Hello everyone, Welcome back. In this module, we're going to be looking at the value of worker health and safety in the workplace. Of all the aspects of worker well-being we study in this course, this one seems to have the most obvious connection to firm productivity and profits. It seems fairly self-evident. If you can't keep your workforce healthy and safe, then how can they be expected to perform at their best? More than this, the law in most countries actually provides clearly defined protections for workers in these areas. Yet despite the obviousness of this connection and despite strong legal support for workers in this regard, time and time again, the health and safety of workers, particularly vulnerable workers in low-income country settings have been compromised to economize on costs or to eke out just a little bit more profit. In the extreme, we know that this leads to disastrous consequences for workers lives, and also for firms abilities to grow and survive. Despite decades of positive investments in worker well-being. Nike, for example, still wrestles with the ghosts of child labor in sweatshops in Asia. The Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh in 2013 claimed more than 1000 lives and forced a reckoning with unsafe working conditions in the apparel industry. There has perhaps never been a clearer reminder of the importance of worker health than the COVID-19 pandemic. Firms learned very quickly in sometimes very painfully, that whenever worker health is threatened, business suffers as a result. For example, in a lot of labor intensive industries where work from home was impossible, the success of firms was dependent on how safely they could reopen following lockdowns, and on their ability to prevent outbreaks in the workplace by closely monitoring the health of their workers. As I'm sure, all of you have experienced, our mental health and our ability to stay engaged and hopeful was crucial to remaining productive even for those of us who worked remotely. One of the few silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has taught us just how important a healthy workforce can be for firm survival. At some basic level, businesses of all kinds should understand that paramount importance of ensuring both health and safety in their workforce. But even if the events of the past have helped businesses prioritize these features, knowing how to invest their scarce capital and human resources into programs that offer maximum returns on both worker health and safety and business outcomes is perhaps more easily said than done. In this module, we're going to explore some of the different dimensions of health and safety. We're also going to learn about how firms can improve productivity and retention by designing interventions that address health and safety challenges that workers face. In this next segment, we'll discuss one of my favorite examples of using research to address environmental, business and worker well-being related challenges. My co-authors and I, Namrata Kala of MIT and Anant Nyshadham of University of Michigan studied the impacts of heat exposure on productivity and found a fascinating mitigating role for something that doesn't usually come to mind when we think about temperature, LED lighting. Let me explain. Due to climate change, record temperatures are being set all across the globe every year. For example, in July 2021, New Delhi recorded an all time high temperature of 43.6 Degrees Celsius or 110 degrees Fahrenheit. A direct consequence of rising temperatures is increased heat exposure for workers on factory floors. To study the effect of rising temperatures on workforces, we worked with our long-term partner Shahi Exports, the largest garment manufacturer in India. Garment factories employed a large number of workers. The factory floor is split into production lines, and these workers are working in very close proximity, especially in the summertime, this working environment can be really hot, humid and stuffy. Now, this isn't enjoyable even in the best of times, and certainly not when working in a high-intensity and high output industry like apparel. In these factories, fluorescent bulbs were traditionally used as the light source for workstations. Strong lighting is really important because workers need to work at a high level of detail and precision when performing their tasks on a particular garment. For example, to execute a specific threading pattern or to neatly attach buttons, you need to see what you're doing. But the issue with fluorescent bulbs is that they also emit a lot of heat, which adds to the factory floor temperature and therefore makes the environment even more challenging for workers. We were on a very hot factory visit one day, walking through snaking lines of workers rapidly stitching together parts of buttoned down shirts. When our production manager pointed to an LED bulb mounted on a sewing machine. He told us very proudly that his factory had changed the majority of lighting from fluorescent to LED over the last few weeks. Not only did this change have impacts on energy efficiency, but he also emphasized that he'd made the workers feel more comfortable on the factory floor because the new bulbs burned less hot than the old fluorescent bulbs. That last bit was really interesting to us. Could LED lighting impact heat on factory floors enough to show up in worker productivity? Fortunately, Shahi had been rolling out these LED conversions across many of its factories for some time now, giving us enough retrospective data to analyze and evaluate this hypothesis empirically. What we found was quite amazing. When factories changed their lighting to LED bulbs, they reduced the ambient temperature on their factory floors by an average of 2.4 degrees Celsius. That increased worker productivity by nearly half a percentage point relative to control factories. This effect was even larger on hot days. Turns out that this gain in efficiency had pretty substantial profit impacts, and those impacts actually swamped the savings due to energy efficiency. By replacing fluorescent bulbs with LEDs, factories gained about $2,800 in power consumption savings, but they gained about $7,500 in productivity. Needless to say, the benefits realized from this project encouraged the firm to continue to adopt LED lighting in all of its factories. Throughout this module, we're going to draw from similar interventions carried out by businesses and explore how investing in the workplace environment and worker health and safety can improve business outcomes.