Someone Who Doesn't Enjoy Jokes
Rosente Devi made full use of the Devi family name.
To be precise, it was closer to making use of Kalt Devi's name.
"Hmm. You say you intend to open a workhouse?"
"Yes. My elder brother takes a great interest in charity, you see."
"Ah, yes. That does sound like Lord Kalt."
Kalt was rather well known even within the Church. He was a man who kept the traditions of the Shepherd with remarkable devotion, and he was generous with his donations, besides.
Thanks to that, establishing a workhouse proved no great difficulty.
"Should you require clergy or scholars to handle education at the workhouse, we would be happy to provide them."
"Ah, that won't be necessary. We've already made arrangements on our end."
At the same time, employment was needed for the poor housed at the workhouse.
And to secure jobs on a sufficient scale, negotiations with the factories were inevitable. Most of the work available in the city was factory labor, after all. The problem was the conditions of that labor.
"I beg your pardon? An eight-hour workday… and a five-and-a-half-day week?"
"Yes. Would that be difficult?"
"Well, Lady Devi. If I were to hire workers under those terms at my factory, the other factory owners would brand me a Red and try to kill me. Installing new equipment like dust collectors and ventilation systems would be one thing… but those conditions would be impossible."
Reds.
That is, the revolutionaries who spilled crimson blood wherever they went. They were a perpetual headache for the Empire.
They assassinated nobles through acts of terror, set factories ablaze, stirred up workers into strikes — in short, they were capable of every manner of villainy.
Their purpose was to disregard existing authority, tear down the class system, and create a world without order of any kind.
"How does upholding the noble obligation make one a Red? A proper balance of labor and rest hardly contradicts the traditions of the Church."
"My apologies, Lady Devi."
And the conditions Rosente had put forward looked, at a glance… no, quite blatantly like the work of a Red. She was asking capitalists to surrender their rights for the sake of respecting the rights of laborers, after all.
Of course, whether any person possessed the right to grind another person into a factory machine was a fair question — but the capitalists' argument ran thus: property rights were a sacred privilege granted by the Lord, and laborers were, one and all, lazy layabouts in need of corrective toil.
"Haa. Idiots. I suppose I'll just have to show them myself."
Naturally, as far as Rosente was concerned, they were all idiots.
In the first place, working someone for twenty-four hours did not mean they would work diligently for twenty-four hours. A shepherd who skipped his afternoon nap could not tend his flock properly; a beekeeper who went without honey grew vulnerable to the sting; a goatherd spent half the day asleep before walking a cliff path.
No — there was no need to even draw the comparison with people.
Even livestock failed to work properly if they were not fed and rested well. Did a dairy cow produce milk because you took a whip to it?
The capitalists, every last one of them, were clearly dimwits.
And so was she, for that matter.
…If I hadn't learned from my brother, I would have thought just like them.
The only people capable of arriving at such an obvious truth on their own were probably Kalt Devi and Dante Lothringen. Prejudice and intuition were this powerful — and this meaningless. Thinking rationally was this difficult.
So in the end, she would simply have to show them with results.
I'll need to use somewhat extreme measures.
It was conduct that wrecked a noble's dignity, and it ran contrary to the traditions of the Devi family — but that was simply what love was.
Love had no tradition, no dignity, and no formality.
"Well… I'm not a good person, after all…"
That day, the owners of several factories notorious for the worst labor conditions met with carriage accidents, and those factories were acquired by certain capitalists of shepherd or beekeeper stock.
It was not so tragic an accident. When hundreds of workers had died in those same factories, the owners had not been particularly grieved. They had merely flown into a rage at the machines standing idle and taken out their frustration with a whip.
In that sense — since the machines kept running even after the factory owner died — how could one call it a tragic accident?
"From now on, this factory will be operated according to the customs of the Devi family. Should any other factory owner raise an objection, have them speak the name of House Devi."
"Understood, Lady Devi."
Even if the factory owner dies — even if red flowers and yellow flowers bloom across the entire field — the factory turns, and turns, and turns again.
Scientific management.
Not the spiritualist notion that working hard, working a lot, and working brutally would increase productivity — but a theory of organizational management grounded in objective evidence and metrics. Its skeleton was Frederick Taylor's Taylor System, which in turn led to Henry Ford's Fordism.
In truth, it was a theory that had drawn enormous criticism on the Earth of my previous life. It treated workers as interchangeable parts, and in the process of streamlining the labor environment, it drove labor intensity to extreme levels.
To regard even people as nothing more than factory components — how ghastly and terrifying a thought!
Ghastly… is it?
Of course it is ghastly.
Ghastly, yes… but the problem was that the capitalists of this world did not even regard people as parts. When a machine broke down they went pale with horror, yet when a person broke down they simply lashed out with a whip to vent their anger.
No factory owner took out his frustration on a machine. He knew that would only tank the factory's productivity. And yet he could not apply the same logic to his workers. That swinging a whip only lowered a worker's productivity was something he simply failed to grasp.
It was idiotic.
In the end, people too were machines that acted according to physiological conditions. In fact, as machines of extraordinary complexity and multifunction, they retained all the more room for efficiency gains.
Ultimately, scientific management is the backbone of modern management theory.
In the modern age, organizational operation placed greater weight on immaterial factors — psychological elements, social consensus, politics, human relationships — but even those were merely tools for long-term productivity growth.
What mattered was the phenomenon itself: that ethical management ultimately led to increased productivity. Even practices that would look somewhat unethical by the standards of my previous life were, by the standards of this world, endlessly ethical and charitable management.
So a somewhat better labor environment could be provided. First, set a baseline. Anything below it was pure inefficiency no matter how much you exploited and tormented the workers — so at the very least, meet this moral standard.
Not for the sake of the workers, but for the sake of the capitalists' own capital.
This was the answer sheet the capitalism of my previous life had arrived at through countless trials and errors.
"First, we need to change the air quality inside the factories. What kind of work can anyone do in a place where they can barely breathe? Oxygen deficiency causes drowsiness, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, ocular hemorrhaging, nausea… in short, it wrecks a person's condition worse than sleeplessness. And if the air is mixed with smoke, it gets twice as bad."
Improve the air quality inside the factories through dust collectors and ventilation systems.
"Holidays are necessary. Even the Lord created the world in six days and rested for one — how can a person work more than that? It also fails to accord with the traditions of the Church. People are frailer than the Lord, so we must operate a five-and-a-half-day system."
Guarantee holidays.
"An eight-hour workday is sufficient. The machines never stop, after all. Three shifts make twenty-four hours possible, don't they? The old method of grinding one person for as long as possible has no clear standard for working hours and is far too inefficient."
Guarantee an eight-hour workday.
"Regular safety inspections and safety education are required. If an accident happens for no good reason and the machines sit idle, the losses multiply several times over. Worker morale drops as well."
Guarantee the workers' safety.
"In exchange, we design movement paths so workers can labor at maximum efficiency and cut wasted time. For complex tasks, we use conveyors to maximize the efficiency of the division of labor and reduce the complexity of the work, creating an environment where workers can focus purely on their tasks."
Having maximized the workers' productivity that way, we then provide an environment in which that productivity can be fully utilized. The labor intensity per hour becomes enormous — but compared to being whipped while ground into a machine, it was a surprisingly doable kind of work.
"Using these principles as a foundation, for each individual factory—"
"Um, Dante."
Rosente, who had been quietly listening to my explanation, cut me off.
"Yes?"
"I've… never even heard of anything like this. I understand it now that you've explained it, but… it's so empirical and refined. It's as if someone constructed an answer sheet through trial and error, over and over again… Did you come up with all of this… entirely on your own…?"
An accurate impression. It was the answer sheet humanity of my previous life had produced after centuries of trial and error. But I could hardly explain that, so…
"Well, perhaps I received a revelation from the Lord?"
"…Honestly. I had no idea you enjoyed jokes."
"Who knows."
"It is a joke… right?"