:32:03
I see on all the faces here today
a touching childlike eagerness
:32:08
to tackle the biggest
textiles questions in the world.
:32:11
How do we at the WTO fit in?
:32:14
What we want to do at the WTO
is help you achieve your dollar results.
:32:18
And in just 20 minutes from now,
:32:20
I'm going to show you
the WTO's very own solution
:32:25
to two of the very biggest problems
in management.
:32:28
One-maintaining rapport
with distant workforce,
:32:31
and two-maintaining
healthful amounts of leisure.
:32:35
This solution, appropriately enough,
is based in textiles.
:32:42
But how did workers
ever get to be a problem?
:32:46
Before unveiling our solution,
:32:48
I'd like to talk a bit about the history
of the worker management problem.
:32:53
We all know about the American
Civil War-at least in the U.S.
:32:56
It was the bloodiest, least-profitable war
in the history of our country.
:33:00
A war in which unbelievably
huge amounts of money
:33:03
went right down the drain-
and all for textiles.
:33:06
By the 1860s, the South
was utterly flush with cash.
:33:10
It had recently benefited
from the cotton gin...
:33:13
an invention that took
the seeds out of cotton
:33:15
and the South
out of its pre-industrial past.
:33:18
Hundreds of thousands ofworkers
:33:20
previously unemployed
in their countries of origin
:33:22
were given useful jobs in textiles.
:33:25
Into this rosy picture of freedom
and boom stepped-you guessed it...
:33:29
the North.
:33:31
Now, some Civil War apologists have said
that the Civil War, for all its faults,
:33:35
at least had the effect of outlawing
:33:37
an involuntarily imported
workforce model of work.
:33:40
Now, this model is, of course,
a terrible thing.
:33:42
I myself am an abolitionist.
:33:44
But, in fact, there is no doubt
that, left to their own devices,
:33:49
markets would've eventually replaced
slavery with cleaner sources of labor.
:33:54
To prove my point,
please join me
:33:56
on what Albert Einstein used to call
a thought experiment.