Emil Lederer’s essay, originally published in 1914 under the title Die ökonomische und sozialpolitische Bedeutung des Taylorsystems and republished in 2011 under the title above, examines Taylorism’s consequences for employment, class relations, and labor organization. Its central question is not whether individual firms can increase efficiency, but what happens when organizational rationalization spreads throughout industry. Lederer presents this systemic approach as a corrective to partial criticism:
Wo man eine Kritik des Systems findet, knüpft sie an das eine oder andere Moment an, ohne es in allen seinen Konsequenzen zu untersuchen.
English translation: Wherever one finds a critique of the system, it attaches itself to one or another particular aspect, without examining it in all its consequences.
The analysis takes Taylor’s productivity claims as premises rather than independently verifying them. Its decisive distinction is between mechanization and the reorganization of labor using existing equipment. Mechanization spreads through investment and creates employment in machine manufacture and factory construction, partly compensating for the workers it displaces. Its diffusion also faces financial constraints:
Zunächst das Tempo: Dieses hängt doch sehr stark ab von der Möglichkeit der einzelnen Unternehmen, investieren zu können.
English translation: First the pace: this depends after all very strongly on the ability of the individual firms to invest.
Taylorism, by contrast, could multiply output rapidly without requiring comparable preparatory production. Lederer therefore treats the speed and employment effects of organizational change as economically distinct from those of machinery. Increased productive capacity does not automatically generate the purchasing power needed to absorb its output.
Das Taylorprinzip, einmal in der Industrie durchgeführt, bringt zunächst vervielfachte Produktionsmassen und damit sinkende Preise.
English translation: The Taylor principle, once carried through in industry, brings at first multiplied volumes of production and with them falling prices.
Falling prices do not resolve the distributional problem by themselves. In Lederer’s initially closed-economy argument, rationalization threatens unemployment, unsold production, and crisis because it neither creates equivalent employment elsewhere nor ensures corresponding demand. Exports can exploit existing foreign purchasing power but do not themselves create it. Adoption during depression is particularly dangerous: what offers an individual enterprise a means of reducing costs can deepen aggregate displacement.
Sie bedeutet daher in hohem Maße Freisetzung der Arbeitskraft, ohne daß auf einer anderen Stelle des Wirtschaftslebens eine Kompensation dieser Wirkungen erfolgen könnte.
English translation: It therefore means to a high degree the release of labor power, without any compensation for these effects being able to take place at another point in economic life.
This uncompensated release of labor connects the economic argument to the social analysis. Taylorism intensifies work and substitutes narrowly trained capacities for craft qualifications. Initial wage increases remain vulnerable to unemployment and employers’ strengthened bargaining position. Once maximum exertion becomes the expected standard, further improvements in wages and working time also encounter obstacles.
The erosion of occupational distinctions has contradictory consequences. It encourages identification with workers across trades while weakening the craft organizations through which particular groups have defended their interests. Industrial unions become more appropriate to the integrated enterprise, where the conditions of separate occupations can no longer be negotiated independently. Yet restructuring requires redistribution of members and resources, and organizational concentration does not necessarily yield greater bargaining power.
Lederer interprets union hesitation partly through an ideological commitment to technical progress. Socialist and other labor traditions often assume that rising productivity ultimately benefits workers. Taylorism challenges that confidence by showing how productive development can strengthen employers without improving workers’ position. A more voluntarist orientation would judge change through present interests and ultimate aims instead of accepting its direction as inherently progressive. Industrial organization could consequently encourage syndicalist aspirations, while the conversion of management into a replaceable salaried function makes collective control more conceivable. Neither development, however, guarantees effective resistance.
The concluding argument differentiates the interests of unions, socialist parties, and consumer cooperatives. Parties may welcome increased productivity as preparation for socialism, while renewed impoverishment can strengthen revolutionary interpretations and enhance political organization relative to trade-union action. Cooperatives face competitive pressure to rationalize, but their savings can return productivity gains directly to consumers. This comparison locates the problem in ownership, distribution, and power rather than in productive abundance itself. Taylorism thus exposes tensions among institutions with overlapping memberships: technical change can transform the labor movement’s organizational foundations without ensuring that workers share its benefits.
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