Frederick Taylor's Dream Come True: the Watchful Eye of a Computer Camera Monitors an Employee's Every Move, Optimizes Productivity, and Reinforces the Factory Model

The Assembly Line Model is Now Applied to ALL Work, Including Hospice Workers!

In 1965 after graduating from High School in West Chester, PA I decided to hand off my lawn mowing business to my brother and take a job working on an assembly line in a small factory owned by the father of one of my high school classmates. The job paid more money and offered me the chance to work predictable hours indoors and not be dependent on the whims of the weather to determine my earnings. My job required me to fill aerosol cans with various products ranging from DW-30 oil to pancake batter. The five of us who worked at this small business did everything from cleaning the vats on the assembly line to sweeping the floors to manually placing the small red caps on the aerosol cans to salvaging “lost product” from cans that were distended by overfilling of the freon, a task that required us to open the defective cans with a handheld hatchet. The owner handed off the oversight of the operations to Homer, a veteran foreman whose expertise at keeping the assembly line operating with baling wire and ingenuity far exceeded his literacy, which was marginal at best. Homer also possessed the ability to keep our morale high despite the sometimes sweltering heat in the warehouse that served as a factory, the unconventional working conditions, and the relatively low wages for full-time employees.

A year later I began my first co-op assignment as a Work Standards Trainee at the Rouge Engine Plant at Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan. My job there was to observe the employees who were assembling engines for various Ford products by performing a succession of manual tasks, tasks that we Work Standards engineers broke into component parts and scrupulously timed to ensure that each employee’s work was optimized. It was quite a leap from the ragtag operation in the small factory in PA to the largest assembly line in the world, and astonishing to contrast Ford Motor Company’s effort to manufacture high quality products as efficiently as possible. The Rouge Engine plant not only employed hundreds of workers on multiple assembly lines on three shifts, it was staffed with scores of engineers who managed the workflow, monitored the quality of each part of the process, and constantly worked to improve the process to make it more efficient. Every employee and every machine was carefully scrutinized.

Eight years later as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania’s school of education I read an eye opening book by Raymond Callahan titled Education and the Cult of Efficiency. Written in 1962 after five years of research, Callahan’s work describes the period from 1900 through 1930 when school administrators began to think of themselves “as “school executives” rather than scholars and educational philosophers.” The book describes the history of this shift in thinking and it’s consequences, which included the development of “work standards”, the development and use of “quality control” metrics, and the imposition of work flow requirements similar to those Ford Motor Company required of it’s assembly line workers.

Callahan’s book predated the so-called “accountability” movement that swept the nation’s schools at the end of the 20th Century, a movement that has taken much of the creativity and joy out of teaching and learning replacing it with a coldly efficient focus on standardized test results; a movement that contributes mightily to the migration of teachers and parents out of public education.

Callahan’s book also predated the emerging 21st century trend to electronically measure “progress” and “quality” in ALL phases of work from iterative work like assembly lines, loading trucks in warehouses, and serving fast food to specialized and highly personalized work like hospice care. As reported in The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score by Jody Kanter and Arya Sundaram in today’s NYTimes, it’s not just Amazon workers, cashiers, and delivery workers who are being electronically monitored:

Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, “idle” buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.

Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their “inactivity” time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’. At companies including J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice. In Britain, Barclays Bank scrapped prodding messages to workers, like “Not enough time in the Zone yesterday,” after they caused an uproar. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.

The article goes on to describe how electronic monitoring is now being used by firms employing hospice chaplains!

The metrics are even applied to spiritual care for the dying. The Rev. Margo Richardson of Minneapolis became a hospice chaplain to help patients wrestle with deep, searching questions. “This is the big test for everyone: How am I going to face my own death?” she said.

But two years ago, her employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called “productivity points.” A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point.

The same kind of metrics are also used in health care, including counseling provided for drug abuse:

Larger, more established companies are taking similar steps. UnitedHealth Group has 350,000 employees, a perch high on the Fortune 500 list and annual revenues of hundreds of billions of dollars. It also has strict systems for measuring “idle time” that some employees say are deeply flawed.

Jessica Hornig, a Rhode Island social worker who supervised two dozen other UnitedHealthcare social workers and therapists seeing patients with drug addiction and other serious problems, said their laptops marked them “idle” when they ceased keyboard activity for more than a short while. They were labeled derelict during sensitive conversations with patients and visits to drug treatment facilities.

“This literally killed morale,” Ms. Hornig said. “I found myself really struggling to explain to all my team members, master’s-level clinicians, why we were counting their keystrokes.”

In recent years, she said, the scores have become even more consequential: On performance evaluations, social workers were rated 1 to 5 based on the amount of time they were digitally engaged — numbers that affected compensation. Ms. Hornig said her team spent hours each week piecing together alternate records but had trouble keeping up without compromising core parts of their job.

As one whose job as a school administrator required de facto counseling sessions with employees, parents, colleagues, and community members, I can attest the difficulty of setting time limits on such meetings. It is hard to set a standard for an appeal to an administrative decision or a grievance hearing and equally difficult to set a standard time frame for composing an email. While some conferences are “boiler plate”, others elicit information that requires probing or unforeseen time consoling a troubled parent or student.

And while the article didn’t mention it, computer assisted learning, which was prevalent and increasing in schools before the pandemic, provided a means of tracking and monitoring the time students spent on their work, effectively training students to accept computer monitoring as a given, leading them to accept a world where 24/7 monitoring is an acceptable means of assessing productivity.

Also embedded in the article is a critique of the privatization of public services, a trend that contributes to the us of time metrics to determine “productivity”. If one assumes that a counselor’s productivity diminishes when they fail to use their computer and the counselor’s compensation depends on computer entries then clients will experience less human engagement and more observation of their counselor entering data. The cult of efficiency, though, requires the development of metrics that are objective, relatively easy and inexpensive to collect, and therefore require less manpower to oversee. It is far easier to measure time spent typing on a keyboard than the long term effectiveness of counseling sessions, and counseling seldom yields fast and unequivocal results. But in a world where time is money and profit depends on the efficient use of time a fast, cheap and easy metric is superior to one that is costly and time consuming.

If we hope to change the work culture in the future we will need to re-think our obsession with efficiency, for efficiency is the enemy of joy.