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Source: TopManagementDegrees.com

The eerie similarities of slavery management practices to modern business

The history of detailed record-keeping on plantations goes back to at least the 1750s in Jamaica and Barbados.

20: first African "indentured servants" reach Virginia, in 1619.

1660: Slavery, as an institution, is justified

Late 1700s: More than 600,000 Africans had been transported to U.S. as slaves

35,000 slaving voyages: brought 12.5 million Africans to the Americas between 1619 and 1860.

1840s: Thomas Affleck (not related to Ben): developed account books for plantation owners.

â¢ It allowed owners to measure productivity

â¢ Which allowed them to determine how far they could push workers

â¢ Could see how many pounds of cotton each slave picked, compare it to previous years

â¢ The account books reduced slaves to "human capital" â¦ as assets, rather than people

Southern plantation owners:

â¢ Many were absentee owners

â¢ Kept complex and meticulous business records

â¢ Carefully monitored their profits

â¢ Had complete control over their workers (slaves)

â¢ Didn't have to worry about turnover

â¢ They could experiment with tactics, moving workers around

â¢ They could demand higher levels of output

â¢ They could monitor what workers ate

â¢ Incentivized workers (to pick more cotton)

â¢ Encouraged honesty, doled out barrels of corn as the prize for good work, to police one another

â¢ Could measure a slave by "bales per prime hand"

â¢ A healthy male slave was considered a "hand", a child, "half a hand"

â¢ Depreciated a slave's worth through the years

4 million: number of slaves in the U.S. by 1860

7%: of Southern Whites owned slaves

2% of free Blacks in the South owned slaves

10,000 free Blacks owned 60,000 black slaves in the 1860 U.S. Census Bureau report

Slaves were considered numbers, not people; today, many corporations considers numbers, not people. HOW far have we come?

Evolution of modern management techniques: A timeline.

1911: RISE OF THE MACHINES: American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor publishes The Principles of Scientific Management, where managers think of their employees as specialized, replaceable components. [Sounds like slavery, right?]

1923: MANAGING BY COMMITTEE: General Motors and creates a decentralized bureaucracy

1938: David Packard and Bill Hewlett form Hewlett-Packard. Their supervisory style, "Management by Wandering Around," encourages bosses to leave their offices and chat with their employees

1950: Edwards Deming, a former statistician for the U.S. Census Bureau, preaches the concept of "quality management."

The basic idea: Profit comes from repeat customers, so every person in a company should be focused on making the highest-quality product possible,

1978: Transformational leadership," where a leader's job is to determine how his company and his employees can benefit society.

1990s ; Servant leadership: the main role of a leader isn't to single-handedly pursue some higher goal, but to keep his employees happy.

2001: Daniel Pink publishes Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself. Workers no longer need companies to employ them.

Even today: two H.R. approaches similar to plantation owner management:

â¢ Commodity approach: A person is treated like a commodity who can be bought or sold at a price.

â¢ Machine approach: person is treated as a part of the machine that can be fitted like any other part.

In more barbaric ways, does Plantation-like slavery, in Business still exist?

20.9 million: number of men, women and children round the world still in slavery. These people are:

â¢ forced to work – through mental or physical threat

â¢ owned or controlled by an 'employer', usually through mental or physical abuse or the threat of abuse

â¢ dehumanized, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as âproperty'

â¢ physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement.

Types of slavery today:

â¢ Bonded labor: biggest numbers in South East Asia.

â¢ Child Slavery: an estimated 5.5 million children around the world.

â¢ Early and forced marriage affects women and girls forced into lives of servitude.

â¢ Forced labor affects people who are illegally recruited by individuals, businesses or governments and forced to work.

â¢ Trafficking: transporting a person from one area to another and forcing them into slavery conditions.

Sources:

"From Slavery to Scientific Management: Capitalism and Control in America, 1754-1911," by Caitlin Rosenthal, and the forthcoming edited collection Slavery's Capitalism.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2003/10/01/353427/

http://facweb.furman.edu/~bensonlloyd/hst41/CharlesDavidsonSlaveryInTheOldSouth.htm

http://www.antislavery.org/english/slavery_today/what_is_modern_slavery.aspx

http://breakingbrown.com/2013/09/slavemasters-ran-their-plantations-exactly-the-same-as-modern-corporations/

http://www.academia.edu/2454504/HUMAN_RESOURCE_PHILOSOPHY

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/27/677592/-Why-everyone-should-study-slavery