Archive:Reconstructing the economy after World War I

World War 1 had so weakened the traditional European powers that newcomers and rival Japan, India, the United States Australia and Canada flourished in their place. At the same time the war had forced many European manufacturers to become more efficient and had expanded the demand for automotive and air transport, electrical products, and synthetic goods. The prewar pattern of mergers and cartels continued after 1918, giving rise to gigantic food processing firms such as Nestle in Switzerland and petroleum enterprises such as Royal Dutch Shell. Owners of these large manufacturing conglomerates wielded more financial and political power than entire small countries. By the late 1920s, Europe had overcome the wild economic swings of the immediate postwar years and was enjoying renewed economic prosperity

European businesspeople acknowledged that the United States had vecome the trendsetter in economic modernization and they made pilgrimages to the Ford Motor Companyes Detroit assimbly line which by 1929 produced a Ford automobile every ten seconds. Increased productivity, founder Henry Ford pointed out, resulted in a lower cost of living and thus increased workers' purchasing power. American workers could afford such expensive goods as cars: whereas French, German, and British citizens in total had fewer than two million cars, some seventeen million cars were on U.S. streets in 1925.

Scientific management also aimed to raise productivity. American efficiency expert Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) developed methods to streamline workers' tasks and motions for maximum productivity. European industrialists adopted Taylor's methods during the war and after, but they were also influenced by European psychologists who emphasized the mental aspects of productivity and the need to balance of work and leisure activities, for both workers and managers. In theory, increased productivity not only produced prosperity for all but also aimed to bind workers and management together, avoiding Russian style worker revolution. Streamlining helped reduce working hours in many industries, causing union leaders to embrace modernization and the "cult of efficiancy." For many workers, however the emphasis on efficiency seemed inhuman, with restrictions so severe that often they were allowed to use the bathroom only on a fixed schedule. "When I left the factory it followed me," wrote one worker. "In my dreams I was a machine."

The managerial sector in industry had expanded during the war and continued to do so thereafter. Workers' initiative became devalued, with managers alone seen as creative and innovative. Managers reorganized work procedures and classified workers' skills. They categorized "female" jobs as those reuiring less skill and therefore deserving of lower wages, thus adapting the old segrementation of the labor market to the new working conditions. With male workers' jobs increasingly threatened by labor saving machinery, unions usually agreed that women should receive lower wages to keep them from competing with men for scarce high paying jobs. Like the managerial sector a complex union bureaucracy had ballooned during World War I to help monitor labor's part in th ewar. Plaing a key role in everyday political life, unions could mobilize masses of people for displays of worker power such as stopping the coups against the Weimar government in the 1920s and organizing the 1926 general strike in Great Britain.