Serving as an evolutionary step in the development of industrial labor, Frederick Taylor and his concept of Scientific Management changed the nature of factory work in many ways. One of the ways factory work changed was through the utilization of piecework labor, a system in which the amount of work a laborer produced determined their wage. Whereas factories used to set a certain wage for all workers of the same task, Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management encouraged each individual operative to fulfill a particular standard through the acceleration of their own production. Upton Sinclair portrayed such a heightened pace in his novel The Jungle:
They worked with furious intensity, literally upon the run--at a pace with which there is nothing
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For the common operative, labor became a greater personal investment than in the past. Taylor stated, “‘Under the management of initiative and incentive’ practically the whole problem is ‘up to the workman,’ while under scientific management fully one-half of the problem is ‘up to the management’” (Taylor, 1967, pg. 35-36). Because of this change in responsibility, “There [would] be no more accidents to the machines in this shop. If any part of a machine [were] broken the man in charge of it [needed to] pay at least a part of the cost of its repair” (Taylor, 1967, pg. 51). However, even though workers were more heavily involved in the factory setting, the specificity and pace at which they worked proved to be overwhelming and tiresome. Just as Sinclair described how “Jurgis, too, had a little of this sense of pride” at the sight of such productivity, he went on to ask, “Had he not just gotten a job, and become a sharer in all this activity, a cog in this marvellous machine?” (Sinclair, 1985, pg. 41). Despite these initial impressions, the “visitor realized suddenly that he had come to the home of many of the torments of his life” (Sinclair, 1985, 42-43). In contrast to these positive and negative aspects to Taylor’s Scientific Management for the laborer, the managers had their own series of