Lean (and mean) production: VW in the USA

German manufacturing companies have a reputation for high wages and good labor relations.  That may be justified at home, when labor unions are strong and labor rights are established by law.  It doesn’t necessarily apply to their operations in the USA.

Chris Brooks, writing in Labor News, wrote about how Volkwagen manages its Tennessee plant on the theory that workers are most productive when pushed to their physical limits.

At the Chattanooga plant, permanent employees work alongside “temporary” workers, some of whom have actually worked there for years.  Pitted against one another, both groups fear to speak up.

Workers are routinely pushed to their physical and emotional breaking points. From management’s point of view, this maximizes productivity.

“Every employee there busts their ass and is injured and is working through the pain because they don’t want their job taken by a temp,” Amanda says. “It is made clear to all of us that we are easy to replace.”

That’s lean production in a nutshell: ruthless efficiency, produced by a system of efficient ruthlessness.  Workers are deliberately stretched to their limits, by a combination of competitive pressure, inadequate training, repetitive stress, and rotating shifts—so that the weakest links can be identified and eliminated.

Technology and its discontents: Links 2/17/15

Socialize the Data Centers! an interview of Evgeny Morozov by New Left Review.

Knowledge really is power.   Information available on the Internet enables big organizations to know—or think they know—everything important about you.  Evgeny Morozov, a technology writer and critic, believes Big Data should be subject to democratic control and privacy safeguards, not monopolized by private companies such as Google.

One American City Enjoys a Hyperfast Internet—Any Surprise Corporations Don’t Control It? by Thom Hartmann for AlterNet.

Chattanooga, Tennessee’s publicly-owned fiber-optic Internet utility operates at a speed of 1,000 gigabits per second—about 50 times faster than in the average American city where Internet service is provided by for-profit companies.

New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers by Kyle Wiens for Wired.

Tractlor manufacturers such as John Deere make it virtually impossible and maybe illegal for farmers to repair and reprogram their own tractors.

The invisible network that keeps the world running by Tim Maugham for the BBC.

Containerized shipping enables the global supply chain to function.  It requires complex coordination that can be done only by computer networks.  The author speculates that someday the process of sorting, loading and unloading cargo may be completely automated, with no human beings in the loop.  What, I ask ironically, could possibly go wrong?

South Korean woman’s hair ‘eaten’ by robot vacuum cleaner as she slept by Justin McCurry for The Guardian.

Technology is an extremely useful servant, but, as any rich person can tell you, people with servants need to keep an eye on them.