Piecework production is a manner of delivering products or their constituents where labor compensation is commensurate with output: number of produced pieces or objects. The apparel industry used piecework notoriously as workers were remunerated for sewing buttons, cutting fabric patterns or for the number of pieces of clothing they were able to produce. Basing payment on yield seems beneficial to both workers and employers as the efficient link between output and productivity frames supply chains. Conversely, it can also lead to workers obsessively toiling to increase earnings while discounting quality and neglecting their own working conditions; quantity becomes the dominant and only metric for performance.
Piecework theory also exists in construction as trades and general contractors sometimes outline contracts and purchase orders based on square footage, on the installation of piping, wiring, bricks or the supply of any other building assembly. The clear standard for compensation, theoretically stimulates a more productive workforce. Sometimes associated with industrialization, piecework does not necessarily involve mechanization or mass production as artisans usually worked on piecework payment in preindustrial society; yield for payment, a legacy of rudimentary barter systems.
Pieces can also be fragments of an overall process, and in this way, piecework usually refers to a Taylor inspired division of tasks where each hand’s contribution is essential to building a whole. Piecework in architecture can be elegantly elucidated by a building process and material invented by perhaps the greatest engineer / builder of the twentieth century, Pier-Luigi Nervi. In the Sistema Nervi, pieces (tiles) were conceived as permanent formwork to array geometric molds for large spanning structures assembled from small manageable parts. These man-made tiles could be manufactured à pied d’oeuvre (an example of near-site prefabrication) and commanded a large manual workforce making individual tiles «tavelloni» that once juxtaposed, stitched, and filled with concrete fashioned a monolithic ribbed structural thickness. The laborer’s hand imprinted each tile as the ferrocement shapes were made by troweling and pressing cement-based mortar into multiple layers of mesh over a wooden mold. This type of piecework assembly process helped shape some of the most beautiful architectural structures of twentieth century modernism in Italy and around the world.
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| Small Sports Palace in Rome (1957), Pier Luigi Nervi, during construction (source : wiki commons) |
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