“…at a GM engine plant, circa 1995”

“Bob wants 60 an hour, he gets 60 an hour.”

15 Replies to ““…at a GM engine plant, circa 1995””

As the saying goes ‘Figures don’t lie but liers can sure figure’.

I learned a long time ago, What Gets Measured, Gets Managed*
And management spends more time massaging the measurements, than actually improving the process and accomplishing the goals.
*whether it is important or not.

Want to see a great video on how Bob’s fudging turned out!!
Enjoy. Produced at about the time Obama entered the White House!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEXLPpr2Rwg

I’d like to see from which hour engine blocks lasted the longest. I think of a bunch of union stooges putting 85 engine blocks together in an hour under verbal abuse from some other idiot and I don’t see quality or loving craftsmanship in the picture.

Those that can, do.
Those that can’t, teach.
Those that can neither do nor teach?
They “manage”.

.
Back in early 1990’s I read a book by Edward Deming … he was a statistical Engineer who started Japan on its high quality control strategy in the 1950’s
I still love his 1970’s era analogy of the car industry , paraphrased as follows …
The guy bolting the left front fender on a Toyota is considered the factory expert on installing left front fenders on Toyota’s …. and if it does not fit perfect he can summon management and have the whole assembly line shut down until the problem is solved.
That worker loves his job , he goes home every evening feeling a sense of worth and accomplishment and proud of all things Toyota.
The guy in the GM factory bolting left front fenders on Chevy’s hates his job , the fenders never fit properly and when he tells management they give him a box of spacers to put behind the bolts and tell him to keep his nose out of quality control issues.
That worker goes to the Detroit bar every evening and gets snot friggin drunk in order to forget how much he hates his job.

Take your yearly or hourly wage and write it in felt marker on the inside of your hard hat.
Then instead of telling some manager what an idiot they are, just take off your hat, run your hand through your hair, glance at that number, then blow the proper amount of sunshine up their ass.
Trust me, it works.
We’ve been through Kaizan, ZIP, 5 Whys, Zip again, and several other of these programs.
All of them are The Next Big Thing until they become a dirty word that must not be uttered when the new Next Big Thing is announced.
I’m slightly to the right of Attilla the Hun but I seriously wonder about what goes on in some people’s heads in business these days.
I spent four days in meetings with 9 other people working on a problem that one person could have handled in 20 minutes, and that is not an exxageration.
I can’t even remember the name of the stupid program it was under.
The project was scheduled for four days, and four days it took.
If we had broke up the meeting after half an hour the ‘facilitator’ would have had to come up with some other mindless exercise to pad his resume with.
His job in the group became to lead the conversations away from the obvious answer until 3 and a half days went by.
And no, I don’t work for the government.

I am the one who wrote the blog post that’s linked to here… the blocks that “lasted the longest” would have had more to do with the way the foundry did their work, casting the aluminum.
That said, the quality might have been worse in the “85” hours when management wouldn’t let workers stop the line to do proper quality checks (calling them “union stooges” is offensive). There might be machining defects, such as cutting the cylinder bores to be too small or too big… which could cause a new Cadillac engine to seize up (which happened) or cause it to smoke and leak.
As another commenter mentioned, W. Edwards Deming was correct in his assessment that most quality problems were management issues, not worker issues. I was a salaried engineer in that plant and I learned that the average UAW worker wanted to do good work and produce quality,
Management often wouldn’t let them because it was “quantity before quality” in GM management’s eyes (in 1995).

As someone who worked at a big three car plant in the 80’s,I can most assuredly state to you that there was a great swathe of unionized workers whose sole goal was do as little as possible, while undermining management.
Union stooges sounds about right.

OK, Kursk, but how did those UAW workers get to be that way? Decades of bad management who bullied them and wouldn’t let them do quality work. “Keep the line running, make your numbers, forget quality.” After a lot of that happening, people give up and appear lazy.
Were there some who were naturally lazy and didn’t want to work? Sure. But, don’t paint them all with the same broad “stooge” brush.

In a related vein, I know a guy who used to be an electrician in a mill. He was told to work on an instrument whose reading was thought to be wrong. After calibrating the thing, Bill was told that it still wasn’t right. He puttered some more with the same result. Finally, he turned to the management guys nearby and said: “What do you want it to read?”
The same guy was near retirement age when the company told him he would have to switch over to the graveyard shift. Mad, he asked his boss if he would get a gold watch when he retired. Told that he would not, Bill said: “Well, then I just quit”. And he did.

As a guy who was forced to be a Teamster at a former work place. I have no moral dilemma with using the word stooges. As someone who owned a GM vehicle that started leaking oil from every seal a year and a half after the vehicle was new I don’t speak highly of GM quality.

nope, not union stooges, union STUPIDS is more accurate. GM was once my customer. And most of my life I was an avid GM fan, but Ford took the initiative to “change”, and did so without a gubmint bail out, and now they are recognized as building the best automotive engines in the world
And Mark, I used to travel far and wide as a service tech and yes, management can be as bad as the unionized floor works, and so can engineers, especially those who liked to talk down to service techs, and then wound up eating crow.