Business: America the Inefficient

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than no output at all." Chrysler President Virgil Boyd adds that "one of the biggest problems is Monday absenteeism—the fellow who works two weeks and decides to take a long weekend." Detroit's worst lemons are usually found among cars built on a Monday because they are often put together by inexperienced substitute workers and veterans nursing hangovers.

Status and Sabotage

Workers also insist on more leisure on the job itself—or what auto executives call "goof-off time." Local unions have sometimes called strikes over demands for slowing down assembly lines in order to allow workers more minutes each hour to stretch and gossip. Inefficiency, in the form of less productivity, becomes a formal contract goal. G.M. in particular has been hurt by walkouts over goof-off time and by wildcat strikes that occur with uncanny regularity just as the salmon-fishing or deer-hunting seasons begin. The trend of the times is echoed in Simon & Garfunkel's Feelin' Groovy:

Slow down. You move too fast.

You got to make the morning last . . .

That is precisely the spirit that the first of the stopwatch-toting efficiency experts, Frederick Winslow Taylor, condemned in 1911 as "the greatest evil with which the working people are now afflicted." In a yard where laborers were loading 12½ tons of pig iron each aboard flatcars every day, he taught one worker named Schmidt to load 47½ tons by changing the movements he used to lift the 92-lb. bars and the speed at which he walked to the flatcar.* Taylor's ideas were expanded by Frank Gilbreth, who contended that there must be "one best way" of doing everything. In a book, Cheaper by the Dozen, two of his twelve children recalled the living-room drills at which Gilbreth, fully clothed, demonstrated the proper movements for taking a bath. The modern followers of Taylor and Gilbreth have gone beyond time-and-motion study to give advice on plant design and quality-control standards.

They have a tough job on their hands. Some workers actively sabotage efficiency. A New Jersey-based oil company, for instance, once installed a $750,000 computer system to keep track of inventory and automatically reorder supplies. Within a few months the company was inundated by unneeded pipes, parts and paper. The reason, one manager recalls, was that "every foreman saw the system as detracting from his authority and adding more red tape. The foremen, I suspect, began faking shortages so the computer would reorder." The computer system was junked.

Many people, like the foremen, view efficiency as a threat to their status. Universities often operate at peak capacity only between 8 a.m. and noon, certainly an inefficient use of their buildings and their students' time. Senior faculty members, says Dr. E. Lee McLean, an adviser to several universities, consider that being asked to teach five days a week or during afternoons is an offense against professorial dignity. Factory workers in Flint, Mich., turned a cold shoulder to a bus line that offered to pick them up at their homes and drop them off at plant gates. The workers figured that men who could not drive their own cars to the plant were second-class citizens.

In the offices of business and government, executives often mistake the appearance of efficiency for its reality.