"To assess his efficiency, the store's computer takes into account everything from the kinds of merchandise he's bagging to how his customers are paying. Each week, he gets scored. If he falls below 95% of the baseline score too many times, the 185-store megastore chain, based in Walker, Mich., is likely to bounce him to a lower-paying job, or fire him."
...
"The brains behind Meijer's system is a consulting and software company known for decades as H.B. Maynard & Co., which last year became the Operations Workforce Optimization unit of Accenture Ltd. Borrowing from time-motion concepts first developed for U.S. steel mills and factory floors, it breaks down tasks such as working a cash register into quantifiable units and devises standard times to complete them, called "engineered labor standards. Then it writes software to help clients keep watch over their work forces."
The title of this post was nicked from Robert Kanigels tome about Frederick Winslow Taylor
which I read when it was originally published. If I remember correctly, the stress and monotony of the "Engineered Labor Standards" was offset by higher pay. Taylor was quoted in the book as asking a worker, "are you a high priced man?", meaning he would be well paid for the work if he met the standards. Didn't pickup that point in the article.
