For several generations in the latter half of the 20th century, it took an inspired Michigander to assume the opportunity costs of starting an entrepreneurial venture rather than joining the local assembly-line workforce or simply going to work for someone else.
My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth.
When you replace a highly-skilled, well-compensated professional workforce with an assembly line approach consisting of hundreds of outsourced workers pumping out thousands of stories a day in a virtual sweatshop – how can you be shocked when it turns out much of that information is poorly written, full of errors, made-up, or has a fictional name attached?
It was a bold statement by a company that was truly firing on all cylinders, with a galvanized workforce, from CEO to assembly line worker, all passionately committed to the Chrysler way of doing things.
The activists claim shifts at the plant are long, the assembly line moves too fast and that managers enforce military-style discipline on the workforce.
They claim shifts are long, the assembly line moves too fast and that managers enforce military-style discipline on the workforce.
We've come a long way since Henry Ford's assembly line in 1926 but we still have challenges to overcome in order to sustain a healthy and productive workforce.
Although he wasn't specifically addressing Boeing's expansion with a non-union assembly line in South Carolina, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich testified that the shrinking number of union members in the American workforce has coincided with the slowing growth of wages in recent years.
Like a thousand other skilled assembly line workers, Sean left Honda's huge car factory in Swindon in 2009 when the company was "reshaping" its workforce.
That politically-charged event, as well as a desperate workforce shrunk by the Great Depression, are scrubbed from the almost utopian view of the auto assembly line in "Detroit Industry".
Factors contributing to the loss included the development of an all-new model, the strong Australian dollar and the cost of reducing the workforce at the Elizabeth plant, including the loss of 1,400 jobs after the closure of the third-shift assembly line in 2005, after two years in operation.
