While I'm glad that this experiment was done, because it resulted in better conditions for the factory workers, it bothers me that experiments like this are necessary in the first place. I get that managers and owners, qua managers and owners, are concerned with maximizing productivity, but it should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of humanity and common sense that productivity will increase when labourers are treated as human beings, with basic needs being met for their general welfare, rather than as beasts of burden.
Color me unimpressed at the discovery that productivity increases when workers have something as luxurious as proper lighting and air circulation so that sweat isn't pouring down their faces while they're sewing blue jeans for H&M with the utmost concentration lest they break their finger or hand in a machine.
Putting it in terms of cost & productivity is very clinical, very inhuman, but it's also virtually unassailable. Nobody will argue "We should continue to treat people badly and make less money". So to me it seems like the gold standard result. You don't have to argue ethics, morals, or worry about people cheating. Because you've just made humane treatment of workers economically rational.
You've missed my point. I'm not saying that putting it in terms of cost and productivity isn't virtually unassailable. I'm saying that it's ridiculous that this experiment was necessary to convince management that ensuring the basic welfare of its workforce would improve that productivity.
Just as it's obvious that productivity isn't maximized if workers aren't permitted to sleep or eat lunch (and we don't really need studies to know that), so it should be obvious that productivity isn't maximized when working conditions include stifling heat with no air circulation while you're at risk of maiming yourself at a sewing machine. This is a sweat shop we are talking about.
I've explicitly couched my comments in terms of worker productivity, so I'm not exactly talking about ethics. But ethics is certainly the subtext here, because I think it's obvious that humans perform and live better when they're treated the way they ought to be treated, with their basic needs being met.
Commonsense ethical rules aren't arbitrary; it isn't a coincidence that people fare badly, and perform poorly, when they are treated badly and are made to work and live in squalor.
I would go on a limb an say you have never been to India?
I'll let someone else play hobby-anthropologist as to the reasons why, but complete disregard to the plights of the poor is rampant among the middle and higher class Indians.
I'll take the armchair anthropologist bait. It's rampant because there are so many of us.
If you see a homeless man rotting away, your heart goes out to him. If you see ten thousand of them, then...meh. Human empathy is finite unfortunately, and available in vanishing quantities among the Indian rich. The Indian rich are vile in a way that cannot be adequately described in words. Those of us who've made it outside India and are living abroad often like to discuss the vast differences in the value of life in the west vs east, and also the much higher dignity of labour.
Perhaps the problem lies with how our culture views the company as a “machine” (in a metaphorical sense) whose only purpose is to produce some useful output. All that matters is how can you tweak or modify the machine to be more productive or less costly to operate. People in this world view are simply the metaphorical cogs (preferably interchangeable ones). It would be silly to care about a cog the way you would your significant other or even your pet.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It just happens to be the state of modern work culture.
There’s an emerging world view that instead sees a company as a purposeful organism with all the biological messiness and unpredictability that it implies. This organism has its own needs and desires separate from the productive outputs. Traditional management hierarchies don’t exist for it. Instead, each person is like a independent cell that senses their environment and reacts on their own, but for the common good as they’re actually interdependent in each other.
It’s still early, but there’s emerging evidence from the last few decades[1] that this way of being in the world could be more resilient in the long term and may eventually supplant the company-as-machine model.
That’s a great analogy. Almost all machines have consumable parts to save the rest of the parts from wear (in a car, it’s things like brake pads and motor oil). In companies, the workers are the consumable parts that are chewed up so that the executives and shareholders can thrive.
Financial self interest works as a motivator for a lot of things related to energy efficiency. There are idiots who will buy the least efficient thing just to spite the "hippie snowflakes," but anyone who answers to business owners or shareholders will be happy to have a way to improve the bottom line through efficiency savings and if it improves productivity at the same time then it's a double win.
> anyone with a modicum of humanity and common sense
There's a lot of people out there who don't have those. And can be very driven for their own aims with zero regard for the lives of others. There are a lot of managers in every industry for whom unhappiness of the employees is a sign that they're "working hard".
Color me unimpressed at the discovery that productivity increases when workers have something as luxurious as proper lighting and air circulation so that sweat isn't pouring down their faces while they're sewing blue jeans for H&M with the utmost concentration lest they break their finger or hand in a machine.