Employees interact in the working environment to help a company achieve its objectives quickly and using the right means. Organizations that understand the usefulness of the production line know that employees working in isolation need time to interact with each other. It means that these organizations should understand the role that each person plays in the working environment and how he or she can fit into the domain of the workplace. Compelling employees to work like robots does not help the company to achieve existing and future objectives because it focuses on capitalism while forgetting human resource management. “Modern Times” is a film by Charlie Chaplin that gives an excellent representation of the premise of capitalism. The working class is alienated from various aspects of life because of the capitalist mindset. The essence of this paper is to focus on capitalism and the working class in the movie. It will show that a capitalist mentality has the propensity to change workers by compelling them to become alienated from the product of their labor, the act of production, themselves as workers, and their colleagues.
Capitalism has compelled modern industrial production to depict differences from expectations of society. Workers have the proclivity to lose control of their lives by failing to understand how they can work. It means that their autonomy is reduced significantly, considering that the working conditions in which they operate compel them to be alienated from themselves and the entire job. The take on the movie concerning the alienation is a satirical take on dehumanizing conditions in the working environment. Charlie Chaplin works in the assembly line and depicts the loss of autonomy of the employee working in such circumstances. Individuals in the working environment no longer want to learn how to trade with each other but have chosen to become critical aspects of mass production machines.
Capitalism has compelled employees to be alienated from the work they perform to produce different products. Charlie Chaplin is working on merchandise that he will never own in his life. The company is capitalist and has compelled him to work at a fee. It is an incremental task trying to understand the specific work that he is performing for the company. However, he tightens bolts and objects as on the conveyor belt. The product comes before him for the bolts to be tightened, and it goes away. He does not know where the product is heading and does not seem to care about it. His role as an employee is to ensure that the product has been manufactured and send to the next stage of the production line (Beloso 40). He knows that he cannot own or control the product, which means that he has to watch as it disappears and ensure that he concentrates on the next one. It is this level of alienation from the product that makes it hard to understand the usefulness of capitalism because it has compelled the working class to live in deplorable conditions.
Charlie Chaplin has been alienated from the act of production that helps generate various products. He has no control over the production process but concerns the velocity at which the objects in the assembly line are moving. The company has a manager who is not depicted in the movie but controls the production line. He orders the speed to be increased to ensure that the production facility is working at a faster rate, and everybody has to obey, including Charlie Chaplin. The main character does not put his mind into the work because he is being taken for a human-machine. The pieces of equipment that he is manufacturing are moving on the conveyor belt, and Charlie Chaplin continues to tighten bolts of the next objects without caring for his safety (Martinetti, van Dongen, and Romano 2). The movie even shows a machine that compels workers to continue working during lunchtime despite the need to consume food to possess adequate energy required for work.
The company compels workers to work at the fastest rate possible. The objective is to increase profitability to enable the organization to achieve its current and future aspirations. It is illustrated by the feeding machine that gives workers food while they are engaged with the working environment. It means that they need to stay busy at work rather than take time off the job to go for the lunch hour rather than work and get paid a meagre salary (Hassan 121). Lunchtime is the property of the employee and should never be taken away from the individual. It is imperative that the organization considers the usability of interaction between different employees in the organizational context. However, it has not taken the time to give employees freedom because they need to have time to talk to one another while eating. Employees can motivate each other to ensure that they continue helping the company to manufacture the products. However, denying them the time to interact increases the propensity of these parcels to be detached from the act of production. They may continue working for the organization but only as automatons.
Charlie Chaplin is alienated from his role as an integral part of the production line. Human nature usually compels different persons to become creative. The fundamental nature of creativity is imperative in helping production lines achieve existing and future objectives. The elimination of thinking in the production line implies the destruction of the health and welfare of the employee. The production line is full of monotonous activity. Employees are expected to work on the same objects during the entire day. The tasks are repetitive and volcanoes to the extent that none of these individuals can find happiness in the working environment. The definitive objective of working for the company becomes nullified with the perspective of working humans as objects without autonomy. None of the employees is deploying and maintaining creativity, which means that they yearn to go home at the end of every tiresome day (Rigolizzo and Amabile 65). The company has lost its credibility as an organization that can help employees use creativity.
The final aspect of the detachment concerns workplace engagement. The only time that employees can meet each other to interact in the workplace is during lunch hour. It is a time when each of the employees breaks from labor to take lunch and talk to two other workers. The company has eliminated all components of social welfare in the production line, and it has led to the lack of interaction between employees. The production line does not need workers to interact or collaborate for mutual benefit (Aschenbrenner et al. 1). Every person performs a specific task, and repetition is articulated throughout the day. Capitalism leads to the breakdown of Charlie Chaplin because it shows an inhuman way of compelling individuals to work. The credibility of the company as an organization that understands employee welfare is lost because of the lack of understanding of the needs of each one of them. The company needs to encourage human resource management, which is imperative in helping it realize that workers are humans, and they need to be a part of an organization that understands their needs. Achieving this objective may take a definitive amount of time because the company has goals to meet, and it is operating on a business model that is increasingly hard to change.
In conclusion, “Modern Times” is a movie that shows alienation of the employee from his or her work, the product, the process, the self, and his or her colleagues. Workers are expected to interact in an organization if it is to achieve its goals. The company needs to allow them to interact during the lunch hour to ensure that they reduce the level of stress they experience when working in isolation all day long. The movie shows a lack of consideration for human resources within the working environment. The assembly line employs many people who are expected to work in isolation. Each of these individuals becomes detached from the product because they do not own it and may never see it again. They become detached from the process because it is repetitive and monotonous. They also become detached from the self because the organization does not allow them to use creativity, which is relevant in ensuring that they can use the mind and remain active in the working environment. Finally, the company does not allow them to interact with each other to enable them to promote workplace collaboration and increase extrinsic motivation.
Aschenbrenner, Doris, et al. “Collaborative production line planning with augmented fabrication.” 2018 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR). IEEE, 2018.
Beloso, Brooke M. “Love in the Time of Capitalism: A Marxist Feminist Reading of Modern Times.” Marxism and the Movies: Critical Essays on Class Struggle in the Cinema (2013): 40.
Hassan, ABM Enamol. “Deplorable living conditions of female workers: A study in a tea garden of Bangladesh.” American Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 2.2 (2014): 121-132.
Martinetti, Alberto, Leonardus Adriana Maria van Dongen, and Raffaele Romano. “Beyond Accidents: A Back-Analysis on Conveyor Belt Injury for a Better Design for Maintenance Operations.” American journal of applied sciences 14.1 (2017): 1-12.
Rigolizzo, Michele, and Teresa Amabile. “Entrepreneurial creativity: The role of learning processes and work environment supports.” The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2015): 61-78.