Pear shaped🍋

How would designer Enzo Mari reimagine a pear packing factory?

The thin-skinned pear bruises easily. To protect their longevity, pears need to be individually wrapped in tissue paper and arranged in boxes before shipping. In the early 2000s, a pear packing factory in Northern California managed this operation for the whole region. When the pears arrived each morning, they were washed, checked for bruises, and sorted into stainless steel bins according to size. There are nine pear sizes, the biggest being size 60 (sixty per box), while twice as many 120-size pears are needed to fill the same box.

In this factory, the pear packers were paid per box packed. But since each pear took the same energy to pick up, wrap and place regardless of size, the boxes of bigger pears could be packed with less effort than the boxes of smaller pears. To ensure equal access to the bigger pears, the workers were stationed at each pear size for fifteen minutes before rotating up a size.

Tupapakurua Falls, Erua Forest Dave Heatley

Quasi-exogenously varying piece rates

I know about the floor arrangement of this unnamed pear packing factory because economists Tom Chang and Tal Gross detail its intricacies in their research paper: How many pears would a pear packer pack if a pear packer could pack pears at quasi-exogenously varying piece rates?, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization in 2014.

I first read the paper in a labour economics class in Wellington in 2017, and was gripped. The neutral tone demanded by academic writing could not buff out the physicality of the factory, nor could the complex economic analysis dissuade me from the sheer interestingness of the subject matter. I could almost hear the conveyor belts, smell the fresh, firm pears, feel their lumpy form through crinkling paper. My back recoiled at the thought of so many hours standing. My wrists protested at the strain that would surely build up over the season. Like Chang and Gross, I wanted to know.

How many pears would a pear packer pack, when the effort needed to fill a box changed every fifteen minutes? At which stations would the pear packers pack the fastest? Fundamentally, are pear packers income maximisers, packing more at the bigger pear stations, or are they something else?

Anything pear-related takes me back

When I see the screenprint, I immediately think of the pear packers. It is 2024 and despite seven years having passed since my first encounter, anything vaguely pear-related still brings me back to the Northern Californian factory. Rather than fading, my enthusiasm for the pear packing research has instead leaked into my identity. I have presented the paper not just in my workplaces, but to my housemates, gathered around a laptop on the coffee table after dinner as I explain the operational procedure of the pear packing factory. I find ways to shoehorn it into conversation, even when there is the wispiest of links. A friend tells me she is considering a promotion; more money, but harder work. “Did I ever tell you about the pear packers?” I ask. “Yes, you told me,” she replies.

On this occasion, I am in London at the Design Museum’s retrospective of Enzo Mari, an Italian designer, artist and theorist, looking at a screenprint of a pear that is more pear-like than a real-life pear. Mari’s design career took as many turns as a Microsoft screensaver; his best known designs include a children’s toy of interlocking animals cut from a single piece of wood, a fruit bowl formed from a bent iron beam, and the stumpy Panettone bollards which organise traffic in Milan as well as offering a seat to the passer-by. The exhibition I attend was organised in collaboration with the Triennale Milano, where it opened in 2020 — two days before Mari died from Covid-related causes.

The exhibition’s tour to the Design Museum in London, planned before Mari’s death, was to be the last outing for the collection until 2060; Mari left his entire archive to the city of Milan on condition that it would be sealed for forty years. According to Mari’s “most optimistic” forecasts, this was the time needed to allow for “a new generation that is not as spoiled as today’s generation and that will be capable of using it in an informed manner”, who could “take back control of the profound meaning of things”.

Looking at the two enormous screenprints, I am unaware of my spoiled status, my perspective dulled by rigid education, my body polluted by those hard, toxic dots that filled ‘exfoliating’ shower gels during my adolescence. The prints are of an apple and a pear; the apple, a block of stop-sign red, rounded edges indented at the top and bottom, a thick, black stalk at the top. The pear, a bulbous, traffic light green, with a matching, reflected black stalk. These fruits are no. 1 (apple) and 2 (pear) in Mari’s ‘Nature Series’. The forms are the result of intensive research, as Mari sought not ‘an apple, but rather the apple. It must be the concept of the apple’.

There is a child-friendly quality to the simple shapes, their colour and easy curves engaging for young eyes. Enzo and his then-wife Iela Mari, an illustrator, developed the fruit forms into children’s books, designed to draw the attention of youth away from television.

Enzo Mari hated television

He hated a lot of things. Journalists and academics have variously noted that Mari despaired of: consumerism, capitalism, the design industry, mass production, manufacturers, galleries, fairs, advertising, the media, academia, the digital, fame. Mari was born in 1932, the tenth anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome which was celebrated by the regime as it transitioned into totalitarianism. He left school aged fifteen as his father Luigi fell ill and the family needed extra financial support. Without a high school diploma, Mari was excluded from most further education, but jumped at the one opportunity available: the Brera Academy in Milan, where he studied painting and sculpture before switching to stage design.

Post-war Italy saw intense industrialisation and growth, particularly in Milan, which transformed over the subsequent decades from a war-torn city into Italy’s commercial capital. Throughout this transition, Mari was aware of the increasing social divide, with the boom in mass production generating profits for factory owners, while workers endured poor working conditions and housing. Mari saw design as a political act, and his lifelong commitment to communism imbued his work, his designs centring the factory worker who produced them. Mari agreed with Marxist theory that work is fundamentally alienating, with the exception of transformative work which causes change in the world. Intending to improve the experience of factory workers, Mari designed away the need for the most alienating, repetitive tasks involved in his creations. Having identified the hinge as “the obsessive repetition of the same action by the worker”, he designed his Java bowl without one, the container and lid creating a hinge when fitted together. This, he believed, removed the need for the alienating linchpin.

Mari sought to empower the people and unleash a creative utopia, but his attempts did not go to plan. In his 1973 project ‘Proposals for the hand craftsmanship of porcelain’, he created template designs for bowls and vases to inspire artisans and industrial workers to fashion their own designs. Instead, the artisans carefully replicated his examples. The following year saw the publication of his flagship project, a proposal for autoprogettazione, or self-design. The manual gave instructions for building nineteen pieces of furniture using only pine and nails, and Mari sent the manual to anyone who wrote to him, asking that they cover only the cost of postage. The designs were popular, but Mari was again disappointed, saying that ‘only one percent understood what the project was about’. He was particularly repulsed at those who simply paid others to produce the furniture. Today, Mari would likely still be disappointed if he knew that his interlocking animals, intended as a children’s toy, currently cost NZ$733 at the Design Museum shop.

Worker-pay elasticity is important but hard to measure

The question of whether workers want to work more or fewer hours when their hourly wage changes is important for major policy issues (including minimum wage, unemployment benefits, parental paid leave, pension ages) but nearly impossible to get good data for, because hours are often fixed in contracts. With a pay rise, there is a bigger reward for working, so some may want to increase their work hours. For others, a pay rise means they can earn enough in fewer hours, so they would rather work less and spend more time growing fruit, or making their own furniture. In many jobs this flexibility is not possible, so labour economists peer at the question through a niche of workers who do get to choose; so far these roles include stadium vendors, taxi drivers, bike couriers, and pear packers.

The pear packer’s situation is unique because unlike the other roles, they do not change their hours worked; the pear packer’s shift lasts until all the pears are safely in boxes. Their only choice is packing speed. If acting according to a ‘neoclassical model of labour supply’, a packer would work faster when at the large pear stations than when at the small pear stations, because the implicit wage is higher. Yet Chang and Gross find the average pear packer had the reverse pattern, packing more pears at the small pear stations.

This superficial finding was not the whole story: when analysed by average packing speed, which Chang and Gross label “skill level”, it is only the less skilled who pack the smaller pears faster, while the more skilled did pack the larger pears faster. Chang and Gross hypothesise that the less skilled packer may be trying to hit their own target amount of boxes within each fifteen minute block, despite the pay penalty this incurs, since they could earn more by maximising the number of boxes of large pears packed.

Chang and Gross write that more skilled workers may be better at adapting their packing speed to the implicit wage change, “but we cannot distinguish this… from the alternative hypothesis that more skilled workers are simply more rational than their less-skilled peers.” To me, these results instead show two different strategies for coping with alienating work; the method of the “skilled” packer is a strategy to make the most money, while the method of the “unskilled” packer is a strategy designed to exercise personal autonomy. Two ways for a factory worker to remove the lynchpin. Yet one of them does come at a price; if the average worker were to pack at a constant rate across sizes instead of packing small pears faster, they could earn 7.3% more per hour. With other strategies they could earn even more.

Pear-packer productivity

The authors do not name the pear packing factory, but their later work, on particulate pollution and pear packing productivity, says that the factory has since closed.¹ I search online for a different pear packing factory in the same region. I watch a video tour. The enthusiastic guide is drowned out by the grating and churning of the belts and slides that jiggle the pears into place. I can see the pear packers stationed at bins, wrapping at ferocious speed. Eight years on from when Chang and Gross collected their data, pear packing is still a manual process, although I spot evidence of efficiency gains; a close-up shot of one pear packer, from behind her left shoulder, shows her moving with sniper precision, her body completely stationary as her arms synchronise to summon the tissue paper, grasp the pear, combine the two in a single twisting motion and put the result in the box, all in under a second. Far quicker than the average speed Gross and Chang report, at 2.4 seconds per pear. I suspect she is a skilled pear packer, but I do not know if she is paid per box, or per hour.

A Mari pear packing factory

How would Mari reconfigure the pear packing factory? Could he use his intimate knowledge of both the pear form and interlocking objects to create a system that offers the worker a more enriching experience? I offer my interpretation safe in the knowledge that it is wrong; as part of the spoiled generation, I am incapable of using Mari’s work in an informed manner. The serious task of taking back control of the profound meaning of things belongs to the next generation.

I think Mari would empathise with the average pear packer’s box targeting as a costly way to pass a day of alienating work. Mari would appreciate the need for pear packing in order to distribute pears, but be troubled by the profit maximising setup which disadvantages the workers, some of whom react to the alienating system by adopting a lower paid strategy. Mari would seek to decentralise the pear packing process, encouraging the farms to innovate their own packing methods, with pear workers involved across the whole process. He would once again be disappointed when his creative contribution was misunderstood.

By Olivia Wills

Mt Aspiring and the Breakaway Dave Heatley

Selected sources

Chang, Tom, and Tal Gross. “How Many Pears Would a Pear Packer Pack If a Pear Packer Could Pack Pears at Quasi-Exogenously Varying Piece Rates?” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol. 99, 2014, pp. 1–17.

Enzo Mari. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli, Design Museum, n.d., https://www.electa.it/en/product/enzo-mari-curated-by-hans-hulrich-obrist/

“Enzo Mari, the Designer Who Hated the Design Industry” Financial Times, 2024 ($).

“Enzo Mari at the Design Museum Explores How the Giant of Italian Design Saw His Work as a Political Act”, The Conversation, 2023.

“Enzo Mari Review – Political Art and Craft at the Design Museum”. The Guardian, 27 March 2024.

1. Particulate pollution is bad for pear packing productivity.