![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The poetry of industrial production
Mar. 26th, 2020 10:35 amThere were two benches and twenty−eight men in all; they assembled one hundred seventy−five pistons and rods in a nine−hour day—which means just five seconds over three minutes each. There was no inspection, and many of the piston and rod assemblies came back from the motor assembling line as defective.
...
The foreman, examining the operation, could not discover why it should take as much as three minutes. He analyzed the motions with a stop−watch. He found that four hours out of a nine−hour day were spent in walking. The assembler did not go off anywhere, but he had to shift his feet to gather in his materials and to push away his finished piece. In the whole task, each man performed six operations.
The foreman devised a new plan; he split the operation into three divisions, put a slide on the bench and three men on each side of it, and an inspector at the end.
Instead of one man performing the whole operation, one man then performed only one third of the operation—he performed only as much as he could do without shifting his feet. They cut down the squad from twenty−eight to fourteen men.
The former record for twenty−eight men was one hundred seventy−five assemblies a day. Now seven men turn out twenty−six hundred assemblies in eight hours. It is not necessary to calculate the savings there!
--- Henry Ford, My Life and Work.
That would be quintessential Enframing per Heidegger, i.e. technology shapes and makes use of live and dead parts to increase productivity. As a result, everybody is better off but there's something dehumanizing in sitting for hours without even shifting your feet and performing the same mechanical operation with two simple parts in a tempo imposed by an external decision-making process.
Amazon warehouses are designed in a similar fashion.
