Also, isn't someone from the government supposed to be in charge of this? Shouldn't they be out there finding out what's happening?

It seems odd that no one has tried this, yet as someone who has worked in a factory, I can easily believe that the absentee managers have no idea what the hell actually goes on among the workers.

You need to spend significant actual time, to the point of working actual shifts, to get a clear picture of things sometimes. People have weird and wrong notions of what efficiencies matter sometimes, for example. Shaving a second off an action repeated thousands of times daily matters, shaving a minute off of a rare task that's not even done every day matters far less in comparison.