On efficiency and capitalism

The efficiency movement began when Bethlehem Steel Works, in Pennsylvania, hired a mechanical engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor to speed production, which Taylor proposed to do with a system he called “task management” or, later, “The Gospel of Efficiency.” As Taylor explained in 1911 in his best-selling book, The Principles of Scientific Management, he timed the Bethlehem steelworkers with a stopwatch, identified the fastest worker, a “first-class man,” from among “ten powerful Hungarians,” and calculated the fastest rate at which a unit of work could be done. Thenceforth all workers were required to work at that rate or lose their jobs.47 Taylor, though, had made up most of his figures. After charging Bethlehem Steel two and a half times what he could possibly have saved the company in labor costs, he, too, was fired.48 Nevertheless, Taylorism endured.

— Jill Leporte, in These Truths: A History of the United States.