II. FROM FEUDAL FACTORIES TO FRENCH TAYLORIST ONES

Introduction We will now review why we believe scientific experimentation with pattern of work organization, working conditions, and wage schemes is to the Athletic Apparel Industry's advantage.  Specifically we propose to work with a sample of factories (the size and location will be determined with Logo-corporation, subcontractor, NGO and other stakeholder input).  The result we anticipate is to be able to contrast different forms of pay-systems and work design and working conditions. The implementation will be according to action research methods. That is, an effort that involves workers, managers, and other stakeholders, including the study groups we list below in the design of the experiments we are proposing. 

Literature Review Karl Marx (1867), Adam Smith (1776), and Frederick Taylor (1911) agreed that there are organizational alternatives to sweatshops that yield more productivity, profit, and net workers higher wages.  “The name, sweatshop, goes back to the late 1800s, and refers to the technique of "sweating" as much profit as possible out of each worker. Once a thriving tradition at the turn of the century, sweatshops saw their numbers dwindle in the face of relentless encroachment by labor organization and social legislation. By the post-war years they were pushed to the brink of extinction. But with the new arrangements made possible by the global economy -- highly mobile transnational capital, computer-coordinated production schedules, and free trade policies” (Sweat Gear web site).  Apparel manufacture too often equates to sweatshop work that is based on modes of production and piece-wages that appears feudal in contrast to the kinds of factories that are recently attaining ISO9000, ISO14000, and SA8000 certification.

What about the influence of wage rates? Smith (1976) in the  Wealth of Nations, saw the choice about paying each worker a "living wage" was clear, economic and moral:

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation (Smith, 1776, CHAPTER VIII Of the Wages of Labor). 

Adam Smith did not favor sweatshops. Adam Smith, among others, contended that interests of self-centered interests of merchants and manufacturers ran counter to the general welfare of society.  Smith advocated local accountability, moral reasoning, and a limit to bigness of business. Smith did favor the landowners over the merchants and manufacturers.

The proprietor of land is necessarily a citizen of the particular country in which his estate lies.  The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country (WN, 2: 848).

What was revolutionary about Taylor's scientific management, was the observation that rest and refreshment are necessary to quality and sustained work. Any profit gained by overwork and snatching time for mealtimes and rest breaks and from paying the least possible bare subsistence wage and over-work in unhealthy and unpleasant situations was meager compared to the output of the high productivity enterprise. In short, both Taylor and Marx held out solutions to sweatshops' "slow sacrifice of humanity" (Marx, 1867: 244).

For Marx, piece-wage was a special form of time-wage. "In time-wages the labor is measured by its immediate duration, in piece-wages by the quantity of products in which the labor has embodied itself during a given time" (1867: 553). And piece-wages, from his point of view, afforded the "source of reductions of wages and capitalistic cheating" of workers (p. 553). That is, with piece-wages, the incentive is for the capitalist to parasitically "sub-let" labor by using the services of middlemen (subcontractors). "In England this system is characteristically called the "Sweating system."

On the one hand piece-wage allows the capitalist to make a contract for so much per piece with the head laborer--in manufactures with the chief of some group, in mines with the extract of the coal, in the factory with the actual machine-worker--at a price for which the head laborer himself undertakes the enlisting and payment of his assistant workpeople (p. 554).

To Marx, it is in the personal interest of the subcontractor using piece-wage systems to "strain his labor-power as intensely as possible" by lengthening the working-day. And this is exactly what we have witnessed in apparel manufacture: without the external control of government or the global enterprise's policies and codes, subcontractors use piece-wage and extend the working day, as well as the number of days worked each month. In Marx's day, the "Children's Employment Commission: and other agencies intervened to change working and employment practices.

Piece-wage is the main pay system in today's apparel subcontract factory. Marx hypothesized that piece-wage is paid such that it becomes the average wage, thereby negating any incentive for independence, self-control, or liberty. "Piece-work has, therefore, a tendency, while raising the individual wages above the average, to lower this average itself" for the workforce. In practice, the quotas in the apparel industry are adjusted to keep the piece-wage to a bare minimum and working conditions such as rest periods and subcontractors avoid training in more efficient production methods, unless external controls are enforced. The assumption of the subcontractor is that since the alternative to work is starvation or more rigorous demands of agriculture, those workers have ample incentive to produce. This is defined here, as feudalistic sweatshop practice. We would like to conduct research that would implement and test experiments in alternative pay schemes.

For example, going back to Taylor (1911), his innovation in pay schemes was to introduce the idea of differential piece-rate systems. In his series of experiments he demonstrated that workers when performing a carefully calibrated and planned task, would increase their effort when wages increased by 60 per cent (p. 74). In short, raising quotas and extending the working day, were found to be less productive alternatives than ensuring "prosperity for the employee, coupled with prosperity for the employer" the key to his compensation philosophy.

For Taylor, the solution to feudalistic sweatshop factories was to convince employee and employer, that through scientific experimentation, work conditions and work processes could be redesigned so that workers toiled few hours, with more rest breaks, and at higher pay, while the firm enjoyed the fruits of sharp increases in production. It is our proposal to test Taylor's option in the apparel industry. That is to move from what is called "extreme Taylorism" managing work processes with central control and high division of labor, to what Taylor had originally described, a system of work which is productive for employers and prosperous for employees.

Taylor (1911: 14-18) argued that it is possible to have prosperity for both owners and workers and the diminution of poverty and the alleviation of human suffering. We believe this is an attainable objective for the logo corporations, their subcontractors, and global workforce. Taylor concludes, "the writer has great sympathy with those who are over-worked, but on the whole a greater sympathy for those who are under paid" (p. 18). This is the gist of our attempt to prove that living wage payment and healthy working conditions combined with scientific work processes makes economic sense.

The Experiment  In short, we hypothesize that the modern scientifically managed subcontract factory will dramatically out-produce and out-pay the feudal sweatshop. We seek permission to run this experiment. Taylor (1911: 92-96, 136-143) hypothesized that better working conditions including shorter hours (from 12 to 8.5 hours), rest periods four times a day, paid days off each month for "girls" (his term), and rigorous scientific work procedures would lead to both higher factory output and higher wage levels and therefore to more harmonious relations between employer and employees. Taylor also included "the consumers, who buy the product" of employer and employees "and who ultimately pay both the wages of the workmen and the profits of the employers" (p. 136). This described the global subcontracting production and distribution of the apparel industry. Taylor was able to convince sweatshop owners and their subcontractors that this hypothesis had scientific validity. We believe that by turning from consultant and monitor reporting to scientific study (quantitative and qualitative) and to action research experimentation, that we can convince subcontract factory owners and managers, that sweatshops are not as profitable as the modern firm.

The world at the turn of the century embarked upon experiments that proved in one industry after another that feudal sweatshop production was not as efficient or humane as scientific management. We can do the same in this century.

Scientific management, on the contrary, has for its very foundation the firm conviction that the true interest of the two [employer and employee] are one and the same; that prosperity for the employer cannot exist through a long term of years unless it is accompanied by prosperity for the employee, and vice versa' and that it is possible to give the workman what he most wants -- high wages -- and the employer what he wants -- a low labor cost -- for his manufactures (1911: 10).

The reason it is a lower labor cost, even with higher piece-wage payments is because the factory applying scientific management (now a days, TQM, ISO9000 and ISO14000) with the kinds of working conditions spelled out in SA8000 (living wages, safe and healthy work environments) -- is assumed to yield higher output than is true for the feudalist factory. Nike in 1998 announced plans to move toward ISO14000 certification. Other athletic apparel industry corporations will follow suit. We would like to measure the results and extend the experiments to other factory locations. 

Further, we seek permission to work with select factories to implement alternative piece-wage systems. Taylor, for example, recommended that once scientific work procedures were implemented, such that production rose, the workers would be paid 60% to as much as "double wages" during the scientific experiments, and that such wages would remain this high after the implementation (pp. 54, 72, 74).

We would also like to work with factories that do and do not have active labor unions. Where Marx and Taylor disagreed was over the role of labor unions. For Taylor (sounding much like athletic apparel industry corporate executives) unions are "labor agitators" who are "misinformed and misguided... sentimentalists" that appear "ignorant of actual working conditions" (p. 18). However, for Marx, the trade union movement and worker democracy was essential for insuring that factories did not back slide into feudalistic sweatshops. As Marx put it, "I demand therefore a working-day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place (p. 234). Marx details the wage cheating, ways of stretching the day of forcing people to clock in early, work overtime off the clock, and strange pay deductions. Marx describes the same complaints in 1865 that we hear today, how time is "snatched from the workers by encroaching upon the times professedly allowed for rest and refreshment" (p. 241). The point is apparently subcontract factory management holds to the out-dated feudalistic belief that such practices are in the long run more profitable than what Taylor proposed and what Marx demanded. In short, we want to test working conditions and wage situations in both settings.

French Taylorism - Defined - In a special edition of Journal of Organizational Change Management, Dominique Besson and Slimane Haddadj (2000) review post-Taylor approaches. Different countries throughout the world including Asia and Europe have implemented Taylorism quite differently. We hypothesize the implementation in apparel factories in Southeast Asia is the reverse to the Taylorian philosophy itself, and even a return to the feudalistic factory conditions and piece-wage compensation schemes of the 1800s. By contrast, French Taylorists implemented what Besson (2000) describes a more postmodern approach. It is more accurately "critical postmodern." On the one hand, it is an approach with strong links to Braverman's (1976) Labor and Monopoly Capital project and Marx's (1867) critique of sweatshops and piece-wages. On the other hand, the postmodernists see a drift between what Taylorism was in Taylor's day, and what it is now, in France (and elsewhere). Instead of taking an anti-Taylorism approach, Besson (2000) argues that the post-war configurations of Taylorism in France have not adopted the deskilling system that Braverman points out. But are French workers more "empowered" compared to Asian workers?  French workers are not disempowered from their knowledge and know-how (Besson, 2000: 425). At the same time, French Taylorism achieved high increases in productivity and efficiency in "an informal kind of postmodern administration" (p. 426). First, instead of implementing flexible work rules, the French prefer to keep those rules more rigid, in order to give employees confidence in the work design. The French adjusted rigid Taylor principles to allow for continuous improvements in work designs and such postmodern notions as "work autonomy spaces" (p. 434). Second, the wage contract is considered an essential way in which workers negotiate with management in order to adjust work conditions, skill levels, wages, and the authority system. In this way workers in French Taylorism have a way to invoke resistance as well as ongoing-negotiation, as part of the work organization. This is not a totalizing consensus seeking strategy; it is one where parties know what side of the bargaining table they sit on. Third, instead of management total control over the system of work, employees can avoid such productive despotism by co-control over work processes. Multi-skilling, for example, is seen as a way to enhance worker's negotiating position. Fourth, Taylorism, in its French manifestation, is part of a plurality of perspectives. Management and worker, as well as customer and supplier have voice in the postmodern version. "There existed, and there still exists today, a coded social dialog between workers, union officials, organizers and the hierarchical management" (p. 434). Fifth, the French variation of Taylorism is based on a conflict-engagement approach in which employers and employees actively consider social power and diversity and the dangers of hegemony. Sixth, my own observations of French Taylorism is that working conditions, including good food, rest breaks, and those long French vacations make quite a difference.

Could Taylorism in France be assimilated into the Asian subcontract apparel system? It is a question that merits scientific study. Our proposed experiment stands as alternative to increased levels of governmental regulation of industry working conditions. French Taylorism is a mid range solution between trade unionism and feudalistic sweatshops. It is an improvement over classical Taylorism, that allows piece-wage systems to be modified in ways that increase productivity and worker wage levels, while affording workers avenues of resistance to totalizing systems of control.

Our proposal to the Athletic Apparel logo corporations and their subcontractors is to experiment and scientifically compare alternative work design, work conditions, and wage-incentive schemes. It represents a step forward in establishing stakeholder dialogue and getting beyond expose research projects, or naïve consulting reports, that do not detail methodology nor go beyond the report to actually implement meaningful change. Why not try French Taylorization as a possible improvement over "extreme" forms of Taylorization now in use in the apparel industry in third world nations?

Besson, Dominique (2000) "France in the 1950s: Taylorian modernity brought about by postmodern organizers?" Journal of Organizational Change Management. Vol. 13: (5): 423-438.

Besson, Dominique & Haddadj, Slimane (2000) Towards a post-Taylorian approach to Taylorism. Special guest issue of Journal of Organizational Change Management. Vol. 13: (5).

Marx, Karl (1867) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I The Process of Capitalist Production. Translated from the Third German Edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Edited by Frederick Engels. NY: L.W. Schmidt; 1967 edition, NY: International Publishers.

Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1911) The Principles of Scientific Management. NY: W.W. Norton & company, Inc. 1947 edition.

Return to Table of Contents