What Happened When Automation Came To General Motors? (qz.com) 198
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."
BS: Look at the other car companies (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, GM was behind the trends. No one wants the vehicles that were being produced at the plants that are closing down. "Cars" have fallen out of favor for truck-like vehicles.
Frankly so much has changed since the 70's that comparisons to them are pointless unless done really well, with a level of analysis beyond Quartz. Armchair comparisons may reflect inflation but do they consider all the other quality of life improvements that many of the US's "poor" have these days?
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This.
It's a vague reference to the thermometer that is oil. When the next oil crisis arrives, consumers will sell off the trucks and SUV and buy subcompacts instead.
Those in the auto industry who fail to adapt, as GM did regarding oil saturation, will suffer similar fates.
Re:BS: Look at the other car companies (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
"... GM's ... poor designs for 15 years ..." (Score:4, Interesting)
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". [youtube.com]
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. [consumerreports.org] (Oct. 24, 2018 )
The U.S. has laws that prevent car manufacturers from selling directly!!! One story: Tesla US dealership disputes. [wikipedia.org] 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."
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My friend demonstrated sloppy GM design. Then we went and looked at Ford cars. They were much better designed and built.
Got any specifics? Because I've seen my share of 60s, 70s, and 80s (and later) GMs, Fords, and Chryslers. And Datsuns (Nissans), Toyotas, and Hondas. And VWs, Audis, and Mercedes. And there isn't any appreciable difference between any of them in terms of design AFAICT. They were all pretty much all designed – at the macro level – the same. The difference beween a Chevy Monte Carlo and a Ford Torino was, literally, just how they looked and which name was on the grill.
At the end of the 70s and beg
Re:"... GM's ... poor designs for 15 years ..." (Score:5, Interesting)
The Japanese invented (first to implement anyhow) the hard chrome rings trick. That's what turned 100k mile engines into 250k. The world copied them about a decade after (mid to late 80s). Once consumers saw how long Hondas and Toyotas were going on the original engines.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that GM, Ford, Mercedes, VW etc had sat on that for decades. Liking the service income.
My dad remembers the annual valve job and 40k rings and bearings. Yeah metallurgy.
American cars truly did suck in the 80s, beyond the sloppy body fits which were just longstanding crap standards. The only computer controlled carb worth a shit came from Japan. Thank dog we've settled into EFI. EPA rules and carbs made for absolute shit engines, from everyone.
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They were chroming the insides of rifle barrels in the 40s. But no factory engine came with them until the 70s, when the Japanese did it.
If your bug motors lasted 350k, you needed bigger cams. Why? I once changed a bug motor in 20 minutes (with 2 others, baja so no sheet metal). That was slow, not close to a competitive time.
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"Those engines lasted 350K miles and more. "
LIQUID cooled inline four single cam VW engines easily lasted longer (Rabbit, Scirocco. Caddy etc) but air-cooled flat four Beetle engines needed top end jobs long before that. Forged pistons don't wear longer, they withstand hot-rodding longer than cast because they are stronger. That has naught to do with bore wear.. No way the top end on an air-cooled VW was good for 300+K. The valves wouldn't last that long. I've owned and wrenched on both versions.
When I sold
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600N forever!
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I agree. This is somebody desperately trying to argue that mass-production (of all things!) is better be done manually by hand than by automation. Complete nonsense. GM just did it wrong.
Re: BS: Look at the other car companies (Score:4, Insightful)
First off, the moment you use the term "leftist" it reveals that you're a moron of very low intellect. The "left" isn't a thing. It doesn't have an -ist form. Ever notice the people using the term "rightist"? Probably not, because you'd have to be fucking stupid to think so.
As far as your argument goes, it's a load of bullshit. It's mostly people on the left that want to reign those folks in and make them accountable. It's the folks on the right that think that it's OK to intentionally bankrupt companies if there's a buck in it for the executives. These people you list aren't great people, they're horrible people that are being protected by the right.
As far as broader movements and factors go, that's just reality. You think any of those tyrants could control an entire country on their own? Obviously not, as few people could withstand the attacks of even a few dozen people, let alone millions.
I know there was a long period of time where the broader perspective was ignored in favor of the "great men," but really, it was never true, that's just where the historians were focused. And they frequently focused on that as that's what the people with the money funding their research wanted. It's mostly the ignorant and the naive that think otherwise. But, given that you used the term "leftist" in a non-ironic sense, that's probably you.
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Leftist is a wrong choice of words. It's marxist.
Despite that, the critic is valuable. A single person can very easily drive the company into the ground.
Tim Cook of Apple, Lorraine Williams of TSR.
From the other hand, there are, of course, objective factors that require extra-ordinary individuals in leadership to adequately response to them.
There is an issue of smartphone market saturation, there was an issue of computer games replacing board games.
All of this important. Objective factors and trends and hu
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Steve Job was one of the best minds in history of technology. His marketing sense was top notch.
Your bringing him is absurd.
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His 2nd go was awesome and Apple became a powerhouse. But his 1st go nearly killed Apple and he was tossed out.
So, which is he? Exceptional leader or value killing loser? He did both at various times.
Both - kind of. His first go round with Apple he took it to the top of the industry (Apple ][), got arrogant, and then got too far ahead of the market (Lisa), came back with the early Mac, but got kicked out for being hard to work with - he wasn't very personable to the Board Of Directors and others that he needed to cull favor with in order to keep the company. He left, created Next Computing, learned from his mistake, so when he returned (via Apple buying Next) he improved where it mattered to stay in con
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While I have to concede he was a great contributor to the tech world for various reason (in spite of my particular disdain for Apple), please don't be revisionist in saying he was "better than Gates" or a genius at tech. Microsoft CRUSHED them while Gates was there once they were in more direct competition. Don't forget, for the longest time Microsoft worked on the Apple platform's software and overtook them much to Jobs' protest. Microsoft fell down under Balmer's leadership after Jobs made his return. It
Re: BS: Look at the other car companies (Score:3, Informative)
Just because the word "rightest" doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely as "leftist" doesn't change the fact that "leftist" means "leftwinger" and plenty of people use "rightwinger". I think it's you who is the moron.
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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 t
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Um... no (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Its easy to say that but the truth a bit murkier. Most of us can't work 20-30 hour weeks because we want (I use the term loosely) to consume more services, such as modern medicine that did not exist 60 years ago; oh and fun a full 30 years of retirement too.
So it was a question what would amount to being job sharing and working half a week or earning enough to fund those wants at the cost of displacing someone else; someone else who by the way is being taken care of by the government. The government is fu
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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.
This is often cited as the reason that the US Gov't never lets them fail, and they can get away with running a terrible business indefinitely. However, I often wonder how valid of a reason this really is. Given what's involved in manufacture of modern military hardware, how realistic is it to repurpose a GM factory? Would it actually take less time/effort than simply helping the various defense contractors to stand up entirely new facilities?
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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.
That was ~40 years ago, and even then in the 1980's post-gigantic fuckup with the cheaper JP imports they were massive. Stupidly massive on a scale that would surprise you, they were heavily diversified in everything from raw material extraction to refining. And the 'emerging markets' of IBM-compatible components and held companies like EDS and GM-DIESEL(now known as Electromotive), if you're unfamiliar with GM-Diesel they held around 70% of the train engine market, and emergency generator market in the 1
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It's worth noting that Nissan merged with Renault a long time ago, and since then, Nissan's quality (and business) has gone down substantially. Among Japanese manufacturers, Subaru seems to have filled the market hole left by Nissan.
Or you COULD budget like your parents, grandparent (Score:4, Insightful)
> ! If you want to work 20-30 hours per week
If you wanted to, you could work 20-30 hours a week and have a single 20" TV connected to an antenna with no monthly charges like your parents or grandparents did at your age, rather than multiple 60" TVs streaming Netflix. Here in Dallas there are about 50 broadcast TV stations you can get without paying anyone a dime.
You can have a 950 sq foot house like your parents or grandparents had, instead of 2,400 sq feet. You could have one family car instead of two or three, and plan your weekly errand trip to do everything in one trip, saving money on gas, wear and tear on the car, etc. You can put the bread in the toaster yourself and toss an egg in the microwave (or stove) for 35 cents instead of paying McDonald's right times as much. Same food, just 85% lower cost.
Some people live only 30% better than their parents, having 50 broadcast stations instead of three or four, and work 20-30 hours. It's fairly easy to do if you want to, and you look up how on the internet, perhaps joining one of the forums where people who do that share ideas. Others similarly work 40 hours while saving 65% of their income for retirement, so they only have to work 10-15 years in their life. That's an option, a choice people have.
Personally, I don't go that far, but I use some of those ideas in moderation. I make coffee at home for 25 cents instead of paying $4.50 for a cup of coffee - a savings of 95%. I shopped and found the best value package for TV and internet, without any premium channels. 120 channels is enough for me; I don't need 250 channels. I bought a house for 40% less than the banks say I can afford. It's still 3,500 sq feet, though, so I plan to downsize this summer.
This is bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the 20" TV, again, in their day they had one, and it would have been about $1000 bucks in today's money. We're talking 40 years ago, inflation's a bitch. Today I can buy a 50" TV for around $300 2018 dollars. And the PS4 launched at $400 4 years ago, almost half what the 2600 did.
Wages are down about 20% what my grandad did across all jobs except for CEO of a fortune 500. Good paying (and unionized) manufacturing jobs like what my granddad had either were automated away or shipped overseas, sending folks to low pay service sector jobs in their place and further depressing wages. Meanwhile George Bush Jr deregulated the commodities market allowing parasitic investors to buy large quantities of food without ever taking delivery of said food. So they "buy" a million hog bellies and then "sell" them, effectively skimming 10-15% off you and me and driving up the price of food. And then there's Reagan & Clinton, who allowed stock buy backs. Those used to be an illegal market manipulation. Every been fired when the stock market had a minor dip? You can thank Reagan & Clinton for that and the perverse incentive they created for short term stock gains
The entire economy is rigged against working class Americans. It's hard to come to grips with that because when we were kid's we were taught that it wasn't. That you could do anything you set your mind to thanks to the wonders of capitalism. If it's one thing the ruling class knows and understand it's "get 'em while they're young". They do it with religion and they do it with economics. Christ, there's a line about it in the bible.
Please, please start thinking these things through. Guys like you, who've drunk the kool-aid, need to come to your senses and see how you're being taken advantage of and run into the ground for nothing in return.
So is that.. (Score:3)
Add to that the fact that I bet your grandpa didnt insist on buying a fancy apartment the day he could scrape together a minimum off-plan deposit.
Before your grandpa was later-middle age I also bet:
He didnt buy a new car every 3 years 'because that helps the economy'
He didnt drink $5 cafe coffee.
He didnt have a $1000 phone, and a pile of other 'toys' to make him feel better about himself.
He didnt go on overseas holidays.
He didnt buy things on credit.
In other words: he had personal responsiblilty and restrai
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My grandparents had a 2 story house with a ton of bedrooms (I forget how many, I was pretty young when we moved out west from them). And they were working class. They had an Atari 2600 around launch. Adjusted for inflation, at $700 bucks.
And I'll bet that this was after years of saving, and getting lucky during the hyperinflation hit of the 1970's and 80's, where the valuation of properties went through the roof along with wages. Meaning that the house they originally bought for $7k, was suddenly worth $50k. You're also forgetting that the Atari 2600 was "new technology" the entire underlying idea of it was new, new fabbing, new chip designs, everything. And that the reason you can get those new technological wonders cheaper today then y
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Luxury. Bedrooms? We had to live in the middle of the road and eat ice cold gravel.
I had to get up in the morning (Score:2)
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This is an interesting post. And you are correct in that by living frugally you would not need to work quite as much.
However, there is a major factor you are neglecting : certain costs are very large regardless of how much you save elsewhere. The three main ones are :
a. Education. There are bargain price educational programs, I admit. Train to do a trade skill like nurse or electrician, and it's a short and inexpensive period in school, followed by a longer period of training at decent pay. But if you
Lots of people do it. On education, negative deb (Score:2)
The funny thing about it being impossible is that lots of people are doing it. You can certainly decide not to do it yourself. That's fine. It's very clearly not impossible.
On education, by the time I was halfway through school, the program had already helped me double my income, so I graduated with more money in the bank than when I started school. Many people don't do that. Many people get a degree in African History from the most expensive school they can get into. You don't have to do that. You don't ha
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Filter your home search by 'No HOAs'. Or you will regret it.
Gets you old construction and square streets. Not some shitty subdivision full of that wonderful new construction and busybody assholes.
It will also get you the occasional 1000 square foot house on a horse property. Most will have rooms added by now, but not all.
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Or, we could hike our capital gains tax rate high enough that there's no incentive to hoard billions of dollars and let the workers actually benefit from working.
There's not much reason for most jobs to go on for more than about 30 hours a week. That's probably stretching the amount of productive work that most people can do anyways. We've got ample money being produced in those productive hours to cut back the time without cutting the pay.
The kicker though is that productivity would probably go up as now t
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Nations compete on AverageROI * (1 - corporatetaxrate) * (1 - capgainsrate) * (1 - corruptiontaxrate). After tax ROI.
If they don't, they see no investment, capital flees. Adults understand this. They also understand that past ROI is no guarantee of future performance.
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Try France, asshole.
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Given all of the safety improvements in the last 10 years, though, I would only drive such an old car if I were desperate
What safety improvements? My 2005 car has a rigid cage, crumple zones, airbags all round, traction control, ABS, NCAP rating that competes quite well with current cars.
Any safety improvements over and above the cage, crumple zones, airbags all round, traction control and ABS are minimal - probably don't even make much of a difference.
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Automatic braking?
You consider using a car without automatic braking to be a desperate act?
Vendors (Score:3)
I've worked at multiple companies where a VP goes with a vendor, buying 10s of millions of dollars of network gear, then goes to work for them after a year or 2, after the hardware is deployed.
Theres always seems to be some kickbacks, wouldn't doubt some GM execs went to go work for those manufacturing/robot vendors after buying billions in equipment.
And the alternative was...? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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FTFY.
If a vehicle gets damaged between the assembly line and the customer, short of someone wrecking it, that's a design flaw. Vehicles should not be that fragile.
Ironically, this is a problem that automation is likely to make worse. If a part is defectively weak by design, the rate of early breakage during assembly will be much higher with human assembly than with automated assembly, because humans are less careful. This can make design flaws in parts obvious earlier, which in
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If a part is defectively weak by design, the rate of early breakage during assembly will be much higher with human assembly than with automated assembly, because humans are less careful.
What part of a car do you think is meaningfully tested through assembly? I'd say next to nothing. Sure it would be nice if it was factory tested afterwards, but I doubt anything is so flimsy that it breaks when you're putting it together. Even cheap plastic crap from China typically lasts a little while before it breaks...
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Toyota was well managed and navigated the same waters as GM, but the results were completely opposite. If you aren't familiar with Toyota's history, it's a pretty interesting read, and a somewhat rare example of good mgmt in business.
Tax Payer Bailout (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seconded. The only parasite ruining the economy in this story is GM itself.
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We had to protect the billionaire class
Not so much. Equity owners lost their shirts on the GM bankruptcy. Bondholders had to be arm-twisted into taking a deal. What got bailed out was the pension fund. The alternative being the government having to pick up the tab for retirement and healthcare payments.
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You can start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reorganization [wikipedia.org]
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That of course makes the absurd assumption that the people who buy GM cars would instead buy just no car. Instead they would have bought a car from someone else, and those same OEM components would have ended up in a Ford or a Toyota or a Volkswagon or whatever. Sure, it would still have been disruptive but not the end of the world like you suggest.
Besides, when GM would have been broken up, any plant that was worth anything would have been snapped up when it hit the auction block.
Correlation != causation (Score:2)
Yes, GM invested in automation but so did its competitors.
The main problem was twofold. Bad leadership that couldn't look further than end of quarter results and labor unions that forced companies to keep people in the same torpor of drudgery rather than uptrain the good ones and fire the bad ones. GM still can't fire workers until they have to close down the entire factory, so you end up with line workers being bored most of the day as they meet their quota faster and faster due to automation.
Japanese car
Re: Correlation != causation (Score:1)
A funny observation: all the right skills and motivation often implies unbearably difficult work. I bet someone with the right skills and motivation tends to figure out how to make work easy. Unless, of course, they are being hindered in some way from achieving their goals
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"Japanese car companies on the other hand invented the kanban board and people with the right skills and motivation drifted to the top, the rest fell to the wayside."
So GM not firing workers led to this mess, while the Japanese, who were famous for being _unwilling_ to fire workers, leapfrogged them?
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I don't think you read this right. There is an entire different mentality, unions prevent people from being promoted and force people to work in a particular position. Sure, Japanese manufacturers often can't layoff workers due to Japanese labor laws but those people aren't then forced to work and don't get pay raises every year either like the labor unions require.
Unions & Managers Robots (Score:3, Informative)
On the management side, G.M. had competing brands wit their own bureaucracies and managers, fighting each-other for R&D budgets, production resources, marketing dollars and more. It wasn't Buick against Mercury, but rather Buick against Oldsmobile, Chevy and Cadillac. It wasn't Camaro vs Mustang but Camaro vs Firebird.
And it was the union vs the company. Any proposed changes came with significant concessions to the union, or with a strike.
Take the Saturn effort... which was designed to be "clean-sheet" (rather than badge-engineered clones, such as the above-mentioned Camaro/Firebird.) The Union forced GM to cede significant control to the union, even before the factory opened, including:
That's what killed G.M. Not automation, but the combined culture of competing accountants and a greedy-and-hostile monopoly for the labor (UAW), both of whom could only act on relatively short timeframes.
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Those Saturns were the best cars GM ever made though...
beware of statistics making assumptions (Score:2)
There is a hidden assumption here that corrupts that statistic. "If GM had not made the investment, there would have been NO change in their global market share."
This is important, because without considering that, "22%" has no point of reference. The assumption is the reference is 0% - "no change". The likely realit
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Yup. There's a book on it. [addall.com]
Something is wrong? (Score:2)
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."
So the author here seems to think that GM should be keeping its Ohio plant open, producing small cars and employing more people and les
FU GM (Score:2)
Pursuit of he cheapest (Score:2)
Impala - $40K for a common package. Though listed as a larger car than the Camry, Mazda 6 or Altima. Those are about $10K less and let's face it, the Camry shows up on the "cars most likely to last 200K" list. The Impala doesn't. When I saw the price of the Impala I had to ask "what were they thinking?"
Cruze - not sure on price. I was considering it, but until 2018, it wasn't exceptional in quality or
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Cruze - not sure on price. I was considering it, but until 2018, it wasn't exceptional in quality or style. Compare that to a similarly priced Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Toyota and it will probably get outshined.
Probably? There is no probably. The Cruze comes dead last (and far back) in every comparison except price. When I was looking for a new car I drove a Cruze. Suck comes to mind as to how to describe it. Everyone knows cars have lots of plastic in them, but to "see" and feel the plastic is off-putting.
Incompetent management (Score:1)
Re:Incompetent management (Score:5, Informative)
Having grown up in a "GM Town" for many years, let me share my opinion.
GM workers were terrible, they had a HUGE sense of entitlment, knowng they had union protection and could do almost anything they wanted.
The biggest concern from "management" where i lived was how can they fire the worst of the worst.
The Employees? If they were not bragging about how they will just "shut em down" if they didnt get what they wanted.. They were faking injuries to take the summer off so they could run their side job (landscaping).
Most of my neighbours were either drunks, or high all the time.
There is a "licensed' restaurant right by the plant. During lunch, they'd all head down there and get loaded up before going back to work.
There wasnt much you couldnt get "on the line".. Chickens (farm fresh), stolen merchandise, drugs of all kinds..
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What you said might be true but the negative impacts of those apparently incompetent workers will always be dwarfed by the leveraged , exponentiated mistakes of managers, owners, and capital. The mathematics behind your assertion simply aren't there.
The solution: worker owned co-ops. Where the people building the products are the ones who are responsible for making decisions.
Fault was NOT automation coming to GM (Score:3)
GM used robotics to try and replace top talent. Why? Because they are costly. But it is the top talent, such as tool makers, where you get your real innovation. So, GM's management was/is killing its own innovation. We see the same issue throughout America with exporting of jobs. What is left are jobs that can not be exported and even the high-end jobs on these have been replaced with illegals, who then send the bulk of the money out of the nation.
GM should be looking at Tesla. Musk is doing things right. And rather than claim that GM is better than Tesla (which they do all the time), they would be better to acknowledge that Tesla is destroying them, like the German's have, and then try to learn from tesla. Tesla's model Y, will likely be the most automated vehicle ever done. And knowing Musk, he has almost certainly disobeyed his board and is now designing the car to be much less expensive than the M3. Both in Design, and build.
GM needs to learn from that.
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Not workmanship, Poor Design Quality, cheap parts. (Score:2)
I don't know all of the factors leading up to GM's situation, but I do not think it's about factory workmanship. I think it's more about poor designs and cheap parts. In the last 18 years I've been driving Hondas putting on ~140K to 160 K miles before getting a different one. Almost no repairs. No wheel bearings, no alternators, no mufflers, no A/C pumps, no water pumps, no timing belts. None of that.
Friends driving GM Terrains are getting new wheel bearings at 40 K miles, new mufflers at 50 K. D
How to do robotics (Score:2)
Don't just use robots to produce 20 year old car designs with less union workers.
Quality control.
Make the new cars look good, drive well, be efficient and pass on the new technology to people buying new cars.
10 and 20 year old car parts resold every decade as a new "looking" car is not a new car design.
Learn from what was working and not working well in a France, Italy, West/Germany, Japan, So
Complete twaddle (Score:2)
I recall being in high school and watching a movie made many years before about working in a car plant. It involved a guy that had been working at the plant for many years and was now working on some machine where all he did was X all day long.
At one point a new worker asks for his advice working a spot welder because he knew the protagonist had worked it for many years, and our hero tells him there's a trick to it they don't teach you and shows him how to do it. Then the foreman arrives and tells the hero
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And this needs special mention:
> At GM quality suffered because "Instead of making flawless cars, workers simply did their assigned jobs,"
Uhhh, yeah, high quality like the ones coming out of the NUMI plant? Where the workers were often drunk on the job, and put their beer cans into the doors of the cars so there would be a rattle you couldn't fix?
What decline? (Score:2)
It's true that GM car sales have declined to the point that GM doesn't want to be in the business any more. That's because Toyota and Honda captured the US car market by focusing on quality. Toyota and Honda use the same robotic process as GM.
On the other hand, GM's truck business is doing fine. Is this segment less automated than cars?
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It's because of import tariffs.
https://seekingalpha.com/artic... [seekingalpha.com]
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That was 2008. Nothing went well economically in 2008, in case you've forgotten.
You assume there IS a decline. I don't see one.
https://media.gm.com/media/us/... [gm.com]
Honda and Toyota also use robots (Score:2)
Why are we picking on GM's decline, such as it is? If robots were the cause, wouldn't all the manufacturers be suffering the same fate?
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A more useful analysis would ask why the Japanese cars succeeded whilst the GM ones did not and what a modern manufacturing line depends on - the quality improvements that the workforce are instrumental in finding. Ironically the sucess of the Japanese manufacturers depended upon was technology invented in America by the likes of Deming, later taken up enthusiastically by the American semiconductor industry but apparently not by car manufacturing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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People have been used on assembly lines since the beginning of the automobile. None of that is new. No production auto has been built by a small team of "craftsmen" (with the exception of some niche autos like the Ford GT I suppose). It's impracticable and in general not a good idea. Requiring a small team to be skilled in every aspect of the modern auto with thousands of unique parts is just terrible. Of course, I believe we have been focusing on the automating the wrong tasks. Having a human drive screw
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Re:The UAW happened to GM (Score:5, Insightful)
The same reason that most profitable car companies are now relocating into Right To Work states. The unions latched onto GM like a vampire and drained it of it's life force.
Ahh, the old "parasites" argument. Whenever the armchair industrialists want to whine about uppity workers expecting decent pay and working conditions, this oldie always gets pulled out.
Of course this only works if you completely gloss over that the unions had valid contracts that GM chose to enter into and then renege on as much as possible. When the CEO drains the pension fund to gamble on the stock market and looses big, retires and leaves it for the next couple of CEO's to ignore and suddenly all those retiring workers *surprise!* actually are still alive and want the pensions they contracted for but the company can't afford now, it's the Unions fault somehow. Can't blame themselves for poor management after all.
Before anyone goes spouting off about the mythical guy pushing a broom all day for $1000 an hour, let's remember that Union contracts are negotiated, and if GM's highly paid lawyers and management couldn't negotiate a way to efficiently utilize their work force, then that's on them, not the Union. But then, how can management suppress wages with Unions around? Whoops, I mean the workers wages, they're not savages after all, THEY have stock options and golden parachutes, naturally.
It's many things! UAW should accept some blame... (Score:1)
Do I think all union auto workers are just "parasites"? No.... That's utter crap. A company's most valuable asset is its labor, and there wouldn't BE any profitable companies using union labor if they weren't able to benefit from it.
With GM, I think they have a multitude of problems. For starters, they tried to offer too big a variety of vehicles. Every new vehicle you add to the product line is a huge up-front R&D expense and a risk it might not even sell well. After that, it has the negative impac
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But absolutely, GM has a long history of selling cars with "fit and finish" problems.
If anything, that's an understatement. My extended family went through a rather stupid amount of GM cars in the 80s and 90s, and the vast majority were stinkers. The thing is, they were relatively cheap compared to other cars, at least in our area, and we weren't exactly rich.
I have lots of memories of trying to repair those cars, trucks, and vans. Lots of memories dealing with all the stupid issues, parts which failed repeatedly, and all the irritations that come with lots of lemons. And those memories mad
re: fit and finish (Score:2)
Yep... I was trying to give GM the benefit of the doubt, as much as possible, on that one. In the 1980's, everyone seemed to figure out their vehicles were shoddy junk. I mean, literally every friend of mine had parents who bought at least one or two GM vehicles and proceeded to have horror stories about how often they broke down.
I believe they improved significantly since then. But the interiors are still a weak spot for them.
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GM makes great pickup trucks. Sure, they have had problems, but so've Ford and Chrysler. Overall I prefer driving Fords, and working on Chevys. There's also no denying that the LS motor is an absolute peach. But I'd really rather have a Toyota than either one...
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Of course, your statement only works if you gloss over and ignore inconvenient reality.
Sure, the contracts were legally valid... But it's not as if GM had free choice. They're legally required (by Federal and State laws) to negotiate with the union and hire it's members. They have very little (if any) ability to hire and maintain any significant num
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The same reason that most profitable car companies are now relocating into Right To Work states. The unions latched onto GM like a vampire and drained it of it's life force.
Ahh, the old "parasites" argument. Whenever the armchair industrialists want to whine about uppity workers expecting decent pay and working conditions, this oldie always gets pulled out.
It's the old "When all of these damn people working are laid off, and if no one is working any more, the profit margins will be great."
Funny how these brilliant folks simply do not understand that in order to buy shit, people have to have money to buy that shit.
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Screaming right-wing the second anyone doesn't agree with you?
Right - Asshole fits you much better.
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But do you fit my asshole? That is the real question...
You'd never go back to sheep.
MANAGEMENT is always to blame. (Score:5, Interesting)
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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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.
Workers' rights need to be protected, because if they are not, history shows that that workers will be abused. But unions can also enshrine mediocrity — I've seen it first hand. They don't control decision-making, but they can certainly compromise efficiency.
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No disagreement there. Management still is responsible and often times when something is portrayed as impossible there is some bright exec who finds a solution that works to point to elsewhere... the attitude should be that the management needs to change if they can't find solutions.
That said, efficiency is not the goal. Gainful employment is the #1 goal. #2 is security/stability. #3 (to the majority of people) is doing something meaningful.
Competition is supposed to encourage efficiency which is the justi
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That said, efficiency is not the goal. Gainful employment is the #1 goal. #2 is security/stability. #3 (to the majority of people) is doing something meaningful.
If employment is your #1 goal, you need to let go of puritanism. This whole idea that our purpose is to work is ridiculous. Security/stability via meeting needs should be the #1 priority.
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The real purpose of a company is whatever the company and society agree on. For a long time corporate charters were not about profit, but rather supplying some benefit to society with profit a side benefit, and we still have that to a degree in the form of non-profits, whose real purpose usually does not involve profit.
This idea of the only purpose in a company is profit is fairly recent and mostly applies to public companies. You can have a private company whose main purpose is to go to Mars and profit is
bigger picture (Score:2)
The arguments for the existence of the corporation as well as the capitalist approach to economics run deeper than whatever the current societal and legal definitions/expectations are. John Smith and others argued using socialist reasoning as justification; which shouldn't be a surprise since few people are anti-social.
Today it's a completely unspoken contract, let the capitalists and corporations exist for the greater benefit of all. (anything for the greater good of all is socialism.) THAT is the reaso
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Seconded. Nobody wanted any of these gas-guzzling hickboxes except the delusional hicks working on them.