Prompt:
The following appeared in a memo from a vice president of Quiot Manufacturing.
"During the past year, Quiot Manufacturing had 30 percent more on-the-job accidents than at the nearby Panoply Industries plant, where the work shifts are one hour shorter than ours. Experts say that significant contributing factors in many on-the-job accidents are fatigue and sleep deprivation among workers. Therefore, to reduce the number of on-the-job accidents at Quiot and thereby increase productivity, we should shorten each of our three work shifts by one hour so that employees will get adequate amounts of sleep."
Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.
Response:
The argument presented here claims that in order to reduce the number of accidents on-the-job and increase productivity at Quiot, they should shorten the 3 week work shifts by an hour so that they get sufficient amount of sleep, as recommended by the experts. However this argument is incomplete, and cannot be deemed solidly reasonable unless few clarifications are reached.
One of the underlying assumption is that Quiot manufacturing and Panoply industry plants are quite similar and due to which arguments claims that reducing the work shift by an hour in the latter unit has seen 30 percent less accidents as compared to the former. First of all there is no enough information to prove that these both units are similar in nature, the kind of manufacturing they both carry out, and the process via which they hire the employees, maybe the Panoply unit hires the people only after having a certain degree of work experience due to which the employees tend to be more careful with their work resulting in lesser accidents. The products manufactured in Panoply unit maybe less hazardous than the one in Quiot. In order to bolster the claim the author needs to prove the similarities between both the industries, provide information about how both the units fall into the same category of manufacturing and reside in the similar environmental, economical conditions.
Secondly, the argument relies on the expert advice who suggests that many on-the-job mishaps happens due to lack of sleep and fatigue among the workers. We need to know more about the study conducted by the experts in order to reach this conclusion. Did the study include wide range of manufacturing industries, what were other factors that played a role during this study and most importantly it also depends on which location this study was conducted. Giving more information about the study itself and proving that the sample included in the study done by experts is exactly like that in real world, and also making sure that there were no other external factors that skewed the study results will help strengthen the claim.
Lastly, given that we do not answers to a lot of underlying questions, the argument cripples and is unreasonable to overthrow any kind of conclusions.