Quote:
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Originally Posted by Maleficent
An average shift is 8 hours... (i'm guessing) is 48 minutes of bathroom time excessive? That's 6 minutes per hour to go to the bathroom... Does the average person go to the bathroom once an hour?
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Where I live, you are allowed 2x15 minute breaks and a half-hour for lunch, when working for an 8 hour day.
Then again, when you work on an assembly line, I would think it reasonable to allow workers 6 minutes per hour (or lets say, 3 minutes every 30) to stretch, take a break, grab a drink of water, fix clothing/tools needed on the line.
When you look at the assembly line process and you explode he figures with the scale of Ford, you get some startling numbers:
Ben's fictional Production Line factory...
Assumptions -
1000 workers
12 dollars per hour
8 hour "on-site" per day
2000 hours of work per year (50 weeks x 40 hours)
Well, if you look at it, you are spending 12,000 dollars per hour on labour on your plant. If you are a manager, you have to appreciate that the workers you supervise and are responsible for are making your yearly wage every five hours.
Now, consider that a one minute break by your production line equals a thousand minutes in labour. That equals 16 2/3 hours. that equals 200 dollars in actual monies paid for doing nothing.
If you are a manager, you want that to not happen. One minute of production time per hour equals 400,000 per year, in labour. Six minutes per hour per year = 2,400,000 dollars.
In this scenario, we are talking about 6 minutes per hour, and the workers are certainly making more than 12 bucks an hour. Are there a thousand workers on the line? I don't know what a typical Ford production line looks like.
What managers, bean-counters and "efficiency experts" don't know (or quickly forget) is that production line work is hard. Your muscles start to hurt from the repetitive motion. You are stressed out because you don't want to be the one to hold up the line. Your tools wear out, and you need to replace them. You occasionaly need to wipe the sweat from your brow...
If the worker feels that every second is being accounted for, that will quickly burn them out. There has to be some flexibility in the system so that the workers feel good, or they will start to get hurt, or go on stress/sick leave.
But imagine you are responsible for the labour budget. I am your boss and I tell you that 2.4 million dollars is too much flexibility in the budget you submitted. What are you running here, a fucking day spa? I could hire a productivity expert at 1.2 million dollars and have things tight around here. Tell you what. If you tighten these numbers up in the next fiscal quarter, I will give you a 10% productivity bonus. That means ((2,400,000)/4)*10% = 60,000 in your pocket, if you can find a way to keep these fucking production line monkeys at their station for six more minutes per hour! Why can't you do that? I can walk out this door and find a thousand young executives waiting for a 60k$ salary with a 60k$ QUARTERLY BONUS. Do it or you are gone.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the fictional world of Middle Management. Any takers? 60k per year plus a potential 240k$ annual bonus? All you have to do is sell your soul and be willing to have 1,000 employees hate you.