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What Happened When Automation Came To General Motors? (qz.com)
General Motors was once the world's most profitable company -- for two decades -- and by 1970 its revenue was $22.8 billion (or $152 billion in today's dollars). But five weeks ago GM announced that it was finally ending small-car production and closing its Lordstown Assembly plant in Youngstown, Ohio.
So what went wrong? Quartz argues that GM's decline "began with its quest to turn people into machines," as "the company turned assembly work into an interlocking chain of discrete tasks, to be executed by robots whenever possible." In an article shared by Slashdot reader reporter, Quartz argues that seen in that light, the company's response to a 1972 strike "marked the beginning of the company's long but uneven descent, which would be characterized by a repeated impulse to bet on fancy, futuristic but unproven technologies while undervaluing its workers."
But the strike also raised larger issues for "a massive special task force" issuing a federal report on the quality of working life in 1972, titled Work in America... [T]echnology had failed in its promise to free humans from drudgery and wring profit from their talents, the authors said. On the contrary, the new jobs created generally required minimal expertise and therefore prevented workers from honing their skills. That stymied career mobility and left people mired in the same torpor of boredom for decades. Despite this, America continued to offer its young people increasingly rigorous education -- even as work life left little opportunity to apply it.... The larger hopes and ambitions of Work in America -- the vision that saw satisfying work itself as essential to the health of American society and democracy -- exists now as little but a curio in the footnotes of academic journals....
Meanwhile, GM continued to lavish spending on big capital investments, confident that the secret to competitiveness lay in replacing humans with technology. But as in Lordstown, the spending bore little fruit. As automotive analyst Maryann Keller recounted in her 1989 book Rude Awakening, one GM executive observed that, between 1980 and 1985, the company shelled out an eye-popping $45 billion in capital investment. Despite that spending, its global market share rose by but a single percentage point, to 22%. "For the same amount of money, we could buy Toyota and Nissan outright," said the executive -- which would have instantly bumped GM's market share to 40%.
At GM quality suffered because "Instead of making flawless cars, workers simply did their assigned jobs," Quartz argues. "Workers had no big-picture goal of building cars together to motivate them."
The 7,000-word article concludes by noting that Youngstown residents still hope that their car factory will re-open. But it's also possible that instead Lordstown Assembly "will remain standing, but empty, a vast roadside reminder of a corporate elite's doomed quest to cheapen labor by stripping the human need for skill, learning, independence, and purpose out of production, by reimagining people as machines."
So what went wrong? Quartz argues that GM's decline "began with its quest to turn people into machines," as "the company turned assembly work into an interlocking chain of discrete tasks, to be executed by robots whenever possible." In an article shared by Slashdot reader reporter, Quartz argues that seen in that light, the company's response to a 1972 strike "marked the beginning of the company's long but uneven descent, which would be characterized by a repeated impulse to bet on fancy, futuristic but unproven technologies while undervaluing its workers."
But the strike also raised larger issues for "a massive special task force" issuing a federal report on the quality of working life in 1972, titled Work in America... [T]echnology had failed in its promise to free humans from drudgery and wring profit from their talents, the authors said. On the contrary, the new jobs created generally required minimal expertise and therefore prevented workers from honing their skills. That stymied career mobility and left people mired in the same torpor of boredom for decades. Despite this, America continued to offer its young people increasingly rigorous education -- even as work life left little opportunity to apply it.... The larger hopes and ambitions of Work in America -- the vision that saw satisfying work itself as essential to the health of American society and democracy -- exists now as little but a curio in the footnotes of academic journals....
Meanwhile, GM continued to lavish spending on big capital investments, confident that the secret to competitiveness lay in replacing humans with technology. But as in Lordstown, the spending bore little fruit. As automotive analyst Maryann Keller recounted in her 1989 book Rude Awakening, one GM executive observed that, between 1980 and 1985, the company shelled out an eye-popping $45 billion in capital investment. Despite that spending, its global market share rose by but a single percentage point, to 22%. "For the same amount of money, we could buy Toyota and Nissan outright," said the executive -- which would have instantly bumped GM's market share to 40%.
At GM quality suffered because "Instead of making flawless cars, workers simply did their assigned jobs," Quartz argues. "Workers had no big-picture goal of building cars together to motivate them."
The 7,000-word article concludes by noting that Youngstown residents still hope that their car factory will re-open. But it's also possible that instead Lordstown Assembly "will remain standing, but empty, a vast roadside reminder of a corporate elite's doomed quest to cheapen labor by stripping the human need for skill, learning, independence, and purpose out of production, by reimagining people as machines."
GM's decline came when they started making crappy, low gas mileage cars and ignored the Japanese's well built, high mileage cars. Toyota, Nissan and even Hyundai produce decent cars with lots of automation.
GM's suits don't like paying to build quality except in Trucks where the higher profit margins mean they can spend a little more (and even there they lag behind Ford & Toyota). They'd rather chase short term profits and let the Government bail them out every 10 years because they know we need their factories in case we need to ramp up for war.
And tech didn't free us from drudgery because we didn't let it. Instead of cutting our work weeks we used the improvements in productivity to lay people off, reducing the demand for labor and then using the reduction in demand to cut wages (yes folks, supply and demand work both ways). Based on productivity gains (real ones, e.g. manufacturing and farm outputs, measured productivity is kind of iffy because it includes the largely make-work service sector economy) we should be working 20-30 hours a week tops but we're pushing over 50. Stupid motherf*ing puritanicals...
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Everybody else was automating too, if they stood still or went backwards towards more manual processes they'd be long since dead. Besides, automation is a bottom-up process, you automate the simplest, most routine operations freeing up people to do more complex tasks. If they couldn't grok it 50 years ago, they should see what assembly line work was like 100 years ago. There was competition and they lost, simple as that. A lot of people reason like things were great, we made changes, then things were shit, so the changes were shit. That happens too, but sometimes the world is changing around you and you can either try to roll with it or bury your head in the sand and hope for a miracle.
Despite all the "you get what you pay for" trash talking the truth is that automation is often really good at pushing out thousands of almost identical objects. Sure those objects can be built flimsy and cut safety margins to sell even cheaper, but that's a problem with the market and not the tool. Maybe I'm just exceptionally lucky but I find it's really rare that I find something that's a manufacturing defect. It's usually either a design flaw meaning they all got it or it's transport damage somewhere between the factory and me. Of course nothing is ever without exception, but unless it's like really unique handmade piece of art you don't get special attention with manual labor either it's just dull routine work.
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It had more to do with the corrupt union leadership opting to pay themselves $1000 an hour.
The reason they get paid huge amounts is supposed to be because MANAGEMENT are responsible. THEY must deal with every problem; however, corporate culture always rewarded the people who were talented at shifting blame away from themselves (and taking credit for others... the culture got worse too.)
So we have administrations loaded with people who do not take responsibility publicly or privately and even spend $$$ promoting blame on others. It is to the point today where you have organizations blaming their customers/users for not liking their dictates (think of software companies pointless UI changes.) You don't even need MBA training in sociopathy to pick up the habits anymore.
The unions are NOT the problem; they don't get much say - even if they promote stupid, management has to own it because the decisions are made by them. Externalizing costs is more than outsourcing; it's the MBA philosophy for everything. Workflows get mechanized into "legos" so it is easy to swap out low skill workers and never be at their mercy; additionally, it makes automation far easier. Same lessons were not being learned by industrial revolution are not being learned today. You think the MBA reads history? They don't have to think, just play office and investor politics (today PC babies are a new factor in the political game.)
The real purpose for a company is to provide gainful employment; despite that not being explicitly or culturally stated anymore. Look at all the socialist arguments used by the champions of capitalism-- and the reason people support it is because the flawed system produced the best results for the most people. Today, it's a religion with zero thought except to defend emotional attachment to a brand... like how religion to many is merely a brand name you identify with (or politics.) The purpose is long forgotten and it's popularity is running on fumes. It keeps getting worse until the majority fully wakes up. Look at Trump and the dimwitted and cowardly Republicans; he is just a symptom of a social cancer... remove the Tumor without addressing the cancer and another one predictably happens... progressively worse each time until death.
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Your response is comprehensible only in terms of your single-minded ideological blindness. "You think any of those tyrants": I never mentioned any tyrants; you simply began imagining arguments. I blamed poor corporate leadership for failure. If you'd take a breath and stop instinctively babbling in response to the single word "leftist," you'd realize that you want to blame the same people whom I blamed: that the executives are responsible for GM's current state, not automation.
I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks the left wants to make people like GM executives accountable has to deal with the historical fact that Obama's bailout of GM, like TARP, made risk public and profit private. The left, as manifest in politics, is sheer hypocrisy designed to protect the wealthy under the guise of helping the common man. If you can't figure out why many of the wealthiest men, like Warren Buffett, support the Democrats, it's because the Democrats protect them and make them even wealthier: nixing pipeline projects due to environmentalism and Native American water concerns just enriches Buffett through his BNSF railroad, which hauls the oil instead. The political left is historically complicit in stripping accountability in the corporate world.
"Great" in the idea of the "great men" of history does not mean good, but rather powerful. Your rhetorical flourish about "horrible" people was as hollow as your reply.
Leaders do, by their decisions and personality, shape companies, and their personal failures result in corporate failure. Steve Jobs pushed Apple forward into innovation. John Sculley could not do that, and Tim Cook still cannot. Cook's failures are personal, not the result of broader circumstances, but every press release about Apple's current bottom line will blame anything but Cook. Mary Barra's failure at GM was personal as well: she did not push her company, which was under her control, to make cars that American consumers wanted. She will never take the blame for that, though: instead those who write GM's history, like TFA, will blame robots or whatever they can to avoid ascribing responsibility to the leader.
Under the "great men" idea of history, leaders were held accountable for their failures. The historiographical shift to ignoring the actions and personal characters of leaders enables exculpatory histories like TFA that shift blame away from bad leadership to inanimate trends like automation. As others have pointed out, GM failed while other companies and other industries thrived on automation: that alone should suffice to invalidate TFA's thesis. What was peculiar to GM? Its bad leadership.
If you ever want executives to be accountable, as you pretend the left wants, you have to be able to pin blame on individual leaders, and that means reconsidering the possibility that individuals, not just trends or movements or circumstances, really do influence the course of history.
"It was GM's ... poor designs for 15 years that killed it." -- from the parent comment.
The poor designs were at least partially deliberate, apparently. Most car buyers weren't knowledgeable about cars. The bad designs made more money for GM car dealers. The dealers wanted more work, so they wanted more failures. The dealers would make huge amounts of money and would pay for expensive local advertising.
A friend of mine who was also 14 years old then, and who had a father who was an excellent mechanic, suggested we ride our bikes to the places where GM and Ford stored their cars when they arrived in the local area. My friend demonstrated sloppy GM design. Then we went and looked at Ford cars. They were much better designed and built.
Back when car buying became very popular in the U.S., and many years later, it was See the USA, in your Chevrolet".
My understanding is that now the best car manufacturer is Toyota. My understanding is that cars designed in the U.S. are far more likely to fail.
10 Least Reliable Cars -- Consumer Reports' annual survey exposes the models with the greatest risks of problems. (Oct. 24, 2018 )
The U.S. has laws that prevent car manufacturers from selling directly!!! One story: Tesla US dealership disputes. Amazing!!! Laws that help car dealers make more money. Quoting that Wikipedia article:
"48 states have laws that limit or ban manufacturers from selling vehicles directly to consumers, and although Tesla has no independent dealerships, dealership associations in multiple states have filed numerous lawsuits against Tesla, to prevent the company from selling cars."
When the next oil crisis arrives, consumers will sell off the trucks and SUV and buy subcompacts instead.
Doubtful. It's going to be far more cost effective for automotive manufacturers to just switch to an electric drive-train than it will be to retool entire lines to make smaller cars, and to dust off plans for smaller, more efficient engines and get lines up and running for those.
That's almost possible now, but not quite. In another 5-10 years? Shouldn't be a problem.
The biggest issue will be enough batteries, and more than likely, that's where Tesla ends up making the big bucks. Couple more gigafactories, and they can start to supply everyone else.
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