Recently, Barclays walked back a new spyware program that it had begun piloting on its workers after they complained about its “Big Brother” tactics. The investment bank had contracted the services of Sapience, a Texas-based data analytics company, to intensively monitor its employees — everything from what apps they clicked on to how often they were away from their desks. Barclays’s promise to collect only anonymized, aggregated employee data in the future is a win for its employees, but the case is just the latest example of how digital tech advances are being used to perpetuate modern-day Taylorism.

Frederick Taylor’s crusade against “loafing,” which he operationalized at Bethlehem Steel at the turn of the twentieth century, was a single-minded drive to adapt labor to the needs of capital.  The resulting model of “scientific management,” also known as Taylorism, fundamentally changed labor-management relations in the United States. As Harry Braverman argued in the 1970s, “it is impossible to overestimate the importance of the scientific management movement in the shaping of the modern corporation . . .  [Taylor’s] teachings have become the bedrock of all work design.”

In the Gilded Age Taylor’s scientific management meant stopwatches and time and motion studies to determine precisely how much pig iron should be scooped into exactly what size shovel, or which direction a man should turn to pick up a part for the assembly line. In the New Gilded Age scientific management is companies like Sapience promising to “provide enriched activity data from devices across the organization and turn it into actionable information.”