This Is an Uprising -
How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century
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Sunday, 30 December 2018
quote [ In 1970. General Motors, the biggest company on the planet, unveiled the Lordstown Assembly plant, the most automated factory the industry had ever seen, to make GM’s Chevrolet Vega,
In 1972, Lordstown workers rebelled against GM. Their uprising became a national symbol of blue-collar disaffection. Newsweek hailed the strike as “industrial Woodstock,” Toyota’s superior quality and efficiency was largely thanks to how it trained and valued its workers. GM’s mistrust of its workers ultimately prevented it from making great cars ] “current concept of industrial efficiency mistakenly ignores the human satisfactions of craftsmanship and creativity to motivate workers. Keeping workers on task required increasingly authoritarian measures—a strategy doomed to backfire. The new jobs created generally required minimal expertise and therefore stymied career mobility and left people mired in boredom."
I found this story hard to read because it jumps around too much. The Lordstown plant is weaved throughout and it pays off in the end, but not at the beginning. The story is compelling, GM is top down. No matter how great the strategy is or how brilliant executives are, you need bottom up commitment to be successful.
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Comments
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foobar said @ 9:42pm GMT on 30th Dec
If you treat your employees well, they'll help you out when you're not looking. If you don't, you'll have constant micro-sabotage pulling you down.
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profetscott said @ 12:28am GMT on 31st Dec
I did not finish the article. Entertaining enough read. I kind of doubt the research the writer undertook. Vega the first small car GM produced? How about the Corvair? First small car for .GM to fail. Again, for a different reason, how about the Corvair?
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thepublicone said @ 3:10am GMT on 31st Dec
[Score:1 Good]
The Vega was the first 4-cylinder car GM offered, and the first subcompact, therefore, the first real response to foreign subcompacts. The Corvair was a flat 6, and considered a compact by definition.
My parents owned one when I was a child- it was a giant piece of shit, and my parents will still use it s a benchmark for shittiness, as in "Well, the Dodge Journey your father has from work isn't the best, but at least its not the Vega we had when we first got married." The reasons for GM's decline are plentiful, but GMAD and the move towards treating people like machines is a symptom of a cultural shift in the company, and a general misunderstanding of- or simply not giving a fuck about- the cultural shifts in the American Workforce through the last 60s into the 1970s. Combine it with their complete inability- or refusal to- understand and listen to their customer base (something GM continues to repeat, over and over, since the 1970s) and you have two very large symptoms of a bigger problem: GM forgot they sold cars to people based on whether they were better than their competitors, and started to believe people bought cars from GM simply because they were GM. The moment you, as a company, begin to believe that you know what the customer wants better than the customer, you're fucked; how long it takes is simply a matter of scale- GM is one of the largest companies in the world; killing something that large can take decades. Ask Sears. Or Kodak. Or Xerox. Blackberry. Target Canada. Nokia. Blockbuster..... It's a LONG list. |
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Story is hard to read ... but compelling.