In other news - treating your oxen wonderfully will not transmute a wooden moldboard into an iron plow.
> "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".
I appreciate it but no need - the people doing that (typically) are as much victims of this propaganda. They aren't malicious, they have been learned the same culture we're talking about.
Funny enough, the first place I ever interned had attempted to do a lights out factory in the 1980s. Short term, it was a disaster - in part because they literally had not installed sufficient lighting to trouble shoot problems, push automated transfer vehicles back onto control strips, and pry parts apart. The machining centers of the era could do the quality but required experts to operate, monitor, and adjust. When things went wrong they weren't small anymore, they were destructive and shut down production for 12+ hours. The shift had been made in part to leverage concessions from the workforce, and (IMHO) as a result it disregarded all the tacit skills those employees used to keep the place running. Long term, They ended up with higher quality, faster throughput, but more employees. But, it cost them a lot and they needed more employees to move stuff around the factory because they had built this huge space to do lights out and the irredeemable piece of lights out was material movement and handling. What I learned was that robots and machines can't tell you what went wrong - no matter how much you log.
I've got a ton of other examples. Every factory I've worked in I've learned how much of a myth 'low skilled labor' is. On the floor, in every factory, new hires were useless - which is a pretty definitive marker of 'skilled labor'. Same thing in the military - senior NCOs are often critical mentors to new LTs. As an engineer I've typically learned as much from the technicians and operators as from the other engineers. At each, I've also worked with really smart engineers who were terrible at their job because they had been socialized that their intelligence was all they needed and there was no need to learn from the 'floor guys'. Roger Smith (and Elon) thought engineers could make the transition to lights out with their knowledge alone because they had bought into the same narrative about blue collar work be low skill and low intelligence. The result was concerns about air friction on robots but not tolerance stack up of stampings or repairable castings.
The problem is, until you really engage with it, the narrative descriptions of certain work we get from the media and economists become a lens for making sense of reality. I'm not immune from that, I just had it beaten out of me. Oxen aren't stupid either, they're still really useful in situations where tractors struggle.
