Barcelona Metropolis

When we discuss health, we tend to talk about it as the opposite of sickness. Ultimately, what determines whether we can label ourselves healthy or sick is the extent to which we can make our bodies productive. Modern proponents of Taylorism assert that a body capable of productive use must be healthy. However, some studies demonstrate that the notion that happiness and health inevitably breed more productive workers may be little more than an illusion.

In the field of medicine, this notion can be traced back to the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was around that time that physicians began to take a keen interest in the relationship between occupations and health. A pioneering work in this regard is the aptly and dryly titled volume Hygiene, Diseases and Mortality of Occupations, authored by John Thomas Arlidge, a physician educated at King’s College London, and published in 1892. This was a landmark work, charting an impressive range of occupations from clerks and laundresses to tobacconists and bookbinders, seeking to expose the different dangers associated with each occupation. What is striking, however, is not the detail with which the author describes each occupation or the painstaking research he conducted to reach these conclusions, but rather the display of thinly veiled contempt for those who have not successfully integrated themselves into the broader realm of productivity – those whom Arlidge describes as “the drones and idlers of society, wasting life in indolence or using it only for self-indulgence”.

There are two assumptions underlying this claim that may be worth considering. The first is the demonisation of those who, whether willingly or not, decide to choose a path that is not explicitly productive. He refers to these individuals as “parasitic offshoots of civilised society”. The second assumption underlying this claim is that the absence of illness is, if not a prerequisite, then at least a favourable condition for rendering bodies productive.

The health concerns regarding occupational activities, as they were expressed especially in England, did not seem to be a major concern for Frederick Winslow Taylor, the American engineer, who, in 1898, initiated his extensive experiments in workplace efficiency. Upon arriving at the steelmaking company Bethlehem Steel, Taylor was determined to ascertain how effective a man could possibly be. To conduct this experiment, he chose a strong man as his test subject, whom Taylor called Mr Schmidt. Mr Schmidt was, to use Taylor’s own derogatory remarks, “a man of the mentally sluggish type”. Taylor argued that what made him fit for the job was that he was “so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type”. Equipped with a stopwatch and notebook, Taylor planned the working day, minute by minute and movement by movement. The docile Schmidt dutifully did what he was told and was able to load pig-iron like never before. If Schmidt, under Taylor’s supervision, could work at a speed ten times faster than his fellow workers, then surely they too could work at the same speed.

Ford was by no means the first to adopt such apparently humanist measures to keep his workers close to the factories. There is a long and often fascinating history of so-called welfare capitalists, from Pullman to Kellogg, who sought to improve workers’ quality of life while simultaneously boosting profits for their companies. Nevertheless, what makes the Ford example pertinent to this day is that it captures the managerial problem where workers become so sick that they feel compelled to leave the workplace. What kept Ford awake at night was not primarily the welfare of his workers. Whether they were healthy or ill was determined by the larger issue, namely whether they were productive or not.

While Taylor’s legacy lived on – he died in 1915, just a few years after publishing his landmark pamphlet The Principles of Scientific Management – a new generation of American management theorists was taking over. These business school academics, often associated with the human relations movement, began developing what they called the happiness productivity thesis. Here, one can observe how health and happiness are integrated into a broader concept of the “human side” of work. The idea that this generation of “scientists” hit upon was that workplaces could be made more efficient not by imposing menacing control akin to Taylor’s methods, but instead by appealing to workers’ hearts and minds, cultivating what were known as “soft skills”.

What is interesting to note is that, while none of these scientists were trained physicians or possessed any medical expertise, they were nevertheless able to influence the discourse on health in a profound way. They combined the burgeoning interest in group and ego psychology with a growing interest in business leadership.

Henceforth, human psychology was not solely, or even primarily, about exploring the mysterious depths of the human mind, as had been the focus of Freud and his free-wheeling acolytes, but also about understanding the human mind and body to make them more suitable for a profit-driven world.

The ultimate point they sought to make was that businesses could achieve greater efficiency not by enforcing more efficient work routines, but by creating working conditions more conducive to worker happiness and health. Therefore, happiness and health were not only prerequisites for productivity but were also, in an impressively circular argument, purported to be its outcome.

More happiness, more productivity?

The notion that happy workers are supposedly more productive persists to this day and remains an uncontested mantra for today’s corporations. However fervently HR gurus assert this belief, there is still no conclusive evidence to support it. To test this hypothesis, one researcher correlated the profits of the four major supermarkets in the UK with the satisfaction levels of their respective employees, only to find that the most profitable companies had the least satisfied employees.

This crudely farcical model of increasing efficiency, ironically labelled “scientific”, spread across America in the intervening years and was soon exported to Europe and other corners of the world. The method was quite simple: breaking down working tasks into their most basic elements, and, with military-style surveillance, ensuring that each worker had no space for rest or recuperation. This approach became the predominant model for increasing efficiency, not only in factories but also in offices and other workspaces.

It seemed like an ingenious idea: to squeeze as much work out of a worker as possible while simultaneously asserting the task’s scientific legitimacy. It really was ingenious and profitable, until it wasn’t.

The reason, as Ford (among other business leaders) would later discover, was that bodies (and minds) began to break down. It turned out, to no one’s great surprise, that spending day after day on the treadmill was such a brutally nightmarish experience for any human being, even those Taylor deemed hopelessly stupid, that the workers saw no other way out than to escape. This was the case even when their prospects of surviving without work, with neither money nor shelter, were meagre.

The predecessor to human resources

What happened next, according to standard management textbooks, was the emergence of the human relations movement, which later paved the way for what is now known as human resources, or simply HR. Ford himself had to find ways to retain employees – constantly hiring new ones was too costly – so he set out to find ways to strengthen their ties to the workplace, both physically and emotionally. To this end, he built family houses near the factories and even introduced a sociological department that made home visits (to ensure their homes were kept tidy) and engaged workers in social activities.