Managers and Workers: Origins of the Twentieth-Century Factory System in the United States, 1880-1920 (review)

Daniel Nelson’s Managers and Workers,here in its second edition, describes the evolution of the factory setting from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Nelson focuses on the role of the foreman, scientific management, labor recruitment, welfare work, and their impacts, all given final shape by World War I and Progressive governments. Only chapter 7, “The New Factory System and the Worker,” is new; the rest is lightly revised, and the notes reference additions to the scholarship since the book’s initial publication in 1975.

The outlines of the tale are indeed more familiar than they were when the first edition appeared. At that time, the “new labor history,” with its shift in attention from labor organizations to activity on the factory floor, was just emerging. Nelson deserves credit as one who pioneered the new focus. His account of the gradual movement from the first generation of factories in the United States to the so-called second industrial revolution and its large, managerially controlled plants displays a broad and careful use of period sources. Managers and Workersis particularly good when considering the extent to which Taylorism derived from a variety of ongoing trends in factory management. The book also clearly describes the very limited direct impact of this “scientific management” on American industry, as opposed to the extent to which industry came to display many of Taylorism’s attributes after they had evolved further, shaped by other people and other forces.

In a second edition, however, it can be valuable to consider how the book’s relationship to its historiographical context has changed. Nelson posits what might be called an invisible hand of technological change, from which emerges “better machinery” (p. 17) leading “often inadvertently [to] fundamental changes in the factory environment and in the human relationship” (p. ix). New conditions “invited” the new wisdom of factory management. Rather than emerging as part of an effort to take control of the workplace away from skilled labor, it appeared where “the legacy of the artisan shop had ceased to be an important force” (p. 10). In other words, the inexorable march of progress prevails in Nelson’s narrative.

There are other problems as well, to my mind. Nelson tells a national tale but too often without reference to differences between regions and industries. He offers a chronological tale of change without considering the persistence of earlier practices, structures, and relationships. His account ranges from the specific and well referenced to the general and less substantiated. He assumes motivations and claims that most manufacturers “did not attempt to cheat or exploit their employees, at least in a financial sense.” They were “reasonable,” even “benevolent” (p. 93).

Nelson omits and ignores long sections of the development of industry. He cites inside contracting and its demise as the progress of machine shop practice, omitting the previous period, when skilled workers managed production without inside contractors, whose advent they had strongly resisted. He discusses technological “improvement” in iron and steel without reference to the twelve-hour day and eighty-four-hour week it introduced. He contrasts systematic management with a previous lack of coordination and ignores effective worker control of production on the floor.

Nelson clearly understands how modern practice came to predominate, yet he ignores numerous works of the past twenty years that would have added depth and clarity to discussions from factory architecture, to contested changes in the workplace, to the changing attitudes of immigrant labor. He can be insightful, as when he notes that employees rather than engineers “first grasped the implications of systematic management” (p. 55). On the other hand, he ascribes the failure of the Industrial Workers of the World to confront industrialists successfully and continuously simply to their distrust of AFL-style labor-management relations (pp. 131...