“My Sweatshop” or “The Benefits of Child Labor”

In the course of my adventures, many fantastic opportunities have presented themselves to me.  And the only way to really sharpen life’s pencil is to jump right up and accept those more interesting projects that come your way.

Like the time I organized a sweatshop and put all those children to work.

Oh I haven’t told you that story, have I?

Well.

The job that needed doing was fairly simple, actually.  A small, single-page insert needed to be glued inside the front cover of every book in those stacks and stacks of boxes of books against the back wall over there.  And all we had were the books, the inserts, glue sticks, and an army of toddlers.

At first, we gathered the kids around and showed them what to do.  We slathered glue on the back of an insert, opened the front cover of a book, and pressed the insert in place. Voila! That’s how you do it.  Now get to work, munchkins.  No breaks!

So the kids each grabbed an armload of books and a stack of inserts and trudged off to their workstations to start putting them together.  After about 15 minutes, little by little, things started to change.

“Are you going for more inserts? Would you bring me some too?”

Thats how it started.  Those young squishy plastic brains started to adapt and improve upon the process.  After just minutes, They had reorganized themselves.  Some of the kids would sit and plaster inserts, while others were assiged as runners to constantly bring more inserts and books to the ones with the glue.  Still other runners were tasked with clearing the completed books from the tables and putting them into boxes so that they wouldn’t get in the way of the workers.  The children had found a way to more than double their efficiency by eliminating the down-time spent walking for new materials.

One frugal young’un asked if it were permissible to just glue one edge of the insert.  She suggested that we would save lots of glue if they only painted one sticky stripe across the top of each insert, like a post-it note.  Kicking ourselves for our crusty adult brains that refuse to think creatively, we agreed and sent her back to work without even whipping her for her insubordination.  News of the change spread telepathically across the work floor, and production speed doubled again.

The room now buzzed like the New York Stock Exchange, with children shouting instructions at each other, calling “We need runners over here!!!” and “Books! More Books!”

Then I saw one little genius demonstrate the cleverest thing: She took a whole stack of inserts and bent them like someone about to play 52 card pickup.  Bending the stack, then pinching the middle of the papers while letting go of the edges tilted the stack so that it leaned.  She had exposed the top edges of every insert in the stack, and glued that slanted edge, creating an entire stack of post-it inserts.  Now all she had to do was peel an insert and slap it down inside the cover.  Now several gluers could share a single stick of glue, and had sped up the process so dramatically that nearly half of the gluers had to re-task themselves as runners just to keep production going smoothly!

While the first three boxes of books had taken our sweatshop 15 minutes, the next 150 boxes were done within the hour thanks to that creative and self-organizing little workforce.  I may never understand how laboring in a Los Angeles sweatshop can teach Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts the value of “community service,” but I was certainly grateful for the help!

Now that I know what kids are capable of, if I’m ever called upon to manage a sweatshop in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, I’ll be even more prepared for the job!