When Workers Won’t Work: How Scientists, Employers, and Social Reformers Understood and Sought Remedies for Industrial Fatigue and Other Workplace Afflictions, 1910-1940

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the history of attempts to ameliorate fatigue and other workplace afflictions in the US in the first half of the twentieth century. Bringing together labor history, business history, and the history of science, this dissertation traces how three communities of researchers attempted to apply the emerging sciences of (I) physiology, (II) time and motion, and (III) mind to measure and resolve the intractable problem of industrial fatigue and related workplace maladies. The third group of researchers, championing a mental approach, succeeded in demonstrating, at least to the business community, that the science of studying workers’ minds, rather than their physiology or time and motion, was the key to resolving the labor problem. I argue how, in this process, these scientific approaches invented to wrangle the condition of fatigue sometimes amplified it, transforming fatigue study from a reform-minded initiative to protect workers’ health to a tool for capital to better command its workforce. By using science to pathologize the mental roots of fatigue, researchers promised industry a method for ensuring peaceful workplaces free from discontent and transformed industrial life. As workers variously resisted, sabotaged, and acquiesced to these new initiatives to scientifically collect data about their behaviors, minds, and bodies, they left behind a history of how workers experienced and responded to technological transformations at work.