overcame what they discovered was the weakness in a flat bonus.  As fair or as superior as this bonus may be in relation to the prevailing rate in the market, managers say that the workers are apt in time to fall below the standard as their work becomes routine, unless the incentive after a time is increased or changed in character.  In other words the wage incentive is like a virus injection.  The dose is not continuously effective, except as the amount is increased or altered.

A usual method of keeping alive the financial incentive is profit sharing and schemes for participation in profits, but they are rewards of general merit and bids for continuity of service; they have no direct relation to the workers’ efficiency and compliance with standards which distinguish the wage rewards of scientifically managed plants.

Promotion, the incentive second in importance to the wage incentive, is of assistance in postponing the time when the dead line for the worker is reached.  Nothing better illustrates the limitations of promotion in this respect than the fact that in factories where the turnover is the lowest, the opportunity to promote the workers decreases; it falls in proportion to the length of their term of service.  That is, chances for promotion are the lowest in factories where conditions otherwise are favorable to the worker.  In the factory where the turnover is only 18 per cent the management says that promotion is a negligible factor.  Where the turnover is high there is greater opportunity in plants scientifically managed than in others to promote men, as the scheme of organization calls for a larger number of what they call “functionalized foremen” and teachers in proportion to the working force.

It is as I have said, on account of the necessity of these positions in the general scheme that managers of factories are interested in finding more men who have initiative, than industry under their direction has produced.

Before scientific management was discovered, business management and machinery already had robbed industry of productive incentives, of the real incentive to production; a realization on the part of the worker of its social value and his appreciation of its creative content.  All that was left for scientific management to gather together for its direction were bits of experience which workers gained by their own experimental efforts at how best to handle tools.  Their efforts it is true were not sufficiently great in this direction to promise progressive industrial advance.  The margin for experiment which was still theirs was not sufficiently largo to insure continued effort inspired by an interest in the work.