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When Madonna was on tour in Spain a few years ago, teenage girls turned up at her final performance wearing the very outfit she had worn for her first show. They had bought it from Zara, the Spanish retailer.
几年前，麦当娜(Madonna)在西班牙的巡演到了最后一场时，台下的少女们穿着她首场演出期间穿的演出服。她们是从西班牙零售商Zara那里买到这种款式的服装的。
While most fashion retailers take months to introduce new product lines, Zara’s supply chain can design and deliver new clothes to its 1,500 stores in more than 70 countries within days.
大多数时装零售商需要几个月的时间推出新的产品线，而Zara的供应链能够在短短数日内完成新品的设计，并将其交付至70多个国家的1500个门店。
In her book The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton argues that Zara’s investment in staff is crucial to this speed, together with its ability to collect information from employees on what is popular. Zara’s shop assistants, for example, tell managers if customers are requesting a long-sleeved version of a particular shirt.
泽伊内普•托恩(Zeynep Ton)在她的著作《理想工作战略》(The Good Jobs Strategy)中认为，Zara具备这种速度的关键在于对员工的投资，及其通过雇员对流行趋势进行信息收集的能力。例如，如果顾客希望某款短袖衬衫有长袖版的话，Zara的店员会向经理反映这种需求。
The question that Ton, an academic at MIT Sloan, set out to answer is how do Zara and other successful retailers treat employees better than rivals, yet still deliver healthy profits and shareholder returns? Her work focuses on low-cost retailers because they compete on price and because it is often argued that the only way companies can keep costs down and prices low is to skimp on labour costs – whether through low wages, minimal benefits or underinvesting in training.
作为麻省理工斯隆商学院(MIT Sloan)的学者，托恩着手回答的问题是：Zara和其他成功的零售商，是如何在提供比竞争对手更好待遇的前提下，还能实现可观的利润及股东回报？她的研究对象是低成本零售商，因为它们拼的是价格，而且人们往往认为，企业降低成本及价格的唯一出路在于节省劳动力成本——不管是通过压低工资和福利，还是通过在培训上的投入不到位。
As the title implies, The Good Jobs Strategy argues that this is not the case. The author focuses on four low-cost retailers in the US that treat employees well: Costco, the discount retailer, Trader Joe’s, a food store, Mercadona, the Spanish grocer, and QuikTrip, a petrol retailer. It contrasts these with low-paying, “bad” employers such as Walmart, the world’s largest private sector employer.
正如书名所暗示的，《理想工作战略》认为，实际情况并非如此。作者聚焦于美国的四家低成本零售商，它们给雇员提供的待遇都不错：折扣零售商好事多(Costco)、食品连锁店Trader Joe's、西班牙杂货商Mercadona，以及汽油便利店QuikTrip。这本书将它们与那些支付低薪的“坏”雇主进行了对比——例如世界最大的私营部门雇主沃尔玛(Walmart)。
Salespeople and cashiers are also the two largest occupations in the US, even though a typical retail worker earns wages beneath the poverty level. In 2011, staff at Walmart received $585m in public assistance. Moreover, Ton points to studies that have shown that when Walmart has opened a new store, wages have tended to fall in surrounding shops.
售货员和收银员也是美国人数最多的两大职业，尽管一名典型的零售工人的工资尚达不到贫困线。2011年，沃尔玛员工领到的公共补助总额为5.85亿美元。托恩还提到，一些研究表明，当沃尔玛开设一家新店时，周边商店的工资倾向于下降。
If you had invested $100 in Walmart 10 years ago your money would have grown 40 per cent; invest in a company with a “good jobs strategy” such as Costco and your money would have tripled.
如果你在10年前对沃尔玛投资100美元，那么你的钱将增值40%；但如果投资一家实行“理想工作战略”的公司，比如好事多，那么你的钱将增至初期投资的三倍。
While there are likely to be many reasons for this difference, Ton argues that the decision to give employees low-paid jobs for which they are badly trained ultimately costs companies in lost performance – such as empty shelves, or stock recorded as being on the premises but impossible to find.
虽然产生这一差异的原因可能有多种，但托恩认为，向雇员支付低薪，而且在培训方面不愿投入，最终会让公司付出表现不佳的代价——比如，货架空空如也，或是数据库的存货无法找到。
The book identifies some crucial practices that have helped model companies transform their investment in staff into higher profits. These include cross-training employees, offering secure contracts and paying them properly. While Walmart deals with erratic customer traffic by hiring staff at the last minute on hourly rates, Costco shifts employees between jobs and occasionally offers staff unpaid time off work. If they do not take up the offer, Costco takes the financial hit. However, staff often do opt for the unpaid leave because they have regular pay packages and benefits.
该书总结了模范企业的一些重要做法，这些做法帮助它们把对员工的投资转化为更高利润，包括岗位轮换培训、提供有保障的雇佣合同，以及支付像样的工资。沃尔玛在面对不稳定的顾客流量时，会等到最后一刻才聘用钟点工；而好事多则会调动雇员轮岗，偶尔还向他们提供不带薪休假的机会。如果他们不接受这个机会，公司会承担相应的经济负担。但好事多的员工往往选择接受不带薪休假，因为他们有正规的薪酬待遇和福利。
Another practice is to give workers more power. Although window displays in Zara are modelled in Spain, shop assistants can suggest local improvements, sending snapshots back to head office for approval.
另一个做法是授予员工更大权力。尽管Zara的橱窗设计是西班牙总部制定的，但店员可就改进本地的设计提出建议，将快照传回总部审批。
But Ton’s advice is not limited to employment strategies. She also found that successful retailers offered a smaller range of products and fewer promotions. This helped retailers buy at bigger discounts, avoid confusing customers and forecast sales better.
但托恩的建议并不限于雇佣战略。她还发现，成功零售商的产品范围和促销活动都比较少。这有助于它们在采购时拿到更大折扣，避免让顾客困惑，并能更好地预测销售额。
Critics would argue that companies such as Walmart are successful, profitmaking machines, and that without surveying all retailers it is impossible to tell whether combining good employment conditions and standardisation of products really delivers higher profits growth overall or just at a few key companies. But at a time when the complexity of workers’ jobs is increasing and labour force investment declining, this is a methodically researched riposte to cutting staff and wages.
批评人士会辩称，沃尔玛这样的公司是成功的制造利润的机器；同时在没有调查全部零售商的情况下，很难说良好工作待遇与产品标准化的结合能否在一般情况下带来更高的利润增长，或者这只适用于少数关键企业？不过，在如今这个工作复杂性不断增加、而对劳动力队伍的投资不断下降的时代，这份条理清晰的研究是对裁员降薪的一个有力反驳。
