Efficiency Methods
An Introduction to Scientific Management

REMUNERATION jßj However, it is everywhere admitted that the time- wage brings no incentive to increase the amount of work. The usual form taken by an attempt to com- promise between time-wage and piece-rate, each alone having proved unsatisfactory, is to assure some sort of minimum time-wage to a worker, and then to draw up a system of rewarding him for extra exertion, measured naturally in terms of greater out- put, or of shorter time taken. As the extra amount done must be the basis of this system, the arrange- ment will be something resembling a piece-rate. Schloss calls these “ time-wage and piece-rate ” systems, or, generally, “ progressive wages.” The more modern name for them is “ premium-bonus systems.” Taylor gave in his original paper1 a critical account of an American system of the kind first used by Mr. Towne in 1886, and elaborated by Mr. Halsey, who read a paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers on it in 1891. Schloss des- cribes the Towne-Halsey method, and an English one, used by Messrs. Willans and Robinson at Rugby, which is on rather different lines. The methods of calculation of the bonus are complicated, so we shall not describe them in detail. The essential in each scheme is to fix some standard amount of work or standard time first, and then fix the reward for saving time or doing more work, whichever it is. It is somewhat interesting to study the adminis- 1 Also in " Shop Management, ” p. 38, et seq.