>From the WSJ, 7-1-2002: Tricks of the Trade: On Factory Floors, Top
Workers Hide Secrets to Success --- Bosses Seeking Input to Boost
Output Often Hit a Snag: Tight-Lipped Old Hands --- Mr. Fowler's
`Voodoo' Accuracy
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Bill Fowler knows that knowledge is power. That's why the 56-year-old factory worker seldom tells anyone anything...
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Great article, Kelley. I love the words `lore', `voodoo', `tricks', in the place of skill, craft, method, technique, and knowledge. That little yuppy biz (WSJ) stylistic dismissal alone tells it all. Since the WSJ considers core engineering craft, `voodoo' why would any one with such skills want to explain to them, these are the basis of the industrial revolution? They are convinced it was all built on the genius of management and capitalism. So fuck'm.
I have systematically down graded my skill, efficiency, craft and knowledge at work for the last twenty years working in private shops. In the last dozen years I almost never show newer workers anything either, and certainly never explain anything to a boss, manager, or supervisor. I learned that detailed teaching skills are the fast track to being replaced by cheaper labor.
The all time master of this is Loi B, one of my current work buds. He actively hides and protects his methods and techniques like they were state secrets and will point blank refuse to explain what he is doing to me or Larry G, his co-workers. Larry G and I on the other hand do share, but only between ourselves, in a mean spirited isolation of Loi. Joe M the new guy flounders around, and I've tried to help him but his work ethic is to keep from learning too much, so he doesn't have to work on more difficult jobs.
As for the `just in time' production changes cited later in the article, I have to say, one of the key experiences I've had was watching a manufacturer change over to this sort of production system, and it did exactly the same thing---it killed them. Within about six years of changing they went bankrupt: slowing production, increasing costs, reducing quality, etc, etc. I love it when the asshole MBA efficiency experts take a face plant.
The deeper truth is that US corporate culture no longer understands manufacturing and industrial production, since its whole emphasis has been to get rid of that nasty greasy stuff, the material realities of industrial production.
If you noticed in the article:
``..One of Mr. Bosco's first priorities was to undo the damage the overhaul had caused. For that, he needed his workers to tell him what went wrong and how to fix it. As they searched for solutions, both the plant's managers and workers agreed that the root of the problem was that former management hadn't given workers any input into the redesign. `They ignored our experience, because they thought any monkey could build pumps,' says Mr. Bancroft, one of the plant's most seasoned pump builders...''
At one time, core managers were grown up from the shop floor, and applied what they learned to the production systems---and were actually rewarded (shock of shocks) for it. But that era probably died sometime in the late sixties. I remember at least some of that sort of work culture as a kid and admired it. But the great rise of the professional managerial class over took that generation of old line managers and we got the `rust belt' of the 70s, the birth of post-modernity, etc. The 80s were a great lesson in how all that turned out: gutted US industry, shill corporations with a brand name and no US plants, and what the Reagan administration called the longest post-war expansion in history, etc. Well the 90s did all that and better.
Just read Jim Farmelant's excellent post (Braverman's analysis of Taylorism, Johnson, etc.)
But the ultimate sequel to Taylorism is the rust-belt of the 70s, the re-partitioning of industrial society back into the haves and have nots, and the reduction of a once rising working class back down into the mass urban miseries of poverty, crime, disease and early death.
The ultimate problem with Taylorism is that so-called scientific management and rationalized production doesn't work. You simply can not pre-plan a production process anymore than you can completely pre-engineer a device without building one and testing it. And it gets worse. You can not pre-design a business around a pre-designed production system for a pre-designed product---unless of course the 'business', `production' and `product' are not real. Ipso facto, the imaginary product of imaginary production and imaginary profits---the dot.com, Enron, WorlCom, wonders of the twenty-first century....
Chuck Grimes