Efficiency Methods
An Introduction to Scientific Management

CHAPTER XIV SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT AND WELFARE WORK The movement among employers towards amelior- ating the conditions under which employés work has gradually taken form and driving force during the epoch in which Taylor’s ideas have also been taking root. It is not, therefore, surprising to find that his own writings, especially those best known, contain very little trace of welfare development, or Industrial Betterment, as it is more usually called in America, Still, experiments in making general workshop conditions much more comfortable date much further back than Taylor’s essays, both in America and in England, though the general move- ment in imitation of these experiments (which have on the whole proved very successful), is compara- tively new. In England the promulgation and furthering of welfare work has, of course, received an extraordinary impetus since the war. There are two main reasons for this. First, the conditions under which women work are matters on which public sentiment is always more active than when men are concerned ; and many employers, feeling the sentiment themselves, and anxious to demon- strate to the public that they feel it, have proceeded 150