Relation with Work Efficiency
Studies have found that unusually hot weather is linked to lower economic output in countries around the world. Although several factors from poor crop yields to heat-related illnesses probably share part of the blame, there is also a more fundamental variable at play which is “When we get hot, we find it difficult to work”. Anant Sudarshan, the South – Asia Director at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago said that Every human’s physiology is the same whether they live, the connection between hot temperatures and lower productivity has fundamental implications for how we should think about the costs of climate change going forward. Sudarshan analyzed the productivity of workers in India, the world’s third-largest economy. They looked at both labor-intensive and highly automated manufacturing processes. In the first category, they found that the productivity of workers engaged in cloth weaving or garment manufacturing dropped by 4 percent per degree as temperatures rose above 27 Celsius. However, when studying workers in the steel industry who were operating in plants with highly automated production, they found that productivity did not fall when it got hot outside. The heat did more than influence productivity at work. It also increased absenteeism. A one-degree increase in the ten-day temperature average increased the probability that a worker would be absent by as much as 5 percent. Interestingly, this remained true even where the workplace used automation. Mechanization might reduce the effects of temperature on the shop floor but may not solve the problem of employees missing work. They also found that the value of output declined by about 3 percent for every degree above the average temperature. This loss is large enough to explain the entire reduction in India’s economic output in hot years.
To adapt to hotter temperatures, businesses could install air conditioning. Sudarshan collected data from several garment plants in the midst of a phased roll-out of shop floor cooling, providing the researchers with the opportunity to compare workers on the same day in nearby plants who did and did not have climate control. They found that workers in plants with climate control were more productive.
“Air conditioning is expensive and poor countries are unlikely to move to universal cooling anytime soon. However, if cooling the workplace doesn’t prevent people from skipping work, then adapting to hotter temperatures will be difficult even in richer countries. In the long run, countries may need to prepare for bigger changes. Factories may decide to relocate to cooler regions or automate more of their work to compensate for the lost productivity. This may have wide-ranging impacts on employment rates and wages in areas that are already struggling to grow and is clearly an important area for further research and policy attention.”
- Anant Sudarshan