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title="The American department"
has_docs=["orgcaplavoro.md", "mentalrevolution.md", "americanism.md", "counterproductive.md", "donatatravascio.md", "rubinimartinelli.md", "shakecatena.md"]
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# Scientific management 

This section collects documents, fragments and insights on the history of managerial techniques known as 'scientific management' and the circumstances that lead to the introduction of MTM (Methods-Time Measurement) in Italy.




# The story from which we start: The “American department” 

![](static/images/Debole_Operaie_Robot.jpg)

Lebole became famous in the 1960s for a TV slogan advertising its men’s suits that recited “Ho un debole per l’uomo in Lebole”, translatable in English, albeit losing the rhyming of the original, with “I have a soft spot for men wearing Lebole”. 

Aside from its successful promotional campaigns, the Arezzo plant, opened in 1962 in a 75.000 square meters pavilion, is also famous within the history of Italian labour struggles for being amongs the first to introduce MTM (Methods-Time Measurement) methodologies imported from the US. 

But the factory didn’t only make men’s clothes. As Ivana Peluzzi, one of Lebole’s former workers who kindly agreed to talk with us, put it: 

>“this factory [also] produced excellent trade unionists and women who went into politics” 

Indeed, despite the commercial emphasis on men, the story of Lebole’s factory is a story of an all-female workforce. Many of these women came from the countryside and had a peasant background. They chose the factory over agricultural and domestic work attracted by a more ‘modern’ form of life. Some of them had been trained as tailors and seamstresses in the traditional sartorial methods.

Yet, the organization of work at Lebole did not allow these women to demonstrate their skills. Rather, the introduction of MTM was preceded by a period of study, where expert consultants would observe, film and carefully time each of the workers’ movement in order to determine the most effective ways of scripting their workflows and movements, de facto expropriating them of their knowledges.

MTM was first implemented in 1964 in only one of the three Lebole's industrial pavillions, which was quickly nicknamed the “American department”. At first, the workers selected to participate in the experimental production line were envied by the others, as they were see as being considered the best one. But very soon this initial perception changed into concern, as rumors begun to spread about the loss of freedom and brutal rhythms required by the reorganized work process.



 

![](static/images/metodo_americano_1.png)

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# They call it Scientific Management: From Taylor to MTM


The Scientific Organization of Work is a book published in 1911 by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Through the study of work and collaboration between trained management and skilled employees, Taylor felt it was feasible to organize a beneficial relationship from which both sides would benefit in order to overcome what he felt was the imprecise amateurism of the managers of the day. In essence, Taylor's argument was based on the idea that there is only one optimal approach (“one best way”) to do any given work. His theory initially focused mostly on the manufacturing sector, and his approach entailed a comprehensive examination of each worker's motions in order to maximize working time in accordance with the following key phases:

* Consider a group of 10 to 15 workers who are proficient in the task at hand. 
* Examine the precise series of movements that each worker performs in the present state. 
* Determine the time required for each movement. 
* Determine whether there is a faster way to perform it. 
* Eliminate any slow or pointless movements. 
* Finally, create the best possible series of movements.

The word "Taylorism" refers to Taylor's approach to managing industrial plants and it also has a pejorative meaning given that this method appropriates workers' knowledge and skills in order to use these against them. 


# The Gilbreths: productivity in the household 

Amongst the new breed of "scientific managers" were a couple of American engineers, Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who became influential efficiency experts by pioneering the Motion Study method. The Gilbreths created a research methodology based on the examination of "work movements," which included filming a worker's actions and body position while keeping track of the time. They called the units of work they measured the therbligs (an anagram of their last name), each one a mere one-thousandth of a second.

[Price, Brian. 1992. "Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and the Motion Study Controversy, 1907-1930." In A Mental Revolution: Scientific Management since Taylor, edited by Daniel Nelson, 58-76. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.]()
 
The business efficiency approach known as time and motion study (or time-motion study) combines the Time Study work of Frederick Winslow Taylor with the Motion Study work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Methods engineering is the term used today to describe this comprehensive approach to work system development, which is used ubiquitously in industrial businesses and services, including schools and hospitals. It also remains the basis of contemporary processes of full work automation. 

The same couple Frank and Lilian Gilbreth were also the author and protagonists of a successful book (1948) and movie (1952), Cheaper by the Dozen. In the story, the Gilbreth's household served as a kind of practical laboratory where their theories on efficiency and education are put to the test with alternating humorous and morally edifying results. 

In *Counterproductive: Time management in the knowledge economy*, Melissa Gregg explaines how :

> From the beginning, scientific management was a front advanced jointly in the public and private spheres. This is the lasting influence of time-and-motion experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the married couple who epitomized their trade by adopting Gantt charts to run a household of twelve children. Contemporary theories of work often imply that market logic only recently came to intrude on the sanctity of the family.1
>  
> The expanding interest in scientific management and efficiency principles in the early 1900s included a significant agenda for organizing women’s work in the home. The efficiency proselytizers Harrington Emerson and Frank Gilbreth each provide an epigraph for the domestic science celebrity Christine Frederick’s Household Engineering (1915), acknowledging housewifery as demanding the highest acumen and skill.

[Gregg, Melissa. Counterproductive: Time management in the knowledge economy. Duke University Press, 2018.]()

While most of the early Taylorist enthusiasts and and time method managers were based in the USA, Frank Gilbreth spent much of 1913 and 1914 at the Auergesellschaft company, which was allied with Allgemeine Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft (AEG), the largest German engineering firm. The exact nature of Gilbreth's work and his relations with his client remain a mystery, but Walther Rathenau, the head of AEG, and Wichard von Moellendorff, one of its key manufacturing executives, were among the most influential promoters of scientific management in Germany during the following decade.
 
!(Nelson, Daniel, ed. A mental revolution: Scientific management since Taylor. Ohio State University Press, 1992, p.18)[]

# Henry Ford: a total transformation of society

During the late 1910s and 1920s, Henry Ford expanded on Taylor’s concepts using them for the first time in the auto industry and introducing the modern "assembly line”. It is estimated that through the Ford Motor Company, Ford earned an estimated $199 billion in capital, which would make him the ninth richest person in history. Ford incorporated some welfare measures in his management style, apparently keen to lessen the high turnover rate that required several of his departments to hire 300 men each year to fill 100 openings. Thus in 1914 Ford begun paying his workers $5 per day, more than doubling the average pay of the time. In 1926, he also instituted a new 40-hour workweek consisting of five 8-hour days. Real profit-sharing was offered to employees who had worked at the company for six months or more, and who behaved according to Ford’s liking.
 
Employees had their private lives fully scrutinized. Ford instituted a "Social Department" that used over 50 staff members to spy on his workers habits: not only he used violent means to quash any labour unionizing; but the company’s investigators reported on any heavy drinking, gambling or promiscuous behaviour.
 
Henry Ford was also the author of a 4-volume booklet entitled The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem. The booklet, which describes the project of world domination by the Jewish people, was widely circulated in Germany during Nazism and was a source of inspiration for Hitler. On the occasion of his 75th birthday in 1938, Adolf Hitler awarded him with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, which was the Nazi regime's highest honour bestowed on a foreigner, for his Ford subsidiary's efforts in Germany to supply the Nazi army with armoured vehicles and to donate all profits to the Nazi cause. In addition, Ford pledged USD 50,000 for several years during the Nazi regime as support for Hitler's party.

Since the 1930s, manufacturing methods centered primarily on the utilization of assembly line technologies to boost productivity have been referred to as Fordism. Antonio Gramsci and Henri de Man are credited as having theorized the idea.

> …understanding the importance, significance and objective import of the American phenomenon, which is also the biggest collective effort to date to create with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man [sic]. The expression “consciousness of purpose” might appear humorous to say the least to anyone who recalls Taylor’s phrase about the “trained gorilla”. Taylor is in fact expressing with brutal cynicism the purpose of American society – developing in the worker to the highest degree automatic and mechanical attitudes, breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the rowrk, and reducing productive operations exclusively to the menchanical, physical aspect. […] A forced selection will ineluctably take place; a part of the old working class will be pitilessly elimintated from the world of labour, and perhaps from the world tout court. It is from this point of view that one should study the “puritanical” initiative of American industrialists like Ford. It is certain that they are not concerned with the “humanity” or the ”spirituality” of the worjer, which are immediately smashed […] “Puritanical” initiatives simply have the purpose of preservieng outside of work, a certain psucho-physical equilibrium which prevents the psyhisological collapse of the worker…

[Antonio Gramsci, Americanism and Fordism, from Prison Notebooks, p.303] ()

# Methods-Time Measurement (MTM)

Methods-Time Measurement (MTM) is a copyrighted technique utilized in industrial production processes study the way each manual operation or job is performed and, based on the analysis, to establish a standard time for workers to finish each task. This system takes into account four variables separately:
 
- Skill – Ability to follow instructions precisely
- Effort – Commitment to work, willingness of the worker
- Conditions – The environment in which one works
- Consistency – reliability of performance

 
The method was first introduced in the USA in the 1948 by H.B. Maynard, JL Schwab and GJ Stegemerten. Today, MTM exists in several variations (such as MTM-1, MTM-2, MTM-3, MTM-UAS, MTM-MEK and MTM-SAM, for instance, some of which are now obsolete. In the original study, constant speed cameras (at a rate of 16 frames per second) were used to record videos of the skilled employees at the Westinghouse Brake and Signal Corporation's factory floor. The movies were then analyzed and categorized into a preset format of Basic Motions by being displayed frame-by-frame. Reach, Grasp, Move, Position, Release, etc. were some of these Basic Motions. A motion was begun on a frame where the hand first began executing it, and it was ended on a frame when the action was finished. This made it possible to determine the duration of each recorded motion in seconds by using a frame count, which was then "leveled" to a standard performance.

# MTM in Italy

![](static/images/Shake.png)


In Italy, the first experiments with MTM methods are introduced by a company called BEDAUX CONSULTANTS. In the early 1970s, Luigi Firrao authored a long exposè for the newspaper *Il Manifesto*, in which he retraced the companies’ early moves: 

> The reorganization of work based on the methods and systems of the MTM constitutes the only real response of the Italian patronage to the results achieved with the struggle of the working class. All the talk about plant automation and improving productivity by investing in machines that yield more without increasing the worker's effort is just smoke and theory compared to the reality of the factory as it is today.
 
> The most important consultancy firm on work organisation operating in Italy today is Bedaux Consultants, which applies all the systems we have listed above in its interventions for the reorganisation of production.[...] Bedaux’s parent company, of course, is in the United States. In 1927 the Italian Bedaux was founded, whose presidency was assumed by the elder Giovanni Agnelli (the founder of FIAT) and the first work organisation interventions took place precisely at FIAT and Pirelli.
 
> Since 1966, Bedaux Consultants has been headed by engineer Roberto Amadi, who trained at Alfa Romeo and Magneti Marelli. Bedaux's most recent publication lists one by one the companies in which it has intervened to rationalise exploitation systems.
 
> The companies for which Bedaux has worked include: BUITONI, BARILLA, LAZZARONI, PERNIGOTTI, PERUGINA, SPERLARI, SUPERGA footwear, ITALCANTIERI (IRI) paper mills BINDA, STERZI and DONIZELLI; pottery POZZI and SBORDONI, engineering companies such as MAGNETI MARELLI, FIVRE, MAGRINI, AERFER, ALFA ROMEO, ANSALDO, BREDA, CMF, CMI, FMI, SALMOIRAGHI, S.GIORGIO PRA, LAGOMARSINO, CEMFOND, SANT'EUSTACCHIO, SPICA, SUNBEECAMICA ; steel companies including DALMINE and SCI; among textiles COTONIFICIO CANTONI, DE ANGELI FRUA, LANEROSSI, MCM
 
> In addition to this, Bedaux organises a large number of courses to train timekeepers, time and method officials, etc. Bedaux is not alone. More than thirty other companies in Italy organise workers’ exploitation as external consultants, while many companies are frantically trying to hire their own specialists for the same purpose.

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