I’m not sure if Boeing is going the same route we are, but blue collar people - the ones building and assembling airplanes - are treated like replaceable cogs. They aren’t taught the actual meaning or point of quality/quality management systems. It’s mostly warm bodies. When I ask people if they’ve read the specs that cover the processes they’re doing, they stare at me. It’s maddening. You’re performing a complex process solely on OJT? Fucking lunacy.
Boeing moved 787 assembly out of Everett to just their Charleston site to avoid unions. Yes, they treat their assemblers like interchangeable cogs, especially when there are no unions to counteract some of their bad abti-labor decisions. Don’t expect Boeing to get any better with the replacement of 3-4 leaders.
Well, there’s another side to this, of industrial ergonomics. The system assembled\built is supposed to be easily divisible with clear documents into simple non-ambiguous tasks which can be given to those blue-collar people. If the engineers designing it failed at that stage, you can’t blame blue-collar people for not being able to grasp something above their pay grade. They should be shown a few pages with “screw that with this, grease with such amount of that” and that should be enough.
Ergonomics seems to be having its own dark ages as an area these days. Both in consumer and in industrial stuff.
Gotta say, I’m a blue collar who also builds sensitive machinery, have been doing so for six years now.
There is a VERY sharp divide in how well I consider myself to have mastered certain aspects of the job.
Someone fucking kill me: I’m doing this job for the first time and I’m having to spend ages sifting through our processes that may not be documented in enough detail to do the job perfectly. The job is legally safe because I’m following the rules but god I don’t like it. Takes about three times as long as a ‘normal’ task.
This is fine: I’ve done the job enough to know how everything goes together, what torque to use where, and if there’s anything I should really be doing that isn’t in the instructions, or if there’s an instruction mismatch.
Mastery: I can not only do the job, I actually understand the explicit purpose and function of everything I’m putting together on an intimate level, and can use my knowledge of that purpose and function to make god damn sure that what I’m putting out is top quality. As probably the least sensitive example of this, this is stuff like knowing that the particular brand of no-mixing-needed paint we use can sometimes develop a sediment layer of its’ pigments on the bottom that requires you to mix it with a stick for the paint to perform properly, and that you can tell when the paint is experiencing this issue because it’ll be off-colour due to the lack of pigment; and if you don’t resolve this issue the paint won’t adhere to surfaces correctly and is liable to flake off.
I’ve been doing this for six years and there are only a handful of aspects of my job I consider myself to have complete mastery over. I don’t think I’m the best worker out there, not by a long shot, but to me the idea that you can just lose and replace your workforce when dealing with complicated machinery is about as stupid as the notion that AI can replicate the human mind (It can’t unless you abandon the von-neumann computer design).
What I do is similar, and our customers are in house so we have some latitude. We’ve got fairly loose standards about how we build most things, and usually more than one option - but the finished product has rigid requirements. We get to “equivalent or better” some things, but even knowing that is kind of fucky. Grade 8 hardware is better than grade 5, right? Except for safety critical shit. Then you need stress disposition to go to grade 8.
We’ve lost a lot of old peeps to golden handshakes and being mad at the company/union. In a few years my org lost an absurd number of years of experience. Think thousands.
I’m not sure if Boeing is going the same route we are, but blue collar people - the ones building and assembling airplanes - are treated like replaceable cogs. They aren’t taught the actual meaning or point of quality/quality management systems. It’s mostly warm bodies. When I ask people if they’ve read the specs that cover the processes they’re doing, they stare at me. It’s maddening. You’re performing a complex process solely on OJT? Fucking lunacy.
Boeing moved 787 assembly out of Everett to just their Charleston site to avoid unions. Yes, they treat their assemblers like interchangeable cogs, especially when there are no unions to counteract some of their bad abti-labor decisions. Don’t expect Boeing to get any better with the replacement of 3-4 leaders.
I mean I’m a union member and it isn’t much better. There’s a lot of talk but nobody seems to actually care.
Well, there’s another side to this, of industrial ergonomics. The system assembled\built is supposed to be easily divisible with clear documents into simple non-ambiguous tasks which can be given to those blue-collar people. If the engineers designing it failed at that stage, you can’t blame blue-collar people for not being able to grasp something above their pay grade. They should be shown a few pages with “screw that with this, grease with such amount of that” and that should be enough.
Ergonomics seems to be having its own dark ages as an area these days. Both in consumer and in industrial stuff.
Gotta say, I’m a blue collar who also builds sensitive machinery, have been doing so for six years now.
There is a VERY sharp divide in how well I consider myself to have mastered certain aspects of the job.
Someone fucking kill me: I’m doing this job for the first time and I’m having to spend ages sifting through our processes that may not be documented in enough detail to do the job perfectly. The job is legally safe because I’m following the rules but god I don’t like it. Takes about three times as long as a ‘normal’ task.
This is fine: I’ve done the job enough to know how everything goes together, what torque to use where, and if there’s anything I should really be doing that isn’t in the instructions, or if there’s an instruction mismatch.
Mastery: I can not only do the job, I actually understand the explicit purpose and function of everything I’m putting together on an intimate level, and can use my knowledge of that purpose and function to make god damn sure that what I’m putting out is top quality. As probably the least sensitive example of this, this is stuff like knowing that the particular brand of no-mixing-needed paint we use can sometimes develop a sediment layer of its’ pigments on the bottom that requires you to mix it with a stick for the paint to perform properly, and that you can tell when the paint is experiencing this issue because it’ll be off-colour due to the lack of pigment; and if you don’t resolve this issue the paint won’t adhere to surfaces correctly and is liable to flake off.
I’ve been doing this for six years and there are only a handful of aspects of my job I consider myself to have complete mastery over. I don’t think I’m the best worker out there, not by a long shot, but to me the idea that you can just lose and replace your workforce when dealing with complicated machinery is about as stupid as the notion that AI can replicate the human mind (It can’t unless you abandon the von-neumann computer design).
What I do is similar, and our customers are in house so we have some latitude. We’ve got fairly loose standards about how we build most things, and usually more than one option - but the finished product has rigid requirements. We get to “equivalent or better” some things, but even knowing that is kind of fucky. Grade 8 hardware is better than grade 5, right? Except for safety critical shit. Then you need stress disposition to go to grade 8.
We’ve lost a lot of old peeps to golden handshakes and being mad at the company/union. In a few years my org lost an absurd number of years of experience. Think thousands.