The Principles of Scientific Management

THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT 69 gang. The hope was further expressed that he would earn his full wages on the following day. So that whenever the men received white slips they knew that everything was all right, and whenever they received yellow slips they realized that they must do better or they would be shifted to some other class of work. Dealing with every workman as a separate indi- vidual in this way involved the building of a labor office for the superintendent and clerks who were in charge of this section of the work. In this office every laborer’s work was planned out well in advance, and the workmen were all moved from place to place by the clerks with elaborate diagrams or maps of the yard before them, very much as chessmen are moved, on a chess-board, a telephone and messenger system having been installed for this purpose. In this way a large amount of the time lost through hav- ing too many men in one place and too few in an- other, and through waiting between jobs, was entirely eliminated. Under the old system the workmen were kept day after day in comparatively large gangs, each under a single foreman, and the gang was apt to remain of pretty nearly the same size whether there was much or little of the particular kind of work on hand which this foreman had under his charge, since each gang had to be kept large enough to handle whatever work in its special line was likely to come along. When one ceases to deal with men in large gangs or groups, and proceeds to study each workman as