8/5/2012 08:48

Walking Path

The other day I went past an industrial facility. Some of the employees were walking around the property on a path which their employer had built for them. My first reaction was that the employer is doing a good thing by providing this enjoyable walking path around the edges of the property to benefit the employees.

As I went farther along and thought more about it, my enthusiasm for a walking path around a factory dimmed a bit. I still think it is a good thing for the factory to provide this path, but now I tend to see it less as a benefit to the employees and more as a mitigation of the harm being done to them.

What have we done to people that they need to walk in circles around a factory -- and around its giant parking lots -- in order to maintain their physical and psychological health? In actual reality the need for the walking path is based in the abuse of people's lives. This particular factory is located in a recently rural area; almost nobody is able to walk to work as there are few residences nearby. People must necessarily ride in large, fuel-burning, mechanical devices, machines which require wide paved roadways and broad parking areas, which provide no health benefits but rather create health risks both directly (because the moving machines are themselves dangerous) and indirectly (through pollution and immobility among other ways).

The employees are already victims when they arrive at work. I do not know the particular factory, so I cannot say what effects the workday may have on these people. One may surmise, however, that the work they do is not sufficiently physical and varied that it compensates for the rest of the employees' lives; if it were, there wouldn't be a need for a separate walking path.

Given that this is the reality within which people function, constructing another, miniature roadway for them to walk along does provide a net benefit to the individual employees. The walkway mitigates some of the harm being done elsewhere. But building and maintaining a walking path is a non-productive cost; so too is the cost of walking the path. Its benefits are not integrated into the work of the factory; it does not increase the factory's production. (The factory owners may hope this path will increase the productivity of the employees, but this would happen indirectly.)

One beings to wonder whether the life we have built for ourselves is fundamental an existence of harm, with bits of mitigation added over the top to make it survivable.


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