There is a tendency in developing the mechanics of efficiency, as they
relate to labor, to establish for machine production standards of
workmanship. Long and weary experience has proved that wage earners
under factory methods and machine conditions are not interested in
maintaining standards of work. The standards which are set by the
scientific management schemes of efficiency are not, to be sure, the
qualitative standards of craftsmanship but they are qualitative as
well as quantitative standards of machine work. The tendency to
establish standards should have educational significance for workers.
It would have, if the responsibility for setting standards as well
as maintaining them rested in any measure with the workers; it would
have, that is, if the workers had the interest in workmanship, which
as things now stand they have not. The point in scientific management
is that efficiency depends, wholly depends they believe, on
centralizing the responsibility for setting and maintaining
workmanship standards, on transferring the responsibility for
standards of work from workers who do it, to the management who
directs it done. I have learned of only one manager who realizes
that although the factory workers are not to be trusted to maintain
standards, a management nevertheless will fail to get the workers'
full coöperation until it arouses their interest in maintaining them.

The manager is Mr. Robert Wolf, who illustrated this point at a
meeting of the Taylor Society in March, 1917. In describing the
process of extracting the last possible amount of water from paper
pulp, he said:

"Our problem was to determine the best length of time to keep the
low pressure on, as the high, pressure is governed entirely by the
production coming from the wet machine. After having determined