Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny, I remember the discussion of this paper at my university a few decades ago. On your topic, I remember also a case that was discussed on a disinvestment of a fully automated factory. Loads of money was invested in the automation, but on several spots it still needed humans to glue the processes together. This work was so limited and dumb that no workers could be found who were able and willing to perform this t…
I see a factory like that! At one point the only remaining work was when something went wrong. The production line ran so fast, if something went wrong it produced enough garbage for 15 people to clean up. Not sure how they arrived at 15 but with fewer it took longer to resume production. I estimate the thing crashed from 2-3 times per day to every 3 days or so with the later more often. Took about 15-20 minutes to c…
I do believe that the "workers must be uncomfortable all the time" mentality drives a ton of inefficiency. When my son was born, my wife worked from home, but we still needed a nanny to watch him most of the time so my wife could work. So we hired a teenage girl to come over and keep an eye on him for $10/hour. He was a baby, so it was pretty easy work - she spent most of the time watching TV. My wife complained that she was paying somebody $10/hour to just watch TV and insisted that she spend time cleaning instead. Well, she ended up leaving and we had a hell of a tough time replacing her - I said, "why do you care what she does as long as she gets her job (making sure our son doesn't die) gets done?" But she was adamant that if she was paying somebody, it had to look like "work" to her.
I spent six years in college practicing the fine art of reading books and regurgitating their contents back in various contexts so that I could qualify for a job where any time spent reading anything is prohibited because it doesn't look like "measurable" work.