Efficiency Methods
An Introduction to Scientific Management

REMUNERATION 127 by the week, day or hour ; the amount he does in the time is assumed to depend on his conscientiousness, and on the exhortation or driving of his foreman. In piece-rate he is paid so much for each operation, or piece of product turned out, and is left to make the total as large as he can in a day’s’ work. The two methods seem entirely different to an outsider, and the second seems certainly preferable if rapid work is desired. But the matter is by no means so simple. Schloss, in his valuable work on “ Methods of Industrial Remuneration ” (chiefly devoted to conditions in England) shows very plainly that there is not actually the clear-cut division between the two that appears, by definition, to exist. Under a time-wage it is usually made clear, with more or less exactitude, what is expected in a day’s work. Under a piece-rate, the rate itself has to be fixed as a preliminary settlement, the chief consideration being that a man’s weekly wage should reach a certain standard if he works hard, and should not get much beyond it. This weekly wage may be about 25 per cent, greater than the time-wage it supersedes, and is then called by the workers “ time and a quarter.” 1 It is the observation of this tacit custom, that a man’s weekly earnings should not reach more than a certain amount, which is the besetting evil of piece- rates. If the employers have fixed the rate so that a man earns quite easily an unprecedentedly large 1 Tn munition work during the war the piece-rate has risen frequently higher than this, without " cutting.”