it. An industrial engineering text tells us that industrial workers paid a straight wage rate will produce only fifty or sixty percent of the output "reasonably to be expected" under an appropriate work incentive system (Vaugh, 1985, p. 367). That is, absent the effective application of stick or carrot, the workers avoid up to half the work they "should" be doing.
Yet even applying the stick or carrot is not consistently effective. The customary "incentive" alternative to straight hourly pay is piecework rates, in which workers are paid in proportion to their output. Since twice the output means twice the pay, this should theoretically be a strong incentive to workers to maximize their output. However, "workers readily circumvent management's rules as they earn more for less work" (Salvendy, 1982, p. 2.3.9). In fact, however, workers paid under piece rates often maintain an informal conspiracy to keep their own output down avoiding work even when it means accepting less pay. No one is less popular in a piece-rate shop than the overproductive "r
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