Comment by charlie0
10 days ago
If you replaced every worker with someone else of equal skill of course manufacturing company would continue to operate.
Making employees replaceable cogs is what industrialization was completely about. It's what happened during globalization. Think about all those seniors who lost their jobs when the factory went overseas. That was successful in large part because the distinction between a junior and a senior is not that great.
There would be some exceptions here for management and execs, but we are not talking about them here.
> If you replaced every worker with someone else of equal skill of course manufacturing company would continue to operate.
No it wouldn't, because a senior worker wouldn't be around to say things like "oh yes we use a jig under this circumstance that we keep over here <points>". Every business has ton of institutional knowledge like that.
It turns out, that isn't worth much. Because they upended the factories and sent them to Mexico and China overnight without a person to point and say where the jig was. Seemingly, they figured it out.
To be clear, I'm not actually disagreeing with your point, I do think it's important to have those people. But companies felt otherwise.
At least in the instances I've been aware of, they usually weren't really "overnight". Usually a good bit of knowledge transfer or actually moving institutional people, sometimes having the other factory coming online in parallel so they can tweak processes, etc. Usually a years-long process. I think few truly overnight shut down one factory and opened the other with those other people having zero knowledge or training on specific processes without experiencing big issues.