Re: Junkyard dog hits Motown
On May 16, 2007, at 7:06 PM, Mr. WD wrote:
FWIW, about a month ago, I put this question to an industrial engineer who works for a company that produces parts for American and Japanese automakers. He said the culture on the assembly lines in the American automotive plants is totally different from the Japanese automotive plants. The Japanese plants (i.e. those plants run by Toyota, Honda, etc. but not necessarily located in Japan), he said, have carefully choreographed every movement the worker makes. There’s nothing extraneous (no extra tools, etc.) — every move the worker does has been carefully studied and pre-planned.
Yeah, but I first heard about all this 20 or 25 years ago, and the
Americans were supposed to be adopting it. (It’s part of what the
Labor Notes people call management by stress.) They kept failing.
They were supposed to be catching up to the Japanese any day now
since the mid-80s. They haven’t. But Toyota and Honda can make it
work in the U.S.
Of course, it sounds like hell on earth, the last word in alienated
labor.
Doug