From Clock Punch to Cold Sandwich: How Taylorism, Tabulating Machines, and Ronald Reagan Ruined Your Lunch Break

 


It all starts in the late 19th century with a man named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who—as far as we know—never ruined a lunch break personally, but very much laid the groundwork for it. Taylor believed that workers were inefficient because they thought too much. His solution? Strip away thinking. Break every task into its tiniest parts. Time them. Measure them. Optimize them.

This was called scientific management, and it promised to make factories as efficient as Swiss watches. Instead of “working hard,” people were now expected to “work smart”—except they weren’t the ones defining “smart.” Managers did that, with stopwatches and clipboards.

Now, leap forward a few decades to the dawn of computing. Enter Herman Hollerith, whose punch card tabulating machines revolutionized data processing. His machines helped organize everything from the U.S. census to, eventually, IBM’s early business systems.

Put Taylorism and Hollerith together, and you get something powerful: the dream of a fully rationalized workplace—one where behavior could be tracked, evaluated, and optimized in real time. Sound familiar?

By the 1950s, corporate America was obsessed with time-motion studies, workflow charts, and boosting productivity. But there was still a catch: people still had to eat.

Enter the lunch break—a relic of the old industrial model. It was protected, institutionalized, even sacred in some countries (looking at you, France). But in America, especially by the late 20th century, it started to look... inefficient.

Then came Reagan.

With Reaganism came deregulation, union busting, and a gleeful embrace of neoliberal capitalism. The public good? Out. Individual responsibility? In. If you were poor, it was because you weren’t working hard enough. If you were tired, you should get a coffee. If you wanted lunch, you’d better eat it at your desk.

Suddenly, the idea of taking a lunch break became a sign of laziness. A weakness. In some places, it vanished entirely. After all, productivity was now god, and your body was just a slightly leaky machine.

And here’s where it all ties up: a man with a stopwatch in the 1880s, a punch card in the 1890s, a mainframe in the 1950s, and a president in the 1980s—each one shaving a little more humanity off your workday.

So the next time you’re chewing a protein bar while answering emails, remember: it took over a century of "progress" to make that sad little lunch possible.

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