Henry
R. Towne, and improved and made practical by Mr. F. A. Halsey. This plan
is described in papers read by Mr. Towne before The American Society of
Mechanical Engineers in 1886, and by Mr. Halsey in 1891, and has since
been criticized and ably defended in a series of articles appearing in
the "American Machinist."
The Towne-Halsey plan consists in recording the quickest time in which a
job has been done, and fixing this as a standard. If the workman
succeeds in doing the job in a shorter time, he is still paid his same
wages per hour for the time he works on the job, and in addition is
given a premium for having worked faster, consisting of from one-quarter
to one-half the difference between the wages earned and the wages
originally paid when the job was done in standard time. Mr. Halsey
recommends the payment of one third of the difference as the best
premium for most cases. The difference between this system and ordinary
piece work is that the workman on piece work gets the whole of the
difference between the actual time of a job and the standard time, while
under the Towne-Halsey plan he gets only a fraction of this difference.
It is not unusual to hear the Towne-Halsey plan referred to as
practically the same as piece work. This is far from the truth, for
while the difference between the two does not appear to a casual
observer to be great, and the general principles of the two seem to be
the same, still we all know that success or failure in many cases hinges
upon small differences.
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