[lbo-talk] Junkyard dog hits Motown

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Thu May 17 08:58:48 PDT 2007



>From: "Jim Straub" <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com>
>
> > 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.
>
>????? Taylorism has been around for 100 years.

Frederick Winslow Taylor himself -- who broke tasks down into component parts timed to a hundredth of a minute -- has been dead for 97 years, but his curse goes marching on. BTW, while lying on his deathbed, one of Taylor's final acts was to wind his watch.

Carl

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