Going to start keeping a notebook to write down names so I know exactly who to put in the gulag when I become president of the world
Look, the factory monitoring video was cringe but...
I grew up in India and I don't think y'all understand how unreliable the work ethic of the average Indian employee is. I don't think it's an accident that the company has a bunch of Indian founders and my guess is that they're targeting the manufacturing base in India. I think their biggest mistake was not realizing that it would be seen as tone deaf when marketed to a US audience on X or LinkedIn.
But... If you show that video to literally anyone, in almost any walk of life in India, they will nod furiously and say "yes this is what we need." If you are managing a group of workers in India, you have to breathe down every single person's neck every 10 minutes... and then, if you're lucky, they will get about half as much done as an average US worker.
This pervades every kind of work from knowledge work to physical labor.
I interned at a bunch of companies across India and the US... The same exact work would take:
- 2 months at BNP Paribas Chennai
- 1 month at Citi Bombay
- 2 weeks at SAP Palo Alto
- 3 days at BCG Chicago
Not kidding. Literally 10x less efficient.
And as for physical labor? My parents built their house in Chennai a few years ago and they told me stories of how there were weeks of delays because workers simply wouldn't show up. They'd just go on a drinking binge for a week straight (without even pretending to call in sick). Or they'd just leave for their hometown somewhere in rural India with no notice, completely foregoing pay — even if that meant they'd get fired. People just don't care.
I just got back from India a couple weeks ago, and I'm still frustrated remembering the million small unprofessional and incompetent interactions that define the daily experience. I might never go to India again because I can't deal with it.
This is also why Indian manufacturing (in many cases) still doesn't measure up to Japanese, Taiwanese, Swiss, Italian, Turkish or even Chinese products. There's a lot of catching up to do.
By the way — "sweatshops" are quite rare. The average factory is not perfect (eg worker safety measures); but it's a fairly capitalistic democracy and employees have plenty of mobility. If you're not Indian and you're referring to Indian factories that way, it probably says more about your savior complex than anything else.
In summary:
- a country where the economy is mainly held back by a lack of work ethic probably needs different (and more) tools for accountability
- monitoring factory worker capacity in a culture like that doesn't make it "exploitative", stop projecting
- in fact, if you cared about the rapid development and modernization of the Indian economy, you should be rooting for a more performance-oriented culture in India