Shop Management

SHOP MANAGEMENT 51 dated into giving it up. In many cases they were given other work by those interested in preventing piece work, at wages higher than the ruling wages. In the meantime, however, the first man who started on the work earned steadily $1.85 per day, and this object lesson gradually wore out the con- certed opposition, which ceased rather suddenly after about two months. From this time on there was no difficulty in getting plenty of good men who were anxious to start on piece work, and the diffi- culty lay in making with sufficient rapidity the accu- rate time study of the elementary operations or “unit times” which forms the foundation of this kind of piece work. Throughout the introduction of piece work, when after a thorough time study. a new section of the work was started, one man only was put on each new job, and not more than one man was allowed to work at it until he had demonstrated that the task set was a fair one by earning an average of $1.85 per day. After a few sections of the work had been started in this way, the complaint on the part of the better workmen was that they were not allowed to go on to piece work fast enough. It required about two years to transfer practically all of the yard labor from day to piece work. And the larger part of the transfer was made during the last six months of this time. As stated above, the greater part of the time was taken up in studying “unit times,” and this time study was greatly delayed by having successively the two leading men who had been trained to the