Henry Noll was one of the most famous workers in American history, though not by his own choice and not under his own name. Employed at Bethlehem Steel for $1.15 a day, and known among workmates for his physical vigor and thriftiness, Noll was—as the somewhat embellished story goes—selected by an ambitious young management consultant named Frederick Winslow Taylor for an experiment in 1899. One day on the job, Taylor approached Noll—whom he later made famous under the pseudonym “Schmidt”—and asked him, “Are you a high-priced man?” As Taylor rendered the story in his book The Principles of Scientific Management, “Schmidt” replied to the obvious trick question cautiously: “Vell, I don’t know vat you mean.”
“Oh yes, you do,” insisted Taylor. “What I want to know is whether you are a high-priced man or not.”
“Vell,” repeated Schmidt, “I don’t know vat you mean.”
“Oh, come now, you answer my questions,” smirked Taylor. “What I want to find out is whether you are a high-priced man or one of these cheap fellows here. What I want to find out is whether you want to earn $1.85 a day or whether you are satisfied with $1.15, just the same as all those cheap fellows are getting.”
Schmidt then responded that yes, obviously, he would accept the additional 70 cents (“I vas a high-priced man”). Then, the rub: “You see that pile of pig iron?” Taylor explained that a high-priced man did exactly as told, “from morning till night.” Schmidt, whom Taylor compared unfavorably to an “intelligent gorilla,” would be timed and—as we would put it today—optimized in his every movement. “He worked when he was told to work, and rested when he was told to rest.” In this way, Taylor boasted, Schmidt’s output increased from twelve tons of pig iron moved every day to 47.
This was the primal scene of “scientific management,” versions of which spread rapidly across the world’s workplaces. The bargain between Schmidt and Taylor represented the explicit formulation of what would become the defining compromise of twentieth-century American capitalism: Increase your output, get paid more. Wages go up with productivity.
Until, it turns out, they don’t anymore. The unwinding of this agreement in recent decades, such that workers must continue to produce more without expecting it to show up in their pay stubs, has now been the subject of a good deal of discussion and debate. The decline of unions, the rise of inequality, the crisis of liberal democracy, and the changing face of American culture all, in one form or another, relate to this transformation. We work and work and barely get by, while wealth pools up in obscene quantities out of view. Pile more pig iron, but don’t imagine you’re high-priced. What, ask new books by Emily Guendelsberger and Steve Fraser, is this colossal insult doing to our heads? No wonder, Guendelsberger observes, the country is collectively “freaking the fuck out.”