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Free PCs Not AfFordable
rakerman writes: "Ford Cancels Computer Giveaway Program. I guess their 'Model E' program turned out to be an Edsel." We did at least one story about this at the time (and a Katz essay). A lot of people pointed out that the United Auto Workers union was the driving force (ha-ha) behind this program initially.
Spoken like someone who has never set foot in an auto plant.
I work for Saturn as a Controls Engineer, and you can forget about getting rid of (many) more folks through automation. The low hanging fruit has been plucked, that being the welding robots, and in our case, some of the powertrain operations.
The simple truth is that humans are still required to do most of assembly (urethaning the glass & roof not included), and to get the fit and finish of a car looking good. It will be some time before these operations are relegated to robots.
And why bother? Since if breaking the union is what you want to do, then the way to do that is to set your plant up as a "X" plant. That is where your plant does nothing but assembly (as opposed to doing the stamping, welding, painting, etc). The way this works is that you bring in the guys who make the radios, and have them install them on the line instead of a UAW worker. This not only cuts your overhead, so it's cheaper (it's pretty much certain that these guys aren't going to get UAW scale -- and never mind the benifits), but you also lessen the impact of the union.
It's already happening in South America, Ford does it, I think that we do it too (that being GM). Volkwagen planned on doing it too (in fact they stole the plans from us, and lost in court over it)
My parents and in-laws were recipients of the Ford giveaway. It amounted to about $500 towards the cost of the system, plus the dial-up account. IMO, the giveaway was useful. I couldn't convice my father-in-law that his 16MB P-60 just didn't have the horsepower to run his apps. The Ford giveaway saved me some forced tech hours.
DaimlerChrysler decided not to give away PC's, but instead they said, "we'll give you AOL." (great, more AOL users) For $2/month, DCX employees get AOL access and a special DaimlerChrysler portal site with access to benefit information and company news. (Hmmm, $2/month for international dial-up, we contractors lose out again)
Well, the UAW didn't like it enough. So, they came up with a "free" PC "giveaway" program too. The National Training Center (UAW-NTC)provided a program to give out computers from a company called Union Friendly. (a well known and respected vendor?) No, I'm not making this up, really!
For weeks, I had hourly UAW employees asking me which system they should get. (such is the life as the resident geek) The low end being a Celeron 500 (64MB RAM, 10GB, Win-ME), with a contribution of less than $200. Warranty was something like 90 days. The upgrade options were (*ahem*) "very impressive." (ok, that's got me laughing- $600 for 64MB of ram and 10GB of disk)
I've seen some of their systems in the UAW/NTC training rooms (not on our corp network), and they're pretty much basement built systems. With reliabilty and tech support to match.
I told people to compare the options, item for item, against Best Buy, CompUSA, Dell, and Gateway (can't make it hard on these people, many can't handle changing their password every month). Several who followed through, bought a decent PC from Dell.
I don't know how long UAW/NTC will keep their deal going, but somebody's probably making a few extra bucks for this Christmas season.
I wonder if the UAW did anything like this for GM employees?
Check out the United Auto Workers website . Average salary is $14 an hour.
I am a Ford employee in the U.S., and I can confirm that all U.S. employees were able to get the computers through Model E that wanted them. There were problems in other countries, however, such as arcane tax laws that would have required employees to pay about as much in taxes as they would have to buy the computers outright.
Also, even though HP was supplying the computers, PeoplePC was managing the Model E program (distribution and internet access), and apparently couldn't deliver on their agreement overseas. It seems PeoplePC was overly optimistic in their promises.
You can buy a nice Staublii or Motoman robot for around $80,000.
Of course by the time you generate controls drawings, mechanical drawings (for end effectors and fixturing) and develope the application you are problably talking closer to $120-$150k for one robot.
We very seldom use what most here would concider a computer for machine control. Besides that, I have working on a project where we had to handle 33 variations of the same part on one piece of assembly and test equipment. The entire project was less than $2 million. The cycle time for a completed part was 10 seconds.
An Allen-Bradley SLC 5/04 processor with 16k (yes, that is k) is typical of what we use for machine control. I know this seems a small amount of RAM, but when you are primarily dealing with bits not much is required.
I have to disagree with you here. In some cases, the computer can make the dicisions much more quickly and reliably than any human on earth. One example I have personal experience with is machine vision systems. I did a project that involved inspecting disk pack assemblies that were assembled by hand and then orbital formed them in place. The operator would swear that he assembled them correctly when our machine rejected an assembly. Upon inspection, it was proven every time that the operator had in fact assembled them incorrectly. During final exceptance we even rejected an assembly because an eyelash was in the disk assembly. Our customers were very impressed and it also made a strong case for doing this assembly in a clean room.
Actually that is $364k in 35 years, but you left out things like benefits, social security taxes, and unemployment insurance that the company has to pay on top of the emplyee's wages.
OK, I could go on for quite a while but I am done for now...
I know what the Internet is, what the hell is this Interweb business?!