essay - GMAT: Argument 8

Question:
The following appeared in the editorial section of a corporate newsletter:

“The common notion that workers are generally apathetic about management issues is false, or at least outdated: a recently published survey indicates that 79 percent of the nearly 1,200 workers who responded to survey questionnaires expressed a high level of interest in the topics of corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programs.”

Discuss how well reasoned . . . etc.

Answer:
Although in the article the author considers the responses of the survey as a sign of denying the common notion that workers are apathetic about management issues, this argument has two significant flaws.

First and foremost, it's doubtful that employees think the two topics, corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programs, as management issues. They may see the two topics as their issues. For instance, corporate restructuring itself is a management issue for sure, but for employees it may be a threat to make them lose their jobs. For redesign of benefits programs as well, they may think of only themselves, like "What hotels will be available for my region?" Therefore, the argument is not convincing.

Second, if the demographics of the survey is unclear, the argument is not convincing. That is, in this case, what kind of people mostly answered the survey is a critically important information. For example, if most of the survey takers had been people who were very interested especially in restructuring and benefit plans, the percentage of people showing high interests would have skewed the information. Therefore, the author should have showed clear information of the survey.

In conclusion, since the argument has arbitrary interpretation, which is intended to support the conclusion by the way I mentioned above, the argument becomes so weak. Also, unclear source of the survey makes the argument incredible.