The Dark Side of the 1920s: Elimination of Waste in Industry Sharon Rounds McElroy Project through...
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Transcript of The Dark Side of the 1920s: Elimination of Waste in Industry Sharon Rounds McElroy Project through...
The Dark Side of the 1920s: Elimination of Waste in
IndustrySharon Rounds
McElroy Project through
Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum
What Was Seen as Waste in Industry?
• Unemployment during the Depression (1918–1920)
• Speculation and overproduction in booms• Labor turnover and labor conflicts• Variation in products and divergency in
grades and standards• Inefficient processes• Inadequate transportation terminals
Herbert Hoover’s View• “While we currently assume that great
advancements in living standards are brought about by new and basic invention, an even larger field for advancement of these standards is found in the steady elimination of our economic wastes….”
Foreword by Herbert Hoover for Year’s Review in Industry, “Factory”; 12/10/1924; sent through A. W. Shaw; Herbert Hoover Presidential Library files.
• “The necessity of maintaining a high wage level requires that all processes of manufacture and distribution be reduced to the lowest possible. This can be done through the elimination of those wastes arising out of too high a degree of diversification in certain basic products.”
Foreword by Herbert Hoover for Year’s Review in Industry, “Factory”; 12/10/1924; sent through A. W. Shaw; Herbert Hoover Presidential Library files.
Herbert Hoover’s View
Unemployment during Depression
• After World War I• Many soldiers came back to no jobs• Farmers still producing at levels needed for
feeding troops• Farmers losing money — not able to hire
workers
• Speculation is engagement in business transactions involving considerable risk but offering the chance of large gains, especially trading in commodities, stocks, etc., in the hope of profit from changes in the market price
“About time to cut away the harness.” Ding Darling Cartoon, http://ddr.lib.drake.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/ddarling&CISOPTR=1495&CISOBOX=1&REC=2
Speculation
Prevention of Booms• “The best protection against booms is that
every business man shall have the information so that he may realize from the shifts in credit, from the movements in stocks, of production and consumption, that the economic balance wheel is moving too fast and if every man then safeguards against danger disaster never comes.”
Quotation taken from page 7 of A Problem of Distribution: An Address by Hon. Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce. [Pamphlet at Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum.]
Labor Turnover and Conflicts• Strikes seen as steps
to overturn industrial system
• Strikes– Over 4 million
workers went on strike in 1919
– One-fifth of nation’s workforce Image donated by Corbis-Bettmann
http://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=3294
• Labor’s demands– Union recognition– Shorter hours– Raises exceeding
the inflation rate
Labor Turnover and Conflicts
Image donated by Corbis-Bettmann
http://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=3294
Inefficient Processes• Unskilled laborers seen as “dumb brutes”• Skilled craftsmen were “obstacles to efficiency”• Scientific management style
– Frederick Winslow Taylor– made up data, trafficked in racist
stereotypes, treated industrial workers like livestock to be trained
– charged companies ridiculous fees for the service
• Increased gap between what workers produced and what they could buy
• How did Taylor arrive at forty-seven and a half tons [as the amount of iron one man could load in a day] for Bethlehem Steel? He chose twelve “large, powerful Hungarians,” observed them for an hour, and calculated that, at the rate they were working, they were loading twenty-four tons of pig iron per man per day. Then he handpicked ten men and dared them to load sixteen and a half tons as fast as they could...
http://denimandtweed.blogspot.com/2009/10/birth-of-scientific.html
Scientific Management Quote
http://denimandtweed.blogspot.com/2009/10/birth-of-scientific.html
Scientific Management Quote
• They managed to do it in fourteen minutes; this yields a rate of seventy-one tons per man per ten-hour day. Taylor inexplicably rounded up the number to seventy-five. To get to forty-seven and a half, he reduced seventy-five by about forty percent, claiming that this represented a work-to-rest ratio of the “law of heavy laboring.” Workers who protested the new standards were fired.
“16 Tons”by Tennessee Ernie Ford
http://coalcampusa.com/nowv/panhandle/cliftonville.jpg
http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/classic-country/sixteen-tons---tennessee-ernie-ford-14930.html
“You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.”
Why Owe Soul to the Company Store?
http://www.nationalscripcollectors.com/Home/tabid/1031/Default.aspx
• Mines were communities
• Miners often paid in scrip
• Scrip only good at store owned by mining company
• Prices were inflated
Variation in Products
QuickTime™ and a decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
“Wasteful Australia,” The Herald, Tuesday, December 9, 1924
• Saves resources and wasted labor
• Cuts down on types produced
• Helps with inventory• Cuts down on lack
of standardization
Setting Standards for Quality and Grade
http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/54900/54987/54987_seal_commerc.htm
• Need tests to apply to determine whether standards have been fulfilled
• Set up by the Department of Commerce
• Producers, distributors, and consumers agree and benefit from them
Transportation
• Waste in the use of refrigerator equipment• Waste in shipping gin-compressed cotton• Light loading of freight cars• Delays in loading and unloading of freight cars• Waste in less than carload lots• Waste due to improper ordering of cars• Waste due to loss and damage
Memorandum to Herbert Hoover; 2/25/1925; “Elimination of Waste Program”; Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum
“At last we’ve found something we can blame everything onto without its talking back.”
http://ddr.lib.drake.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/ddarling&CISOPTR=1398&CISOBOX=1&REC=7
“The consequent reduction of manufacturing, selling, and distribution costs, and the release, for active use, of millions now tied up in slow-moving stocks, combine to yield savings eventually reaching the consumer in lower prices, thus increasing his real wage and assisting him to a higher standard of living.”
Foreword by Herbert Hoover for Year’s Review in Industry, “Factory”; 12/10/1924; sent through A. W. Shaw; Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum files.