Taking over Sir Wood's textile factory, Wickham enthusiastically renamed the factory, called "Wood Textile Mill", to "European Textile Group". The name of the new company is domineering, and even uses the word Europe, which represents a huge region, but its realization of the fixed assets of the entire group is only this small textile factory, which is really not worthy of the name.

However, the name of the new company also reflects Wickham's ambition to make the "European Textile" group an aircraft carrier for the British and even European textile industry, and become a trendsetter in the first industrial revolution.

In order to achieve his ambitions, Wickham energetically took Ruhr to live in the factory, ready to put the factory in order. Once the factory was on track according to Wickham's wishes and model, he would hand over the management of the plant to Ruhr. There are many other industries that Wickham wants to get involved in, and it is impossible to focus all his energy on textile mills.

After Wickham's observation, he found that the senior technician named Blake was a bit like a technical maniac, and he had his own set of production management and machine maintenance. But Blake has a shortcoming, that is, he does not have the characteristics of a businessman, and his grasp of the market is not too sensitive, which is why when the economic crisis came, the textile mills under his management quickly stopped production.

In order to put Blake in the right position, Wickham creatively set up the position of technical director, and let Blake be the technical director of the new factory, specializing in the production scheduling of the factory and the maintenance of machinery and equipment. As for the market development and the purchase of raw cotton, Wickham is ready to go into battle on his own, and then let Ruhr follow him for some experience.

As for the supply, Wickham contacted Bert Chelsea again, and his family's Chelsea shipping company shipped large quantities of raw cotton from the United States back to the UK every year to sell it to various textile mills as raw materials. After listening to Wickham's request, Bert agreed without saying a word, mainly because the cotton textile industry is now in a recession, many factories are in a state of semi-shutdown, and the Chelsea family, as a supplier of raw materials, has also been greatly affected. Although Wickham's new factory can't consume much raw cotton, no matter how small the mosquito is, it is still meat, and the Chelsea family has no reason to refuse.

Originally, the new technical director Blake suggested that Wickham choose Egyptian long-staple cotton as a raw material, because Egypt's long-staple cotton is rich in silk luster, the texture is very tough, and the dyeing effect is better than that of cotton produced in the United States.

However, Wickham refuted Blake's suggestion and insisted on using cotton from the southern United States. What are you kidding, now that the war between Britain and France has been ignited, and then the British Royal Navy and the French Navy will have many tug-of-war battles in the Mediterranean, the route from Egypt to Britain will become very unsafe, and when the supply of raw cotton is out of stock, who will he Wickham cry to?

The real reason for this is that Wickham didn't say it explicitly, but only explained to Blake that he didn't know the supplier who ran the Egyptian route, although Blake knew that Wickham's reason was just used to prevaricate him, but there was no way to refute it, who made the family the real boss, he was just a part-time worker.

In the following time, Wickham was not idle, he spent three full days to understand the situation, and basically got a thorough understanding of the management of this factory. Wickham was disappointed to find that the factory management system of this era was very rough, and even the small workshop-type factories in China's Pearl River Delta in later generations had a much more advanced management system than the European factories today.

In order to manage a large number of workers, most British factories at this time chose to hire a group of foremen who could "control the field" to manage the hired workers. What is a "townable" field? To put it bluntly, the factory owner spends money to invite some big men with strong bodies and fierce appearances, or even gangsters on the street, to supervise the workers in the production workshop, so as to prevent some workers from cheating and playing tricks and not contributing to work.

The work of the supervisors of these factories in the factory every day is to carry a whip around the busy workshop, and when they see a worker who is not working hard, they will go up and beat them with a whip on their heads! These overseers are usually more ruthless, and a bloody scar is a whip. And the hired workers, like animals in the fields, were allowed to do their work with their whips.

This system of overseers also existed in the wickham factory, where there were 321 textile workers, and about 12 overseers were employed by the overseers alone, and about one overseer for every 30 textile workers. The overseers were not good people, and some of them were even brought in from a nearby debt prison to beat the workers without mercy.

The result of this barbaric and rough line management model is to stifle the enthusiasm of textile workers, and the daily work is regarded as an errand, and the production efficiency of the factory and the qualified rate of products will naturally not be high.

In order to solve this problem, Wickham did not rush to start production after preparing the raw materials, but developed a relatively rough modern management system, the core of which is the "piecework floating wage system". This piecework variable wage system was proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, a master of management in the United States, in 1895, and it is also the originator of the "differential wage" system.

The so-called "differential piecework wage system" means that there are two different wage rates for the same kind of work. For those workers who complete the work in the shortest time and have high quality, it is calculated at a higher wage rate; For those workers who work long hours and are of poor quality, a lower wage rate is applied.

The introduction of this wage system requires that the results of work be calculated in a timely manner on a daily basis, that is, that the results of each worker's production are checked in a timely manner and that they be quickly counted and published, so that they can know every day how he has worked the day before, and in this way, every worker must be stimulated to work with the best of his ability.

This kind of wage system can give full play to the enthusiasm of employees, which is conducive to improving labor productivity, so that employees can work more and get more fair. Implement a differential piecework wage system, where the quantitative operation standard is met, the wage is calculated according to the high wage rate, and if it is not reached, the wage is calculated according to the low wage rate.

As a result of the implementation of the differential piecework wage system, although the factory has to pay a higher average daily wage to the workers, it can achieve higher economic benefits, which is more advantageous than the system of simple basic wage plus overproduction bonus.

After making the plan, Wickham excitedly approached Blake, the technical director who was commissioning the machinery, and handed Blake the differential piecework wage system that he had worked hard to write all morning.

Blake had studied with the parish priest for a while, and his grammar skills were quite good, so he quickly read the plan. Wickham looked at Blake with a look of hope and asked, "Blake, how are you doing with this system?" This is the pinnacle theory of Taylor, a master of management, and it is definitely an epoch-making management method in this era, and Wickham seems to have seen Blake be shocked by himself.

Unfortunately, Wickham's imagination did not come true, and Blake said with some doubts: "Mr. Wickham, there is no factory in England that adopts this method of management, and if it were not for those overseers, I don't think those sewer bugs would have done their jobs for you." ”

Blake, who had been involved in the textile industry for more than a decade, had never heard of such a novel method of management, and it was unheard of that the proposal to abolish the system of overseers and foremen that had been in England had been in place. Moreover, in Blake's eyes, the weavers were a bunch of lazy inferior people, and without the whip of the overseer, they would certainly not work honestly.

"Mr. Black, you are prejudiced against those workers, and I believe that no one will cheat if you work hard to earn more wages," said Wickham. It is important to know that these workers have many families to feed them, and if they do not earn enough shillings a day, their families will definitely go hungry. ”

These days, Wickham has made a general understanding of the textile industry, and nowadays a textile worker is paid about one shilling and three pence a day, and it is more difficult to support the family if there are many children in the family. If Wickham had introduced this new system, some hard-working workers would have been paid as much as two shillings a day, and the pressure on supporting their families would have been much less. Wickham believes that even when it comes to raising a family, those workers will work hard.

Blake scratched his head and said with some embarrassment: "Sir, I can understand the piecework salary, after all, it is more reasonable to work more." But why is it a lot more complicated to introduce a dual-wage system, in which workers are paid at different levels based on their productivity? If you insist on this system, I would suggest that you just adopt a simple piecework wage, sir, you see ......."

The compromise that Blake said was actually the ordinary piece-rate wage system of later generations, that is, the basic salary plus the piece-rate bonus for overproduction, with no upper limit at most, but Wickham from later generations was well aware of the one-sidedness of this system.

In the traditional piecework system, although workers can do more than they can get within a certain range, beyond a certain range, the factory owner has to reduce the wage rate in order to share the benefits of rapid production. In this case, despite the hard work of the workers, they can only earn a little more than the original daily wage.

This can easily lead to a situation where managers try to increase their output by doing everything possible to get workers, and workers control the speed at which they earn no more than a certain rate of wages. Because workers know that as soon as they work faster than this amount, piece-rate wages will sooner or later decrease.

In order not to fall into this strange circle, Wickham objected: "Blake, although the plan you mentioned is simpler, have you ever thought that if workers find that they work hard every day only a little more than their original daily wage, they will still be motivated to work?" ”

In a labor-intensive industry like the textile industry, the fact that simple piecework wages will cause many problems, and if the overproduction bonus is too small, it will not reflect the difference; If it is too high, it will increase the salary burden of the enterprise, and eventually increase the production cost. But differential piecework wages do not have this problem, and the high wage rate of hard workers can be fully offset by the low wage rate of lazy workers, without adding much to the cost of production. If every worker exceeds the production task with quality and quantity, the increased production efficiency can fully offset the cost inflation caused by the high wage rate. That is, no matter how the workers behave, it is good for him Wickham.

Blake has a lot of experience in the textile industry, and through Wickerham's prompting, Blake quickly figured out the key to it, and then said with admiration: "Mr. Wwickham, in this way, those workers will definitely do their best to work for you." However, what criteria are required to receive a high rate of wages needs to be carefully discussed, and must not be easily met by those workers. ”

Wickham nodded and said, "It's natural, you can do the math and set a new standard to control the proportion of workers who can receive a high wage rate at about 30 percent." "This is not Wickham's black heart, he opened a factory and did not do charity, naturally profit as the primary goal.

Blake handed over the commissioning of the equipment to the two young technicians, and then ran back to the office with an excited face to set a new pay scale.