RECENTLY we ordered some furniture from one of the leading furniture manufacturers of Lahore. They told us they would deliver it in five days. At the end of this period, they asked for another three days and then another week.

Even at the end of 10 extra days, they were only able to deliver about 60pc of the order. We had to wait a long time for the rest. They had insisted on getting the full payment in advance. Given the reputation of the company, and the lack of choices, we made the payment.

Throughout the process we had to make countless calls to the company to follow up. Short of telling us that the ‘dog ate the furniture’, the company went through the entire gambit of excuses they could think of: electricity failure, generator failure, late delivery of wood, skilled labour taking unannounced holidays and also that other orders even more delayed than ours had to be completed first. Clearly, some of the contingencies could have been predicted (load-shedding, worker truancy) but were not. And, more importantly, it was the client that had to bear the entire cost of the delays.

Our home refrigerator stopped working a couple of weeks back. The repairmen, from a fairly old and well-known shop in one of the main markets in the city, came and put it right at our place. The next day, the fridge stopped functioning again. They took it to the shop, spent two to three days working on it and then brought it back — with a bigger bill. But it stopped working again in two days. It took them another week to fix it again, and gave a correspondingly larger bill.

Poor quality, lack of timely delivery and absence of pride in one’s skills are part of the economic puzzle.

These are not isolated incidents. Ensuring quality of work, timely delivery, not relying on ‘jughaar’ are part and parcel of work in modern times. But a lot of our people and enterprises, in the formal and informal sector, do not ensure all this. It would be hard to estimate the monetary value of these losses, but these costs are not going to be trivial.

At a larger scale, this must turn into not being able to go into manufacturing that requires high precision and detailing, timely delivery and low rejection rates. Friends in textiles have mentioned rejection rates in their normal and even export outputs that seem exorbitant compared to industry and developed country standards. Colleagues in light engineering have mentioned that they do not go into precision manufacturing as parts requiring high precision are much harder to make here.

There is another side to this story. A plumber installed a tap in one of the bathrooms at our office. When he was done and was showing his work prior to payment, I noticed that the tap was a bit crooked.

When I opened the tap the water came out at an angle. I asked the plumber if he thought he had done the best he could. He said yes. I asked him if the tap was supposed to be crooked. He said no, but then said that if he were to tighten the tap any further there was a chance it would become ‘free’ and loose. On asking what it would take to get the tap vertical, he said he would have to take the tap off and try putting it back again after rethreading it.

What surprised me was the lack of pride he showed in his work. Functionality is important but all practice of skill is an art as well and a reflection on the person doing the work. He was only concerned with functionality (why do you care whether the tap is straight, it works fine) and not about either aesthetics or about showing finesse in the practice of his skill.

There is quite a bit of literature now that links the practice of skill to both embodied existence, to the formation of character traits in a person and to the formation of the identity of a person.

Philosopher Matthew Crawford’s books The World Beyond Your Head and The Case for Working with your Hands explore these issues and mention some of the other relevant literature. Richer living, as a person, requires deeper involvement with our work especially work we do with our hands. The practice of skill helps in developing us as a person and in facilitating our growth as we develop any skill.

Crawford sees the practice of skill as a means of managing the distractions of the modern world too. But even if we leave the last bit aside, the connections with removing alienation from work and externalities towards character development and learning are enough to be concerned about the subject. And the issues are general enough to traverse the entire gambit of manufacturing and service provision area — making or installing taps to teaching or performing surgery.

Many people argue that economic imperatives force people to be more concerned about functionality. There is no time to be worried about aesthetics and/or finesse as the need to make economic ends meet is paramount and binding.

But this cannot be the explanation for poor quality output and/or lack of timely delivery or even the lack of pride in the practice of a skill. All these factors are a part of the economic puzzle. Quality and precision assurance, timely delivery and even aesthetics are what modern manufacturing and service delivery is all about. People, enterprises and countries that cannot guarantee the above are very unlikely to do well in global markets.

The larger question is how are we to achieve this? How have people in other countries managed these aspects? Is market discipline the only way to do this or is more needed? We will return to these issues in subsequent articles.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at LUMS, Lahore.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2015

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