NYT: Building a Harley Faster

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/magazine/building-a-harley-faster.html?ref=magazine&_r=0

JAN. 28, 2014

While working the line at Harley-Davidson’s factory in York, Pa., Mark Dettinger noticed a small problem. The plastic piece that held electrical parts to the front of a motorcycle, a piece about the size of a hardcover book, wasn’t fitting correctly. Every time a new bike came down the line, it took a few extra shoves to push it into place. In fact, it took an extra 1.2 seconds. But Dettinger, who had spent some 20 years at the York plant, knew that every second counted. With 400 motorcycles built each shift, on two shifts a day, an extra 1.2 seconds per bike added up to 2,200 lost bikes annually. Millions could be lost in revenue. Maybe it wasn’t such a small problem.

Before the great recession, Harley-Davidson didn’t have to worry about counting the seconds. There was little competition for their core customers — “fat white guys,” as one Harley employee called them. Harley charged a huge premium for its bikes, and its customers waited as long as 18 months to receive them. (“Easy Rider” isn’t about a Kawasaki.) Inefficiency was part of the charm. Jim Waltermyer, the union representative at the York plant, said workers could assemble motorcycles at their own pace, music blaring, while sitting on chairs — if they even showed up at all. “We had 30 percent absenteeism every Monday and Friday,” Ed Magee, the York plant manager, told me. This all worked fine until, all of a sudden, it didn’t anymore. By 2009, during the worst of the recession, the company was close to collapse. Its stock price had fallen from nearly $75, at its peak, to $8. The inefficiency wasn’t charming anymore.



Harley’s York factory represents an alternative to the common narrative of American manufacturing. In recent decades, countless sleepy Northern manufacturers suddenly awoke to global competition. They often responded by breaking their unions, by moving to a Southern right-to-work state or out of the country altogether, and by employing robots on the assembly line. This strategy has been repeated so many times that even as overall manufacturing output has grown by nearly 25 percent, manufacturing jobs have fallen by 30 percent since 2000.

Union representation on factory floors has fallen even faster. There are two standard explanations for this phenomenon: Many business leaders and economists have argued the companies had no choice but to stop paying high union wages and benefits; others, especially on the left, argue that this is shortsighted, saying that unions, with their emphasis on skill and tenure, can make companies — and the country over all — richer.

FULL story at link.

[enough]

1. The story and comments make an interesting read. (nt)