When we have taken into full account the repressive effect of scientific management on initiative, we may well admit an advantage:  educationally speaking, the repression is direct.  The workers are fully aware that they are doing what some one else requires of them.  They are not under the delusion that they are acting on their own initiative.  They are being managed and they know it and all things being equal (which they are not) they do not like it.  The responsibility they may clearly see and feel rests with them to find a better scheme for carrying industry forward.  The methods of scientific management are calculated to incite not only open criticism from the workers but to suggest that efficient industry is a matter of learning, and that learning is a game at which all can play, if the opportunity is provided.

Scientific managers have hoped that their plans to conserve energy and increase the wage in relation to expenditure of energy would meet little opposition.  They also have hoped that the paternalistic feature of welfare work would allay opposition.  But I am not inclined to include the welfare schemes in a consideration of scientific management; they have little light to throw on what educational significance there is in the efficiency methods which scientific management has introduced in industry.  The playgrounds attached to factories, the indoor provisions for social activity, the clubs, while not having an acknowledged relation to the scientific management of the factory and while repudiated by some managers, are a common feature of plants which claim to be scientifically managed.  There are scientifically managed plants which object to the recreational and other features which have to do with matters outside the province of the factory, on the ground that it is a meddling with the personal side of people’s lives.  “A baseball game connected with the factory,” said the educational manager of a certain plant, “has the effect of limiting the workers’ contacts; it is much better for them, as it is for every one, not to narrow their relationships to a small group, but to play ball with the people of the town.”  It is significant that this concern deals with the union and conforms to its regulations.  Whether this more generous concept of the workers’ lives yields more in manufactured goods than one that confines the activity of the workers to the factory in which they labor, scientific management, so far as I know, has not discovered.

The very nature of the welfare schemes suggests that they are inspired more out of fear of the workers’ freedom of contact than launched on account of comparative findings which relate strictly to the economy of labor power.  The policy of leaving the workers free, it was clear in the instance just cited, had been adopted out of a personal preference for freedom in relationships.  The introduction of clinics, rest rooms, restaurants, sanitary provisions, and all arrangements relating directly to the workers’ health have a bearing on efficiency and productivity which is well recognized and probably universally endorsed by efficiency managers, even if they are not invariably adopted.