Give Me A Break

A physical worker can do more work if he takes more time out for rest. Frederick Taylor demonstrated that while working as a scientific management engineer with the Bethlehem Steel Company. He observed that laboring men were loading approximately 12.5 tons of pig iron per man each day on freight cars and that they were exhausted at noon. He made a scientific study of all the fatigue factors involved, and declared that these men should be loading not 12.5 tons of pig iron per day, but 47 tons per day! He figured that they ought to do almost four times as much as they were doing, and not be exhausted. But prove it!


Taylor selected a Mr. Schmidt who was required to work by the stopwatch. Schmidt was told by the man who stood over him with a watch, “Now pick up a ‘pig’ and walk…Now sit down and rest…Now walk…Now rest.”

What happened? Schmidt carried 47 tons of pig iron each day while the other men carried only 12.5 tons per man. And he practically never failed to work at this pace during the three years that Frederick Taylor was at Bethlehem. Schmidt was able to do this because he rested before he got tired. He rested more that he worked – yet he did almost four times as much work as the others!