Doing well while doing good—“The Great Experiment” At the end of the 1700s, the New Lanark, Scotland, cotton mill had more than 1000 workers. Many were children drawn from Glasgow’s poorhouses. They worked 13-hour days and lived in grim conditions.

On a visit to Glasgow, Welsh-born Robert Owen—an idealistic young cotton-mill manager—chanced to meet and marry the mill owner’s daughter. Owen and some partners purchased the mill and on the first day of the 1800s began what he said was “the most important experiment for the happiness of the human race that had yet been instituted at any time in any part of the world” (Owen, 1814). The exploitation of child and adult labor was, he observed, producing unhappy and inefficient workers. So he undertook numerous innovations: a nursery for preschool children, education for older children (with encouragement rather than corporal punishment), Sundays off, health care, paid sick days, unemployment pay for days when the mill could not operate, and a company store selling goods at reduced prices.

He also innovated a goals- and worker-assessment program that included detailed records of daily productivity and costs but with “no beating, no abusive language.”

The ensuing commercial success fueled a humanitarian reform movement. By 1816, with decades of profitability still ahead, Owen believed he had demonstrated “that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold.” Although his Utopian vision has not been fulfilled, Owen’s great experiment laid the groundwork for employment practices that have today become accepted in much of the world.

Courtesy of New Lanark Trust