Response to Labor Productivity and its Relation to the Environment

From Environment & Resources 2020

The production of goods in a nation is what is referred to as productivity and the profitability off of those collective goods is what is used to determine how economically successful that nation will be. Some believe that these profits can help social and environmental organizations as well. This high demand for massive amounts of goods for a lower price has led to global trade, lower wages and worsening working conditions. This growing system is what is labelled as the “treadmill of production,” in which countries are constantly searching for ways to produce more goods, such as vehicles, furniture, or electronics more efficiently, and cost-effectively.

Higher productivity is appealing to organizations because, although they are lowering the costs of their goods, they sell increasingly more units of what they’re manufacturing. They do this along with either paying their employees as little as what is lawfully required or what is socially acceptable or downsizing their company’s workforce. This is the competitiveness in productivity that drives organizations to continuously find ways to produce as fast, and as much as they can. The companies who are most successful at these endeavors are who earn the most profits and grow in familiarity to consumerists. These are the companies who are at the top of economic Darwinism. When human labor couldn’t produce goods fast enough, many companies turned to machinery, so the labor unions shrunk. Few actually benefit from this practice, mostly being managers and investors while the labor force suffers.

The labor union isn’t all who’ve been harmed by this means of mass production. As a result of the world’s increased productivity, the environment has been impacted in several ways, including pollution, climate change and resource depletion. Certain industries have contributed more to environmental degradation, such as corn, which the production of resulted in a surplus, so businesses created other usages for corn to get rid of it like ethanol, animal feed, and in foods. Because of these reasons, productivity is normally linked to ecological and environmental degradation due to an increased competitive attitude among corporations in recent decades. Despite these consequences, communities, states, and countries still make it their goal to continue increasing productivity to stay at the top and beat other corporations.

Personally, I strongly dislike the way our world works when it comes to business and competitiveness. I wish the world didn’t revolve around money, but humans have shaped economies to be structured this way because we’re greedy. The overproduction of goods leads to people throwing out items much sooner than they need to be, known as planned obsolescence, including food when everything is quite cheap and replaceable. In turn, we are constantly obtaining huge amounts of resources from the planet far faster than they can be replenished because we don’t care about the results of our actions as long as we get to benefit at this moment from it. We don’t think about the future and how we’re still ruining the environment. As for the laborers, we have fallen into a trap where we are pressured to work longer hours for lesser pay and with less benefits as another result of productivity, and now, many people are out of a job because they’ve been replaced by computers and technologies to perform the job for corporations, such as self-checkout machines at Walmart. It’s funny because many of our grandparents and parents grew up being told to eat all of their dinner and to never be wasteful when, now, all people know how to do is waste. That is exactly what corporations want because they purposely make cheap items to make us have to go back and get more.

My parents are wasteful too when both of them grew up in money-tight families. My mother is constantly throwing out food because she keeps too much in the cabinets and fridge and it drives me insane. No matter what I say she never listens because it’s “her rules, her house.” If she doesn’t care about her pockets, then she should care about the people that should be able to eat that food. Another example of their wasteful tendencies is when their clothes tear or a washing machine breaks, they say “oh, let’s just go get a new one because it’ll almost cost the same amount to fix it anyway,” which is, again, precisely how businesses want people to think. I have to agree that it would be more worth it to buy a brand new one than to fix the old one. It’s hard not to think that way because we have been trained to do so from ads and the price labels put on items.

In conclusion, the current market economy is a toxic one which drastically harms the environment and the poor and vulnerable and it’s all centered around our fascination with money. Money, greed, fortune. We hardly question why our economies are structured to be focused on productivity because we’ve grown used to it. If we don’t make a change soon then it’ll be too late before we finally realize.

Citation:

1. Gould, Kenneth A., Lewis, Tammy L. 2015. “Labor Productivity and the Environment.” Pp. 67-77 in Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology, Second Edition, edited by Gould, Kenneth A., Lewis, Tammy L. Oxford University Press.