Cheaper by the dozens
Working in Wisconsin in the early '70s, down by the Great Lake industrial part where I came from, you didn't come up on piecework too much. Even if you worked in a non-union shop, the unions were strong, and they insisted that you got paid by the hour. Yes, there were counters on machines, and management had quotas in mind, and you would be out if you lagged them too badly, but you got paid by the hour, not by the piece.
No one was more associated with the concept of piecework than Frederick W. Taylor. Beginning in the late 19th Century, he endeavored to apply scientific principles [most especially, the idea of measurement] to industrial tasks. He laid the foundation for the likes of Peter Drucker, and a whole nation of consultants. Time-and-motion, get the notion?
In "Frederick W. Taylor: The Father of Scientific Management - Myth and Reality" [1991] Taylor comes across as a son of the upper class, traipsing from one consultant engagement to another, stop watch in hand [or later on, stop watch somehow disguised so as not to upset the floor workers], a little humorous in his actions as he mucked about as something of an anthropologist going into the lost world of factories and loading docks.
Read the rest of the story.
Of general interest
Saturn reveals
new ring and moon - ABC, Sept 10, 2004
The
capsule with sun dust that fell to earth - Universe Today, Sept 9, 2004
Calif
sues Diebold over voting systems - news.ft.com, Sept 9, 2004
Gehry
car of the future - PopSci, July, 2004
Gehry car of the future
on display - MIT.edu
2:51:05 PM 
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