双语阅读｜员工监管技术提高了效率也带来难题
BOSSES have always sought control over how workers do their jobs. Whatever subtlety there once was to this art, technology is now obliterating. In February Amazon received patents for a wristband apparently intended to shepherd labourers in its warehouses through their jobs with maximum efficiency. The device, were Amazon to produce and use it, could collect detailed information about each worker’s whereabouts and movements, and strategically vibrate in order to guide their actions. Using such technology seems an obvious step for firms seeking to maximise productivity. Whether workers should welcome the trend, or fear it, is harder to say.
企业老板总是在找办法来控制员工的工作方法。不论这种方法以前有多么微妙，如今的技术正在完全毁灭掉。2月，亚马逊获得了一款腕带多项专利——从表面上看，这款腕带是用来指导员工在仓库里最为高效地工作。如果亚马逊生产并使用这一穿戴设备，它将收集每位员工详细的行踪和运动信息，并以巧妙地震动方式指导员工的行动。对于各家企业来说，使用这类技术表面上是为了追求最高生产率。员工对此技术是欢迎还是担忧，现在还很难说。
Workplace discipline came into its own during the Industrial Revolution. As production came to depend ever more on expensive capital equipment, bosses, not keen to see that equipment sitting idle, curtailed their workers’ freedom, demanding they work during set hours, in co-ordination with other employees, at a pace dictated by the firm. Technology creates new opportunities for oversight. Editors can see which of their journalists attract the most readers (though many wisely focus on other measures of quality). Referees at sporting events are subject to reviews that check their decisions to within millimetres.
在工业革命时期就有了工作纪律。随着生产越来越依赖于昂贵的资本设备，老板们不愿看到设备闲置，便缩减员工的自由，要求他们在固定的时间里工作，以及与其他员工协调一致，而工作节奏则由企业来控制。技术为监督员工工作创造了新机会。编辑能看到哪位记者吸引的读者最多（虽然很多人明智地关注于其他衡量质量的办法）。运动比赛的裁判常常要复查以确保他们的决策精确到毫米。
Workers and labour activists have often attacked strict discipline as coercive, unfair and potentially counterproductive. Text-book economics suggests, though, that in a competitive labour market any attempt to coerce people into working harder than they want will fail, since workers can simply switch jobs. Studies of factory work paint a more complicated picture, however. People would like to work hard and earn high wages, this story goes. But they struggle with self-control and do not work as hard as they wish they would. They consequently choose to work for firms that use disciplinary measures to push them. During industrialisation, workers “effectively hired capitalists to make them work harder”, says Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis, in a seminal paper on the subject.
工人和劳工活动人士一直以来都在批判纪律苛刻，认为这是强迫性、不公平且可能会适得其反的东西。虽然教科书式经济学揭示，在充满竞争的劳动市场中，任何强迫工人更加努力工作的举措都将遭到失败，因为工人会直接跳槽。然而，一些对制造业工作的研究展现出更为复杂情况：人们更愿意努力工作，以赚取高工资。但他们自制力不高，不能如像想象那般努力。因此，他们选择去实施纪律措施的企业，以此来促使自己努力工作。加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校经济史学家格雷戈里•克拉克(Gregory Clark)在这一领域有重大影响力的一篇论文中写道：在工业化期间，工人“有效地受雇于资本家，让自己工作更努力”。
If that seems an implausibly sunny description of life in 19th-century factories, researchers have found evidence for such behaviour in modern contexts. Supreet Kaur, of Columbia University, and Michael Kremer and Sendhil Mullainathan, of Harvard University, ran a 13-month experiment using data-entry workers, who were paid according to the amount of work successfully completed. Some struggled with self-control, the authors deter-mined, as shown by their tendency to slack off for much of each month but put in more effort as payday approached. When workers were offered contracts that penalised them for failing to hit performance targets, those who struggled to stay on-task disproportionately accepted, and achieved big gains in output and pay as a result.
如果这看上去是对19世纪工厂生活的生动描述，有点让人难以置信的话，研究人员在当代制造业也发现了这类行为的证据。哥伦比亚大学的苏普瑞特·考尔（Supreet Kaur）以及来自哈佛大学的迈克尔·克雷默（Michael Kremer）和行为经济学家塞德希尔·穆来纳森(Sendhil Mullainathan) 进行了一项长达13个月的实验。该实验的对象是数据输入员，其工资取决于他们成功完成的工作量。研究人员发现，一些自制力差的人会在每个月的大多数日子里偷懒，然后在领工资日前努力工作。如果提议让员工签署合同，规定若未能达到绩效指标便实施处罚，那些难以保持工作状态的员工大部分都会接受，最终他们的工作投入和工资会大幅增加。
In many settings, pay is less clearly linked to performance. Whether additional effort translates into higher wages depends on the other options available to workers and on their bargaining power—in particular, whether they feel able to leave if the pay is not worth the trouble. Indeed, in the past, high turnover helped motivate some factory owners to share the gains from workplace discipline with workers. The “$5 day” introduced by Henry Ford in 1914 was an “efficiency wage”, according to Daniel Raff, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Larry Summers, of Harvard University. Workers on Ford’s assembly lines spent entire shifts doing mind-numbingly repetitive work, and many could not stick it for long. Ford’s solution was to pay a wage well above what workers could earn elsewhere. That helped compensate them for their suffering. More important, it led to a long queue of eager applicants, and the knowledge that anyone who left would quickly be replaced and could not easily return.
在很多情况下，工资并不直接与绩效挂钩。额外的努力能否转化为高额的工资取决于员工手中的工作选择以及他们的议价能力——尤其是当工资和努力不成正比时，他们能否会辞职。事实上，在过去，高企的营业额会促使一些工厂老板将因严格的管理而挣得的收益与员工分享。宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院管理学教授丹尼尔·拉夫(Daniel Raff) 和哈佛大学的拉里·萨默斯(Larry Summers)认为，亨利·福特（Henry Ford）1914年发明的“5美元日工资”是一种“效率工资”。福特汽车生产线上的工人在上班时间要一直重复地做让人无聊到头脑麻木的工作，很多人都无法坚持下来。福特的解决办法是支付的工资高于其他企业。这将补偿员工们遭受的痛苦。更重要的是，实施这一决策之后，翘首以盼的应聘者排起了大长龙，同时工人也意识到一旦离开，他们就会被别人替代，无法轻易地重回岗位。
But high turnover does not appear to bother Amazon much. The past decade’s weak labour markets have meant queues of willing workers even without the promise of above-market pay. The same technologies that monitor workers can also reduce the training time needed to prepare new employees, since the gadgets around them guide most of their activity.
但亚马逊似乎并没有为高企的营业额感到困扰。在过去十年里，低迷的劳动力市场使得众多员工甚至愿意以不高于市场价的工资工作。监管工人的技术也能减少培训新员工的时间，因为这些监控设备会指导他们的大部分工作方式。
And new disciplinary technologies create an additional risk for workers. Heaps of data about their activities within a work-space are gathered, while their cognitive contribution is reduced. In both ways, such technologies pave the way for automation, much as the introduction of regimentation and discipline in factories facilitated the replacement of humans by machines. The potential for automation increases the power of firms over workers. Anyone thinking of demanding higher pay, or of joining a union in the hope of organising to grab a share of the returns to increased efficiency, can be cowed with the threat of robots.
新的规范性技术会为员工造成额外的风险。设备可以收集众多员工在工作场所的活动数据，但员工的认知贡献也会减少。这类技术为自动化铺平了道路，正如在工厂中引入严格管理和纪律制度促进了人工被机器取代的进程。自动化的潜能会使得企业权力高于员工。那些想要加薪，或加入工会以试图分得企业利润一杯羹的员工，会因为机器人的威胁而打退堂鼓。
Who watches the watch, man
谁还看钟点
White-collar workers are not spared oppressive bosses. Indeed, as the New York Times reported in 2015, Amazon has experimented with data-driven management techniques known to drive some white-collar workers to tears. (Others, though, told the Times that they thrived at Amazon, “because it pushed them past what they thought were their limits”.)
白领也无法逃脱老板的压迫。事实上，2015年《纽约时报》的一篇报道称，亚马逊推行基于数据的管理方法，据说这让很多白领苦不堪言，痛哭流泪。（但其他人告诉《纽约时报》说，他们能从容应对，“因为亚马逊推动他们打破了自己的极限”。）
The high pay of workers with exacting jobs in finance or technology can reasonably be seen as compensation for their burdensome working conditions. And unhappy professionals can usually find less oppressive work that pays a lower but still decent wage. As Amazon and other firms embrace new tools to monitor and direct their workers, the difference between progress and dystopia comes down to whether workers feel comfortable demanding raises, and whether they can quit without fear of serious hardship. Indeed, firms could ponder such matters them-selves before the inevitable backlash.
金融业或科技界的员工工作艰难苛刻，收入也高，这可以看成是他们繁重工作的合理补偿。工作不开心的职员常常可以找一份不那么压抑的工作，虽然工资相对较少却还过得去。随着亚马逊等企业使用新工具来监督和指导员工，员工是感觉自己在进步还是身处地狱，这就取决于他们能否轻松地要求加薪，能否随性地辞职且不用担心辞职后的困境。事实上，在引起不可避免的强烈反应之前，企业可以对这些问题深入思考一番。
编译：余兴宇
编辑：翻吧君
来源：经济学人（2018.03.01）