| because what they are talking about is the workforce. Treat your workforce like cogs, like oxen, and guess what thats what you get even when you find out quite some time later that you actually need something else. The contrast of these two quotes in the article makes the point > "Mass production technologies and the division of labor created a workforce consisting of relatively unskilled employees on the line combined with a smaller group of highly skilled workers and the engineering teams that designed it." > "Japanese producers pursued precision production, just-in-time production, quality built into all production stages (not just at the end), continuous improvements by the entire workforce, and collaborative labor practices, all of which led to dramatically increased efficiencies and quality." One (Ford) seeks to deskill its workforce in the name of efficiency because they see their opinions as irrelevant because they are not the capital class. One (Toyota) seeks their input as valuable specifically because they are the ones doing the work. I've worked in both types of factories as an engineer. BOTH sought to apply the principles of lean manufacturing to build efficiency. It only worked in one of them, the one with a culture of treating factory staff with respect. In the one where management and engineering looked down on the employees they didn't listen for efficiency opportunities they only looked for them themselves, they presumed the unskilled workforce provided nothing. Funny enough - that plant couldn't attract better quality employees. The articles has an entire section dedicated to workforce education...great! but as with all post secondary education in our modern society, the participants are (in large part) motivated by the economic potential of that pursuit. If I can make the same working at starbucks (with benefits because employer scale) as I can as an electrical tradesperson (yes, there are levels but not all are union) why would I pick the one that destroys my body? Why bother with workforce education if your leaders don't respect their work and will seek to Taylorize them instead of partner with them. Apprenticeship and training works in Germany and Japan because the jobs are not awful. It works because of the culture of work. I would argue this is actually the same reason we lag in another marker the article talks about - robots per worker. |
I feel I seldom hear in tech circles (on the internet at least) the empirical evidence around the Toyota Production System. Maybe I didn't either until I read "The machine that changed the world" by Womack, Jones, and Roos.
It is a historical fact that Toyota produced higher quality with lower cost all through the 1980s vs their American competitors. In the same era at General Motors, CEO Roger Smith said he would build a lights-out factory 100% run by robots. It never worked and they had to abandoned the concept.
When I listen to those Toyota people talk about their system, the concept of mutual respect is the basic foundation. The engineers at Toyota have to spend time working on the line. Exactly what you are describing, partnership vs Taylorization.
Sometimes I feel like this explains Tesla quality issues. When I look at how some people at Tesla think about line workers, they literally call them "Button Pushers" or even use racial slurs. Elon when he described the "machine that makes the machine" was echoing what Roger Smith said in the 80s about a "lights out factory". And here we are ten years later and Tesla does not have a lights out factory and their quality is still very low.
Where I work in the US, it is a service business but some of the concepts still apply. Some of our tools and processes were built from the top down with little user input. It is a struggle to do Poke Yoke or Kaizen, and part of that I think may be the grapevine knowledge to "keep your head down and your mouth shut".