in school are trained.  They are trained in routine, and to do each task as it is given.  This is not education, it is training to do tricks.  The worker does not take over what can be called experience from one task to another.  He forms certain motor habits, called skill.  But under the efficient methods of scientific management the acquirement of this skill is robbed even of the educational value that it had under the unscientific method of factory work, which within its limited field, left the worker to discover by trial and error what were the best methods of getting results.  Moreover, the standards of workmanship which scientific management sets up are not the worker’s own standards; he has had no part in the making of them or in deciding on the comparative merits of the results.  He accomplishes the results as he follows directions, not for the sake of the result, not for the sake of good workmanship, but for the reward.

As I have said scientific management has given the subject of incentives the same careful thought that it has given to the study of lost energy.  The two important incentives for inducing the response of labor to productive enterprises which scientific management has carried forward in their applications, are wages and promotion.  The general assumption is that the wage as an incentive has no limitations, except the physical limitation of a human being in response to stimulus.  And surely it is true that the chance to “make money” is to-day the most powerful stimulus in use.  But thoughtful managers of industrial enterprise tell you, incredible as it may seem, that the worker’s objection to applying himself to his task is not invariably overcome by anticipation of the wage return; he will slack or be perverse or throw over a job in the face of opportunities to earn as good a wage or a better one than he can get elsewhere.  It is well known that workers joint unions in the face of opposition of employers and at the risk of losing permanent positions.

A resourceful manager in one of the most intelligently managed plants in the United States told me that women were less susceptible than men to the wage incentive.  He found that many of them are content when their wage covers a sum which represents for them their personal requirements; that they cannot interest them in trying for more.  On that account the manager takes up the case of the individual girl to see if her ambition to earn more money cannot be stimulated.  They find sometimes that a mother requires her daughter to give in her whole wage at the end of the week and that the girl has no pleasure in the spending of it; they visit the mother and persuade her to let the girl keep a proportion of her wage and point out to the mother that she is limiting the girl’s ambition.  They also find girls who have entire control over the spending of their wages, who are without ambition to earn over and above a certain sum because that sum will meet their own recognized needs.  The