• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 989 0

like HCH and DDT. The climatic variations of so immense a country with its late or inadequate monsoons and its frequent droughts that could suddenly reduce demand, meant that regular sales of the product could not be guaranteed. A salesman above all else, Muñoz had run his numbers over and over again. His most optimistic predictions did not exceed annual sales of two thousand tons. Wisdom ordained that Carbide should limit its ambitions. Certain that he would be able to convince his superiors, he flew to New York. In his briefcase, meticulously sorted by province, groups of villages and sometimes even by individual village, were the results of his first sales effort. He hoped they would be enough to persuade his employers that they should modify their investment in India, even if it meant leaving room for eventual competitors. He was wrong. That journey to New York was to set the seal on the first act in a catastrophe.

The Argentinian could never have imagined that his greatest adversary would be a man who had been dead for twenty-one years. The whole of American industry continued to revere as a prophet the man who, shortly after the second world war, had revolutionized relations between management and work-force. As an obscure employee in a Philadelphia bank, Edward N. Hay, who sported a short Charlie Chaplin–style mustache and oversleeves to protect his starched shirts, had seemed unlikely to leave behind much of a legacy. The obsessive ideas of this nondescript clerk, however, would make him as famous a figure in the industrial world as Frederick Taylor, the man who developed the theory of scientific management of factory work. Edward N. Hay was convinced that the members of the industrial workforce did not receive the attention they warranted. Starting from this premise, he had devised a point system to evaluate every job done in a company. The idea was immediately adopted by a number of branches of American industry. By the end of the 1960s Union Carbide was one of the most enthusiastic users of his methods. All of its industrial projects were automatically assigned a point value, according to a system that determined the importance, size and sophistication of any installations to be constructed. The more numerous and complex the project, the higher the number of points. Because each point corresponded to a salary advantage, it was in the interests of the engineers assigned to planning and implementing any industrial project to see that, right from the outset, it was given the maximum number of points possible.

“I realized at once, I didn’t stand a chance,” Eduardo Muñoz would recount. “Even before they heard what I had to say, the management committee, made up of all the division heads and key members of the board of directors, had rallied enthusiastically in support of the Indian proposal.”

“India has a market of three hundred million peasants,” immediately declared one of Carbide’s executives.

“Five hundred million soon,” added one of his colleagues.

“Don’t you worry, Eduardo, we’ll sell our five thousand tons, and more!” was the message unanimously delivered. “Moreover,” announced Carbide’s CEO, “to show you just how much faith we have in this project, we’re allocating it a budget of twenty million dollars.”

“An extravagant sum that Mr. Hay’s point system was going to spread in a manner advantageous to everyone,” Muñoz would reckon after meeting the South Charleston engineers in charge of laying the plans for the factory. These men were high-level chemists and mechanics, respected leaders in the field of manufacturing processes, in charge of reputable projects; in short they were the elite of the workforce at Union Carbide’s technical research center in South Charleston. “But they were all little dictators,” Muñoz would say. “They were obsessed with just one idea, that of using their twenty-million-dollar bounty to create the most beautiful pesticide plant India would ever know.”

Showing them his documents, the Argentinian tried desperately to explain to his partners the distinctive characteristics