Do Public Sector Unions Treat Teachers as Dumb Animals?

In a fascinating article, Michael Barone of the Washington Examiner blames Frederick W. Taylor, who died in 1915, for the plight of public sector unions today. Taylor conducted time and motion studies aimed at getting workers to perform most efficiently single tasks on long assembly lines. Taylor considered workers, in effect, dumb animals, incapable of initiative, and inefficient when they are not compelled to perform the same simple task in the same single way over and over.

As Barone writes:

➢ Taylor “had huge influence” on auto and steel assembly-line managers, whose workforces consisted of off-the-farm and immigrant hordes with little education and/or little English. The managers believed Taylorite methods that squeezed maximum production out of low-skill workers were the best way to profits.

➢ In the 1930s, the auto and steel industrial unions, helped by the New Deal, went after Taylorism head-on. Unions worked to prevent management from ordering speedups based on Taylorite analysis, and fought against the rewarding of speedy workers with merit pay, instead demanding promotions based strictly on seniority. All this made sense when industrial managers clung to Taylorism, and unions understood workers' interests were diametrically opposed.

➢ Today, liberals look back with nostalgia to the days of powerful industrial unions, when a young man fresh from high school and military service could get an assembly line job and be guaranteed lifetime employment.

But Barone says, “I grew up in Detroit, and I know that these workers hated those jobs. Taylorism, even modified by union representation, was a miserable way to make a living.”

A big turning point came in 1970, when the United Auto Workers (UAW) got the Big Three automakers to agree to "30 and out" -- retirement after 30 years on a generous pension and big medical benefits, because workers retiring at 50 were 15 years short of Medicare. Barone notes that in The Company and the Union, author William Serrin asked why the union and company didn’t instead try to make assembly-line work more creative and fulfilling. That’s exactly what the Japanese and other foreign auto companies did.

When the National Education Association (NEA)—led by Michigan teachers—took the UAW as their model, they made the fatal mistake that haunts America to this day:

The NEA would never allow management to speed up their work. Promotions and firing would be governed by seniority. They would never, ever allow merit pay. This adversarial unionism assumed that management would always be Taylorite. But that has been increasingly untrue in the private sector and was never really true in the public sector.

As a result . . . public-sector unions, with their bought-and-paid-for politicians, have produced public-sector workforces that are unresponsive, unaccountable and impossibly expensive. [Public sector u]nion leaders need to realize that Frederick W. Taylor is dead.