Auto-plant design and worker orgranizing: was, well, lots of other things

Mike Yates mikey+ at pitt.edu
Tue May 5 21:12:02 PDT 1998


Friends,

To say that they are hard jobs is not to say that they are skilled jobs. Believe, as the son of a man who labored 44 years in a factory and then gasped for breath with emphysema for the next 12 years, I would never demean the workers, but the work itself is demeaning to say the least.

michael yates

Brad De Long wrote:


> >Friends,
> >
> >I do not think tht workersin the Mexico Ford plant are skilled at all.
> >Work in
> >an auto plant requires very little skill with very few exceptions. that's why
> >Ford could move in the first place. High productivity (from the technology)
> >and low wages from the huge pool of surplus labor.
> >
> >Michael Yates
>
> Work in an auto plant requires a high tolerance for noise, a high tolerance
> for boredom, a substantial amount of manual dexterity, and substantial
> familiarity with how to handle machine technologies.
>
> Assembly-line jobs are not easy jobs.
>
> Hermosillo is interesting because it is unusual: were it usual, the auto
> industry would have moved to Mexico and the rest of Latin America a
> generation ago.
>
> Brad DeLong



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