The workers have resisted machinery not only because as individuals they were thrown, out of jobs for a time or lost them permanently, but because the machine imposed on them a method of work, of activity over which they had no control.  Scientific management has undertaken to gather up whatever bits of initiative the machine had not already taken over and to hand back to the workers at the bench directions for them to follow with a blind ability to accept instruction.  It is incredible to factory managers that workers object to being taught “right” ways of doing things.  Their objection is not to being taught, but to being told that some one way is right without having had the chance to know why, or whether indeed it is the right way.  This resistance to being taught, it seems, is nothing more nor less than a wayward desire of a worker to do his own way because it is his way, and of course from the managers’ point of view, that is stupid.  It is stupid, but the stupidity is in the situation.  What does this waywardness of the worker to do his own way suggest?  Not that he has a way worth bothering about but that he wants to exercise the quality which all industrial managers agree he does not possess—­his initiative.  Now a man who has the desire to exercise initiative and does not know how to put anything through is not only a useless person in society but the most pestiferous fellow in existence.  Allowing that he is does not mean that he has not the power of initiative or that he could not have learned to put this initiative to good use, if at any time in his manhood or youth he had been taught to use it, instead of being required to follow the accepted ways of doing things without having had the experience of trial and error.  Schools and factory management give workers scant opportunity to discover whether they have initiative or have not.

Mr. Wolf finds that “while it is possible, under certain conditions, to compel obedience, there is no possible way in which a man can be compelled to do his work willingly and when he does it unwillingly he is far from being efficient.  He must have the opportunity to enjoy his work and realize himself in its performance.”  “In our plant,” he remarks, “we never made it a practice to determine arbitrarily standard methods for performing an operation, for we believe that the men who are actually doing the work have generally as much to contribute as the foremen and department heads in deciding standard practices; and because we give the workman the chance to have the most to say about the matter, he is willing to conform to the standard, because it really represents a concensus of opinion of the men in his particular group.”  It is significant in this connection to remember that he does not pay the men by special methods to get the return.  “I am not necessarily opposed to piece work or task and bonus methods of payment....  We have been able to obtain splendid results without resorting to a system of immediate money rewards.”  He thinks it is better to pay the workers liberally so that they “can forget this economic pressure and do good work because of the joy that comes from the consciousness of work well done.”