'This American Life' on Auto Workers: A Hack Job

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/blogs/2010/03/american-life-auto-workers-hack-job

This American Life' on Auto Workers: A Hack Job
by Mike Parker | Wed, 03/31/2010 - 11:33am

What a disappointment was last week’s This American Life. This episode of the popular one-hour show on public radio was a snapshot of how the auto industry could have been saved—if only executives had learned from the innovations pioneered at the NUMMI plant in California, a joint Toyota-GM experiment created in 1985.

I have been a big fan of This American Life. The two-part series they did on health care, “More Is Less” and “Someone Else's Money,” was outstanding.

But what they put out on NUMMI was a hack job: the same tired story about how the Fremont, California, plant was a disaster when it belonged to GM, but Toyota turned it around—using the same workforce to produce a quality car based on teamwork and respect for its workers.

Most of this is myth, hiding the reality: NUMMI’s gift to U.S. manufacturing was the Toyota Production System, or “lean production,” which taught managers how to slice up jobs to make them more repetitive and require less skill, thus increasing stress on workers and discarding them when their bodies and minds could no longer take it. In the NUMMI case, the whole workforce will be discarded: the plant is closing tomorrow.

Why does This American Life simply accept the Toyota president's testimony, that the reason for the company’s massive recalls recently was that Toyota had deviated from its true course and tried to grow too quickly? Something is more fundamentally wrong. (Hint: it involves the company’s lean management system that maintains constant pressure on employees and assures tighter control of a top-down decision-making operation, producing a culture that destroys whistleblowers and breeds cover-ups. More on that here.)

Plus, if worker-management relations were so great at NUMMI and its high-quality product was selling so well, why is Toyota closing the plant? Toyota claims that the closing resulted from the loss of GM's share of production, when the nose-diving auto maker pulled out last year. But the California Treasurer’s Commission’s report on the plant closing debunks that notion, revealing that GM accounted for only 10 percent of production last year and 15 percent since 2001.

FULL story at link.

[Gman2]

1. I almost got a job with those cretins. Luckily, a strike started.

They are stupid fucks. Hateful fucks, and stingey fucks. They dont pay till threatened. Bad people.

[pleah]

2. K&R