Italian Rag Picker Summary

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Recommended: Principles of frederick taylor

In his paper The Principles of Scientific Management published in 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor proposes an alternative system of management designed to promote efficiency. Within his opening argument, Taylor describes the ideal relationship between the employee and employer:

Scientific management has for its very foundation the firm conviction that the true interests of the employees and employers are one and the same; that prosperity for the employer cannot exist through a long term of years unless it is accompanied by prosperity for the employee, and vice versa. (Taylor, 1-2)

Taylor then details sources of inefficiency before describing “personal cooperation” as the condition which will “enable the employee to do his work better …show more content…

The photograph captures a middle-aged woman wearing an off-white apron holding her young child, who has been wrapped in multiple layers to keep warm. The woman looks into the distance beyond the photographer with pain and despair in her eyes while her child looks at his or her mother as if asking to be held tightener. This relationship between the woman and her child mimics the biblical relationship between the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child portrayed during the Italian and Northern Renaissance. Moving beyond the central figures of the photograph, the pair are surrounded the rag-picker’s treasures including barrels of supplies, sacks of food, pillows, and pots for cooking on the surface shown to the right. The room in which Riis captures the mother and child also has no windows or decorative objects, and thus highlights the importance of each object for basic survival. In conclusion, In the Home of an Italian Rag-Picker highlights the experience Riis aims to portray in his project to show the “system that was the evil offspring of public neglect and private greed” (Riis, 1). For our purposes, Riis employs the woman and her child to represent life in the New York tenements under the system of scientific management which brought “public neglect and private greed” into residential

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