If a chicken is going to be broiler meat at some future date, how do you make it more productive? The question, obviously, is posed not from the chicken’s perspective but from that of the poultry farm owner. The answer is that it shouldn’t be allowed to burn away calories by frisking about here and there on the farm when the same calories can be used to pack a little extra meat on its body.
But how does one confine the chickens to one place? Putting the birds in a cage is the obvious solution and that is what farm managers do. The bird is put in a cage of such a size that the only freedom it enjoys would be to feast on the feed in front, to its heart’s content. But this also means a lot of money has to be spent on wire mesh netting to wall the bird off on all four sides.
Soon, someone came up with a productivity solution: Why not put three birds to a cage in a tight fit, where each bird acts as a compound wall to the other, and the farm saves on two partition walls of steel wire mesh.
So life is not much fun for chickens starting out as ‘layer’ birds. Simplifying the process of collecting eggs from thousands of birds on the farm has meant providing a cavity at the bottom of the cage allowing for eggs to be dropped down to a tray beneath which is then moved on a roller conveyor to the packaging area. For the chickens, it is fair to say, being part of a meat factory is ‘a dog’s life’.
Redefining factories
Conventional notions of a factory conjure up in our minds images of huge machines operated by workers in overalls, inside a giant shed. But if you define factories as just places where inputs are converted to value-added output, then a chicken farm is as much a factory as places where automobiles come off an assembly line.
With this conceptual redefinition of what constitutes a factory, it is possible to envision air-conditioned offices employing smart young men and women writing to code as just another factory, albeit one producing output that just happens to be different from eggs and meat.
This may sound like a somewhat degrading description of life in offices offering white collar jobs. But, if we leave aside sentiment and look at it dispassionately, we have to admit that human beings are mere inputs in processes that produce value-added output, as much as steel sheets in automobiles or air-conditioning for digital instrumentation systems that control production in the chemical process industry.
The Amazon model
Which is perhaps why Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, sounded more hurt than angry in his response when The New York Times ran a scathing piece on what it means to work at Amazon. He responded to the NYT article by saying that the Amazon the newspaper describes is not the Amazon he knew. Mind you, he was not claiming that there were factual inaccuracies in the story. He was challenging the underlying tone — namely, that the company is running a brutal and oppressive work-place for its employees.
Employees at Amazon, as the article describes it, are told to toil long and late; e-mails received late in the night must still be replied to immediately, failing which they are reminded by an automated text message to expedite their reply. That’s not all. Pregnancies, children’s illnesses, and so on, are silly distractions for employees that should not come in the way of work at Amazon.
As for bio-breaks or a reasonable recess for lunch and such other necessities, they’re as good as done away with, the article goes on to claim. In sum, Amazon is a place where practically every workplace convention available elsewhere, secured by workers after a long struggle of over a century-and-a-half of post-industrial revolution, are impediments in the ‘Amazonian’ way of life which is ‘work’ and more ‘work’.
But Jeff Bezos’ contention is that if employees have voluntarily embraced such tough working conditions, convinced that there is a great future for them at the end of it all — or if they feel it is the material world equivalent of God’s work — NYT shouldn’t cavil at that.
Workplace changes
Amazon might be an extreme example of how standards of workplace performance, that have long stood the test of time are being re-written. But there is no denying the fact that earlier assumptions about labour standards are seriously beginning to be challenged in most work-places. Take the notion that a worker in an eight-hour shift is expected to put in no more than six-and-a-half hours of work. Modern notions of workplace efficiency start with the basic premise that an eight-hour work shift must mean as close to it as can be bilaterally negotiated with representatives of these workmen.
The second change that we are witnessing is that notions of efficiency in output have crept into staff functions and, to an extent, even in managerial roles. What explains these changes? There are actually a variety of reasons why they have come about.
One, national markets are no longer insulated from external competition, thanks to a better integrated global economy. Managers are forced to squeeze out efficiencies or cut costs wherever they can to protect their bottom-lines as the luxury of price increases is no longer an option in an intensely competitive market place. If that means getting the same job done with fewer people or getting people to turn in more output per unit time, then so be it, or at least so goes the argument.
Two, an excess of production capacities and consequent shutting down of manufacturing facilities (mostly, in the West) has led to an increase in labour supply in these economies, which are stagnating or growing at anaemic rates.
Three, the influx of immigrants (both legal and illegal) from population-dense third-world countries or even poorer countries in the West is adding to the problem of excess manpower in the West.
Four, the manufacturing processes themselves have undergone a structural change with greater automation exacerbating the issue of excess supply in the labour market.
Notions of productivity
Five, the increasing ‘service’ orientation of national economies, coupled with the phenomenon of third-party delivery of services (outsourcing), has meant that notions of worker productivity have spread from ‘blue collar’ jobs to ‘white collar’ as well.
And, six, as jobs are broken up into innumerable component parts to such an extent that while earlier the integral whole did not lend itself to easy measurement, no such difficulty exists now. But none of this would have mattered if technology did not evolve simultaneously to measure output and to exercise greater surveillance over employee activities. Amazon may be an outlier. But the larger principle that its workplace practices emphasise has now become mainstream.
Are there oases in this barren landscape of dreary conditions for labour? Enterprises which produce proprietary products, or otherwise enjoy huge brand equity that allows them to charge premium prices for their products or services, can indulge in such idiosyncrasies as cash bonuses to employees blessed with a child or paternity leave benefits, free meals, and so on. For everyone else, the dictum is: perform a little better than the bottom 10 per cent or perish.
To read more from the Beyond the News section, click here .