Page:Principles of scientific management.djvu/105

101 change in the mental attitude and in the habits of the three hundred or more workmen can be brought about only slowly and through a long series of object-lessons, which finally demonstrates to each man. The great advantage which he will gain by heartily cooperating in his every-day work with the men in the management. Within three years, however, in this shop, the output had been more than doubled per man and per machine. The men had been carefully selected and in almost all cases promoted from a lower to a higher order of work, and so instructed by their teachers (the functional foremen) that they were able to earn higher wages than ever before. The average increase in the daily earnings of each man was about 35 per cent., while, at the same time, the sum total of the wages paid for doing a given amount of work was lower than before. This increase in the speed of doing the work, of course, involved a substitution of the quickest hand methods for the old independent rule-of-thumb methods, and an elaborate analysis of the hand work done by each man. (By hand work is meant such work as depends upon the manual dexterity and speed of a workman, and which is independent of the work done by the machine.) The time saved by scientific hand work was in many cases greater even than that saved in machine-work.

It seems important to fully explain the reason why, with the aid of a slide-rule, and after having studied the art of cutting metals, it was possible