Frederick Winslow Taylor, an engineer from Philadelphia, devised what he called a Time and Motion Study. His idea was to conduct studies on the exact motions required by someone to complete a task. Then, the motions were studied to determine ways to improve upon them in order to increase their efficiency to decrease the time required to complete the task. By decreasing the required time to complete the task, the task could be repeated more times in a given time to increase production.

Taylor’s study was the basis of what became known as Scientific Management. Oxford Reference describes it in the following way:

“The key principles were: Managers should take full responsibility for the planning of work and should used scientific methods to specify precisely how the job should be done to achieve the maximum efficiency. Managers should select the most appropriate person for the job, then train them to the job efficiently, and monitor their performance to ensure conformity to the specification.”

Scientific management is credited with increasing productivity enormously, Oxford Reference states, but only at the cost of deskilling many areas of work.

There was little worry in that regard as far as the Lake Superior copper mine managers were concerned; tramming was not skilled work to begin with, so increasing the efficiency — and the number of tramcars that could be filled and pushed in a 10-12 hour shift was an excellent place to apply scientific management — or so they thought. What soon became apparent was that what the theory did was more to dehumanize workers than increase their productivity.

Many of the Lake Superior copper mines were quick to adopt this new idea. The consequences of scientific management, which came to be referred to as “Taylorism,” included the thousands of workers leaving the trade; the 1913 strike, led by the Western Federation of Miners; and costs to companies in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Almost two years to the day after the strike began, Volume 111 of the Mining and Scientific Press, contained an article, Efficiency Engineering in the Copper Country, authored by P.B. McDonald.

The July 24, 1915 article stated that efficiency in every phase of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company and its subsidiaries underwent the most thorough and minute scrutiny, including:

“– drilling, blasting, ‘mucking,’ tramming, timbering, coordination of work, mechanical aids, improving rock drills, care of old stopes, disposal of waste rock, tailings, etc.”

Observers with pencil, paper, and watches standardized all movements of the miners, McDonald wrote. New varieties of drills of various weights, styles, and with different pressures of air, were tried and advantages of each were recorded.

“Soon a regular staff of efficiency engineers was on on hand in all the Calumet & Hecla mines,” reported McDonald, “many of them college men who had been trained for their work by an apprenticeship at the Superior mine.”

After months of studies, the cost of drifting had been reduced by 60%, although stoping defied scientific management due to its nature. Drifting, McDonald wrote, provided opportunities for measuring what each man accomplished and lent itself to standardization due to the self-contained and comparatively simple nature of the advance of the drift.

The major drawback to these endless time and motion studies was that the men underground were quickly getting fed up with them.

While the “efficiency engineers” had been trained to study how the most productive workers did their work, they apparently had not been trained in the variations of circumstances unique to different work stations inherent to various parts of the mines. In their drive to determine ways to squeeze the utmost production from men in a 10-to-12-hour shift, their studies failed to take human physical limitations into account. While new, more powerful mechanical drills could go on banging away into a rock face at a continual pace after extended hours of use, the men operating them could not.

Similarly, as lighter, more powerful drills were studied, so were newer, larger tramcars with lower sides, but larger decks that could hold far more rock; their lower sides permitted them to be filled more quickly than the older cars. The result was that Taylorism came to expect that men could load larger cars faster, increase the number of trips they could make to the shaft and back, without considering the endurance limits of the men doing the work.

What began as an experiment in increasing efficiency and production quickly became just a means of forcing men to work faster and harder throughout a 10-hour shift.

Patrick Dunnigan summed it up fairly well when he testified before a subcommittee of a Federal investigation into conditions of the Lake Superior copper mines in 1914.

Dunnigan had worked as a miner at the Ahmeek mine for nine years when he went out on strike on July 23, 1913.

In 1911, he trammed at Champion mine, in Painesdale where, he testified, getting 14 or 15 cars to the shaft in a shift was acceptable. At some point, the quota was increased to 20 tram loads. When the quota was met, it was again increased to 22 loads.

When he quit Champion and found work at the Ahmeek, the quota there was 9-10 loads. The company brought in larger tramcars and the quota was increased to 14, then continued to increase until the quota reached 52 tramcar loads per day, with two trammers on one car. Dunnigan testified further that the tram bosses began demanding 61 loads, then tried to demand 70.

William J. Rickard, president of the Calumet Local of the Western Federation of Miners, was a principle leader of the rioting in Calumet on the opening day of the strike on July 23. He also testified before the subcommittee.

He said that when he worked at the Quincy mine, several years before the strike, he worked on a drill machine. The quota was five holes drilled in a shift, then the quota increased to eight holes per shift. Likewise, he testified, trammers who were hauling 18 carloads per shift were then demanded to haul 20, 23 or 24 loads, then as high as 30.

“The men say they cannot stand it,” Rickard said. “They’re working that hard that they cannot stand it and they refuse to do it anymore.”

Chairman Congressmen Taylor rephrased Rickard’s statement.

“As I understand, in general words,” Taylor replied, “if I may put it in my own language, the men complain that the company fails to recognize the human equation in this work and ignore the human side of the conditions under which the men work?”

Rickard spoke for every union member and striker when he replied yes, Taylor understood the situation.