CONCEPT
Soldiering
Taylor's term for workers deliberately restricting output — the practice he condemned as theft, and the framework reveals, in the AI age, as a functional adaptation whose elimination produces the unlimited-demand pathology modern knowledge work now embodies.
Soldiering was Taylor's name for what he considered the root sin of industrial inefficiency: workers deliberately producing below their capacity. He identified two causes — the fear that higher output would lead to layoffs, and the informal work norms that restricted production to a customarily sustainable level. Both, in Taylor's analysis, were failures of understanding or character. The worker who restricted output was not exercising prudence but stealing from the employer.
Scientific management would eliminate soldiering by making the scientifically determined standard visible, the incentive for
compliance clear, and the penalty for deviation unmistakable. What Taylor could not see — what his framework was designed to prevent him from seeing — was that soldiering served a function. In a world without labor laws, informal work norms were the only protection workers had against a system that would otherwise extract labor until the laborer broke. AI eliminates the possibility of soldiering and realizes the unlimited demand Taylor refused to recognize as a