"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
Manufacturing industries will emerge from economic crises with a need for workers who can handle the stresses of continuous improvement in Total Quality Management (TQM) and last-second delivery of parts in Just-in-Time Inventory (JIT) systems. Current knowledge of workers in lean auto production is limited to start-up studies of new workers before 1990, and little of that focused on stress. This project will fill this gap by explaining the stress on experienced autoworkers in lean production during economic crises and technological change.
This project uses flexible interviews to explore the identities of workers in order to understand how they view and adjust to lean production. The investigators will interview 150 workers in 3 Japanese and 3 American auto plants and their suppliers in America.
Three theories will be used to examine how workers view work and stress. First, lean production with high management pressure causes both high stress and resistance. Second, lean production creates team unity out of racial and gender diversity. Successful lean teams with lower stress emerge from contact between people of equal status successfully working on linked tasks in a small group that is promoted by leaders. However, team contact may also lead to dating and even divorce. Third, stress comes from isolation from family and friends in social networks.
The broader impact of this research goes beyond manufacturing because JIT and TQM are penetrating the medical and other service industries. Since the US will not compete with foreign labor on the basis of low skills and wages, it will have to continuously move workers upstream in making high value products through lean production. Learning how workers function in lean production teams while handling the stresses of TQM and JIT will be critical for designing more effective training systems in the future. This study will benefit that preparation, and also help retrain workers who can no longer do this hard work.
