Development of Industrial United States-Working Condition

Workers did not share fully in America's tremendous prosperity. Despite working as much as twelve hours a day, six days a week, many workers in the late nineteenth century did not earn enough money to provide for their families. Roughly twenty percent of women, ten percent of girls aged 10-15, and twenty percent of boys in this age group worked. Working on railroads and in many factories was dangerous. Workplace accidents numbered in the tens of thousands annually. Thousands of workers were killed each year in workplace accidents while working on railroads or in steel mills, coal mines, textile mills, and other factories.

Employers, eager to make employees and factories more productive, devised techniques to increase efficiency in their plants. Frederick Winslow Taylor, an engineer at the Midvale Steel Company in Philadelphia, began making detailed time-motion studies of workers, in which he closely observed how workers performed their job in order to eliminate unnecessary steps and other wasted motions that slowed productivity. Taylor conducted his research in the 1870s, although his most famous writing on the subject, The Principles of Scientific Management, was not published until 1911.

Taylor believed that his techniques for promoting efficiency would not only make workers more productive, but would increase factory profits enough to enable both owners and workers to make more money. He believed that engineers, not business people or workers, ought to control factories, and that conflict between workers and bosses could be eliminated by his "scientific management."