USA jobs and pride

[Rambunctous]

YouTube - Wilson Football Factory

[timv2444]

Impressive.

[Fitz]

Very impressive.

Fitz

[Rossco]

Man, they got some balls at that place.

[Rosco61]

Some of those woman doing that job for 37 years man! that's a cool video

[obsolete]

Being that my family owns a leather manufacturing company I like seeing the art still being done here. Although it is a bit funny that they are owned by a foreign company.

[Honclfibr]

I must be the only one who doesn't get a sense of pride from the idea that someone has been stuck for 30+ years on the same machine, pulling a lever every 10 seconds that cuts an oval shape into leather. To me, that sounds like the definition of despair and hopelessness.

[Jim]

kind of reminds me of the Vanson factory.

how many raises do you think those employees have recieved in their 30+ year career doing the same repetitive job?

[The Snowman]

Can you imagine 30 years of turning footballs right-side out?

[obsolete]

I must be the only one who doesn't get a sense of pride from the idea that someone has been stuck for 30+ years on the same machine, pulling a lever every 10 seconds that cuts an oval shape into leather. To me, that sounds like the definition of despair and hopelessness.

Some people are only able to do that or only want to do that and they are giving them the opportunity.

[joeswamp]

The kind of sad thing is that you need work to be that way in order for the footballs to be cheap enough to buy, but it makes the working conditions like mental torture.

The main reason Henry Ford introduced the $5 per day wage was because he had terrible problems with turnover -- people working at the assembly line would just go nuts and have to leave.

[Mustang]

The kind of sad thing is that you need work to be that way in order for the footballs to be cheap enough to buy, but it makes the working conditions like mental torture.

The main reason Henry Ford introduced the $5 per day wage was because he had terrible problems with turnover -- people working at the assembly line would just go nuts and have to leave.

That you need work to be what way? Repeatable and standardized?

[joeswamp]

Yeah the fact that it's broken down into microscopic repeating tasks. Each person making a football start to finish, like a true leather craftsman, would be far more satisfying for the workers but make the manufacturing cost prohibitive.

This issue was a big one when assembly line manufacturing first started out, you have to find the right kind of people to act like robots all day, and most can't work as long under these conditions.

[Rambunctous]

The kind of sad thing is that you need work to be that way in order for the footballs to be cheap enough to buy, but it makes the working conditions like mental torture.

The main reason Henry Ford introduced the $5 per day wage was because he had terrible problems with turnover -- people working at the assembly line would just go nuts and have to leave.

I thought that he paid a fair wage was so he could have customers for his cars.

[stoinkythepig]

I thought that he paid a fair wage was so he could have customers for his cars.

Not really for the customers, more for the advertising. He paid them enough so that they could afford his cars and that put them in the public eye as an everyman's car far better than any adertising campaign could hope to. This was a radical idea at a time when cars were built buy the poor solely for the rich.

The man had some great ideas, but also was really stupid/stubborn about things as well. He felt that there was never any need to make new models. He thought people should buy Model Ts forever and his plan was to make them forever and continue to make them less and less expensive rather than more modern. This is the main reason General Motors succeeded (and eventually eclipsed Ford) even though Ford had a huge head start.

[BluGixxer]

Although these people are stuck in a repetitive job like that, it is kinda nice to see some people stick with a job that long and not call it quits, I bet they have a whole lotta pride being they can say "I made that gameball " when watching the superbowl.

[joeswamp]

I thought that he paid a fair wage was so he could have customers for his cars.

Actually it wasn't for the customers or for the advertising, although I think this move did ultimately increase the market for his cars, and I also think they later may have advertised it this way.

Just before he did the wage move, Ford was really suffering through his massive expansion because of worker turnover and absenteeism. I can't remember the numbers now, but I think the year before the $5 wage they lost something like 80% of the workers that were hired in that year. Of course bringing any new worker into a business is expensive.

Workers would get sick of these "pull the lever" jobs and just not show up anymore. This raised havoc on the assembly lines, because all of a sudden one component of the line wasn't working and the other workers weren't trained to do the missing job.

Finally Ford just asked somebody to run the numbers and figure out how much all this absenteeism/turnover was costing them, and after some analysis they came up with the $5 wage as the solution. Ford was vilified in the press, called a communist, etc., but it turned out to be an incredibly smart business move, as it lowered their absenteeism/turnover rate to almost zero and substantially increased productivity. He later said that the $5 wage was the greatest money saving innovation he had ever come up with.

IIRC Ford's advocacy of the 8 hour work day came from a similar kind of analysis, they basically noticed that workers started making lots of expensive mistakes after 8 hours. Ford was a really practical guy.