Norma Rae

One of the managers of the factory makes her feel as if her demands have paid off and offers her a promotion to be a "spot checker." She accepts the promotion and soon has to record how efficient everyone is doing their jobs. Her former coworkers are now resentful of her because the managers laid off all of the inefficient employees. She then moves back down to her former position and contacts Ruben about organizing a union. .
             Ruben and Norma begin to contact other employees to tell them about the union. She marries a former coworker (Beau Bridges character) who expects her to do all of the chores that women are "supposed" to do. The managers go on the offensive to quell labor movement by starting a smear campaign on Norma Rae, and posting a notice saying that African Americans are planning to take over the union. Norma writes down the notice to give to Ruben but is fired by the managers for "making a personal phone call on company time." This seems to be an excuse to fire her for trying to organize a union. She walks out stands up on a table in protest. This galvanizes the rest of the workers and they stop working. At the end of the film, we learn that the workers voted for a union. .
             "Scientific Management is an attempt to apply the methods of science to the increasingly complex problems of the control of labor in rapidly growing capitalist enterprises (Braverman 86)." It investigates the adaptation of labor to the needs of capital. According to Taylor, there are three distinctive principles to scientific management which are the dissociation of the labor process from the skills of the workers, the separation of conception from execution and the use of the monopoly over knowledge to control each step of the labor process and its mode of execution (Braverman). Each principle is demonstrated in the factory setting in Norma Rae.
             The dissociation of the labor process from the skills of the workers is referenced in the movie multiple times.