When I watch this first part of the video of Charlie Chaplin modern times in the class, it makes me felt very awful. I mean, does this really happen in our world? Why didn’t I see such things in my life? Why does this happening? There are so many questions that pop out of my head. The part one of the video starts with people hustles and bustles to go to work. The writer describes this situation by making it analogous to pigs; people are busy looking for money and neglect their sense of humanity. This is true as in the intro, it is stated that “Modern Times” is a story of industry, of individual enterprise – humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.
In the video, I would like to highlight that in the presence of technology, in this case, the monitoring camera that is primarily used to monitor the work of the workers, the privacy of the workers are violated. These monitoring are used by the employers to monitor so that the workers do their work to make sure the process going on smooth and there is no barrier to gain profit continuously. We can also see that in order to get more profit, the employer will do whatever it takes by any means. Sometimes they would speed up the process in some section without considering whether the workers will have the bad effects. Bad effects shown in this video is when Charlie passes his work to somebody else, his body eventually still moving according to the work he done before.
In part two of “Modern Times”, we can see another example of the situation where the management would like to do anything to increase the profit by speeding the process. In this case, they do this by using the new technology that is the machine that feed the workers in a systematic way but harms the workers. What happened was that people are forced like robots. They were treated just like robots in order to cut the time consumed so that the production can be increased. At some point in the video, Charlie had a nervous breakdown caused by the detailed work he does although maybe this is unlikely to happen. That’s when I think that Capitalism makes workers life miserable and nothing is crueler than destroying people’s creativity.
1 comment:
The exploitation of workers, especially at low-level entry positions and in developing countries, is a sad sight to see. Employers, in their minds, remove the human element when dealing with their employees. They somehow forget that everyone, including themselves, have physical, emotional, and psychological limits. I’m not against working hard, but companies act like their workers are Superman and that the motivation of a paycheck, no matter how big or small, is enough to keep them going. Despite the fact that technology has made work easier, more Americans are either stressed out and/or depressed than in Charlie Chaplin’s lifetime. The insatiable greed of our economy keeps driving us to make more money, which leads some people to abandon morals and good judgment in efforts to make more money. The reason why shareholders invest is because they think that x amount of money will lead to x plus z money. Therefore, the pressure is on to produce and produce and produce. The only thing is this comes at the expense of the people who are actually producing: the workers.
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