engineers and machinists felt outraged by "bullying" or "tyrannical" supervision. "There will be no diminution of workshop discontent ... no softening of the exasperation the worker feels, while he is treated as a social inferior, watched like a convict, and punished like a naughty school-boy."^[108] Instruction cards, driving supervision, or the stopwatch deprived the craftsman of his manhood and dignified competence. The "objection of the average man ... to what is generally termed here the stop watch ... and to methods that are described in the various efficiency or scientific systems, lies very much in the fact that the man who feels within himself the power to successfully perform the duties of the trade

to which he belongs ... objects to being made an automaton and a cog in a wheel."^[109]

Discontent grew also out of a commitment to equity and justice in workshop life. New authority relations were not necessarily tainted with favoritism or caprice. But tightened supervision and the transfer of control from workers to management created ample opportunities for abuse, particularly in the transitional period when new powers rested with foremen. Engineers and machinists complained, for example, that supervisors rewarded their "pets" with the best jobs, the easiest piece rates, secure employment, and promotion, without regard to skill or seniority. "Is a self-respecting workingman going to get down on his knees to youngsters who are the pets of or relatives of the men who own the plants ... ? There is more politics played in some of the factories of Bridgeport than anywhere else in the city. And this is very demoralizing."^[110] Coventry engineers frequently complained that foremen were not impartial in giving out work or in enforcing rules and, like engineers and machinists elsewhere, often struck for the removal of "arbitrary" and "obnoxious" foremen, rate fixers, or speed and feed men.^[111] A similar commitment to fairness informed the workers' protest that foremen exceeded their jurisdiction or that penalties were out of proportion to the offense (e.g., unjustifiably large docking of pay for being late or fines for spoiled work or tools).

Some spokesmen for business and labor believed that once managers offered their employees a "square deal"—reasonable rules, impartially and tactfully applied—harmony would reign in the shops. If management would treat the workers fairly, discuss grievances with them or their representatives, and clearly set forth lines of authority and the duties and responsibilities of all, the labor problem would vanish.^[112] The IAM sometimes argued that railroads and other corporations could obtain efficient and loyal service "by holding its officials to a strict accountability for any tyrannical or arbitrary exercise of power and by making the lowest servant feel that he will be protected against injustice at the hands of the highest official superior."^[113] In this area, at least, some accommodation of craftsmen's grievances and some reconciliation between the craft ethic and management control seemed possible: a reconciliation based on the rule of law and at the expense of the foreman's powers and prerogatives.

Machinists attacked the system of scientific management in much the same terms as they did its constituent parts—dilution, incentive pay, and tightened supervision.^[114] It is not surprising that, of all the features of scientific management, time and motion study was so often the focus of machinists' hostility. Time and motion study was a condensed symbol of the evils of scientific management. It was a new device for securing the old management goal of deskilling and a key tool for setting new standards of effort and implementing premium bonus systems. It was used to prepare detailed instruction cards and was conducted by new personnel, outsiders often lacking practical experience and insulated from shop-floor pressures. Add to these considerations the new assault on machinists' dignity and integrity in having such incompetents standing over a craftsman, stopwatch in hand, and it is easy to understand the outrage generated by time and motion study.

Such new approaches to older employer goals thus appeared to represent a concerted effort to replace craft autonomy with a system administered by new, distant personnel and outside experts. Under scientific management, machinists charged, "it was not necessary for a mechanic to possess any extraordinary amount of brain or ability; he was merely expected to become a part of the machine and [the] system would do the rest."^[115] "Under no conditions will [machinists] aid and abet in the introducing of any system that would reduce them to mere souless machinery, mechanical in action, denuded in thought and which would rob them of their manhood."^[116] Machinists opposed the system also because it undermined their collective control over workshop affairs, recognizing only individual employees and personal merit rather than craft standards and union rates. Even given the incomplete installation of scientific management in most shops, the very codification of these changes into a coherent management "science" and the widespread debate over its merits served to clarify and publicize antagonisms over workplace control.^[117]

Running through grievances against dilution, piecework, and new authority relations, then, was a craft ethic and a corresponding language of injustice. This ethic was dominated by craftsmen's pride in their knowledge and skill—a pride sometimes expressed in arrogant contempt for laborers and handymen. It involved as well a testy sense of manhood, dignity, and sturdy independence

in standing up for one's rights—an attitude as easily turned against more menial male and female workers as against overbearing supervisors. Neither pride nor manliness, however, should be seen as the products of belligerent individualism. Skill and knowledge belonged to a trade with which engineers and machinists identified. A manly and dignified bearing was a virtue befitting, and demanded of, a member of the craft. In standing up for one's rights against dilution, piecework, or tyrannical supervision, one made a stand for the integrity of the trade and the prerogatives of craftsmen. At the extreme, a brother was expected to give up or refuse a job rather than betray the standards of the craft. Obviously, this occupational solidarity had economic benefits; among the standards of the craft was the union rate of wages. And many engineers and machinists were quite willing to sell their trade rights for a mess of pottage. The tenacious resistance to management offensives, however, can be understood only against the background of a widespread moral commitment to the trade and to a community of craftsmen.

Engineers and machinists did not always express their resentments in the same idiom. American metalworkers' rhetoric of injustice is peppered with the ideals of political freedom, individual rights, and American citizenship. Abuses at work are often viewed not as examples of the hardships of wage labor, but as of a piece with the despotism suffered by American colonists, southern blacks, or Russian serfs. What appears here is not capitalist oppression but political authoritarianism, wrongs perpetrated not by property owners but by tyrants no different from George III, the slave owner, or the tsar.

When craftsmen denounce such autocracy, the standards of the trade shade into the rights and freedoms of American citizens, and the manly bearing of mechanics becomes the independence of every man in the land of the free, the home of the brave. "In the centuries of the past, surfism [sic ] and slavery and vassalage [were] probably the proper thing, but not so now. The mechanics of the Denison shops had rights as sacred as the President of the United States, and in violating them Master Mechanic MeIlvary has shown himself to be the tyrant that he is."^[118] A committee of molders at the Watertown Arsenal, denouncing the introduction of scientific management, told government investigators, "We object

to the stop watch on the ground that such a method applied to the finer sensibilities of the American workingman acts the same as a slave driver's whip on the negro."^[119] Adapting wartime patriotism to his own purposes, an IAM business agent in Newark reports that, while wage earners are fighting in Europe, "we who comprise Uncle Sam's industrial army can not stand idly by and see the 'Kaisers' of American industry continue their un-American practices in the workshop."^[120]

This rhetoric reflects a populist rather than a class perspective. Machinists' commitment to American freedoms and individual rights could mask class antagonisms and block class solidarities. This indeed was and continues to be a common stereotype of the American worker—ambitious, self-reliant, impatient with communal restraints, applying at work the individualism and liberty acquired in the exercise of political rights.^[121] Yet populist traditions (particularly strong in the IAM, with its roots in southern and western railway shops) were rallied to the defense of craft standards. Craft ethics and populist language run together, for example, in testimony against scientific management. On one side, machinists complained that scientific management robbed them of their skill and dignity. "That system lessens a man's knowledge.... Too much direction is not a good thing ... because the mechanic is supposed to know his business."^[122] "I do object to their standing over me with a stop watch as if I was a race horse or an automobile.... A workman has just as much honor, manhood, and self respect as a business man or a manufacturer; and more so, I believe, than these scientific shop-management experts."^[123]

The other side of machinists' protest, however, drew on populist sentiments. Scientific management, they charged, was un-American. It was all very well for efficiency experts to claim that "we all believe in liberty, but we recognize, or are capable of being shown, that true liberty is liberty under law."^[124] For machinists the laws of scientific management were autocratic and demeaning, and the use of a stopwatch was an insult to the free-born American.^[125] Allied with craft traditions, moreover, populism could lay the groundwork for democratic assertions of workers' control. "The men ... should and ought to have a chance to work together voluntarily. [Scientific management] is despotic management, rather than voluntary cooperation.... That is, the men are forced to do

as they are told. Orders come down absolutely from above. We believe that the men should have definite rights, and that they should be allowed to express their rights through their committees and through their organization."^[126]

In both countries, then, craftsmen subscribed to a clear moral code—an implicit social contract, in Barrington Moore's terms—by which they evaluated new conditions at work and found them wanting. At the core of this code was a craft ethic, a shared commitment to the standards and dignity of the trade. Among machinists this ethic is overlaid with more populist rhetoric, in which the values of political liberty, equality, and participation are directed against the confinements, subordination, and despotism of the factory. This commitment to the rights of the individual and the citizen in a free society did not offer a promising foundation for class solidarity and for challenges to capitalist (as against autocratic) control of production.^[127] But it could be a powerful source of antagonism to management policies, and one that resonated with craftsmen and less skilled workers alike.

The broader importance of the craft ethic for the development of factory politics is twofold. While this ethic survived, engineers and machinists were unwilling to trade craft control and craft standards for economic compensation. And traditions of craft control and autonomy lay behind engineers' and machinists' assertions of their right to a voice in workshop management. These ensured that workplace conflicts would be contentious and politically charged. At the same time, however, when this ethic was directed from managers to other workers, its characteristic expression was exclusive and arrogant. While craft traditions survived, engineers and machinists remained reluctant to ally with less skilled workers. The remainder of this book examines how these potentials and ambiguities in the craft tradition were mobilized in concrete strategies, organizations, and goals.