The Pennsylvania engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote in 1911 that the typical iron worker was as dumb as an ox, and that people who had repetitive jobs worked at the slowest rate they could get away with. Taylor came up with a system for tasks to be broken down to simple parts that didn't require any thought. Thought would be left to the supervisors. This is what is now known as Taylorism.

In an article a few years ago, Adria Scharf, co-editor of Dollars & Sense compared today's scripts -- 'thank you for calling ___, how may I help you?' and others found in a call center -- to yesterday's Taylorism: "Scripted talk is more than just an annoying quirk of the modern service economy. It represents a deep form of managerial control -- a regimentation of the labor process so total that it extends even to speech. Scripts are a fact of life for retail and service workers whose employers make use of a time-worn early-20th century managerial strategy: Taylorism."

But aren't scripts necessary to keep agents and other workers efficient and consistent? Or are they really a modern-day Taylorism, a system that assumes workers are dim-witted and lazy?

In January, we reported that Lloyds TSB, the UK bank, found that scripts annoyed customers who called its information line. Nine out of ten callers didn't like scripts. Further, 60% of callers didn't feel like their questions were answered and 55% said they weren't being listened to when scripts were used.

Scharf says the scripted call (and even the recorded/monitored call) is often bad for morale. The Communications Workers of America union says that monitoring should only be used for targeting training, never for punishment.

Studies by Cornell economist Rosemary Batt showed that when call centers used self-managed teams, they performed better than groups with rigid oversight. What do you think? Tell us.