Is flexible working the way forward for factory workers?

Analysis: Factory workers may not be able to work from home, but flexible working arrangements may allow some more control over their lives

Since the Covid pandemic, office workers, managers and even executives have embraced systems that make their work life more flexible. For many, this has meant remote work. While there is a growing trend for organisations to force workers back to the office, many office workers still have the option to work from home at least part of the week.

But while remote work has been available to many office workers, there are several occupations in which the option to work remotely, or to work something other than a 40-hour work week in a traditional workplace, has not been practical or widely available. In particular, factory work has long been an occupation in which the idea of flexible working arrangements did not seem feasible or even relevant.

Recently, a manufacturing arm of GE Appliances has been forced to experiment with giving factory workers more flexibility. To be sure, there is not much opportunity to work from home if your job entails assembling components of some major appliance. However, the company found that programs to offer workers more flexibility in when they work have been surprisingly successful.

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GE Appliances did not adopt flextime programs out of the goodness of their heart. After the pandemic, they were finding it impossible to staff their factories with a full-time workforce that worked a steady 40 hours each week in the factory. Employees can use apps to schedule multiple four-hour shifts per week to fit their schedules and preferences.

Some employees have long preferred to work part-time, while others preferred schedules that worked around other obligations (e.g. getting children to and from school). While executives and managers initially treated the idea of flextime for factory workers as crazy, management at the plants which have adopted this technology have come to embrace the idea.

While it is tempting to think about this experiment as an almost desperate response to the problems staffing a factory in the wake of Covid, I prefer to think of this as the latest stage in the long march from the old days of heavily regimented factory work. In the early 1900s, factory owners revolutionised work by adopting assembly-line methods. Henry Ford and others demonstrated that it was possible to simplify jobs so that each worker performed a discrete task (such as attaching a headlight to a car) quickly and repetitively. By grouping workers into an assembly line, it was possible to achieve unheard-of levels of productivity.

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This benefited both workers and factory owners. Workers could get good-paying jobs with minimal skills and factory owners made millions. Ford was famous for paying his workers the high wage of $5 per day, in part so he could build up a large class of potential customers who could afford to buy his cars. The cost to workers was that they became cogs in an unforgiving machine, doing the same small job day after day until they retired.

By 1911, Frederick Taylor’s system of Scientific Management had reduced workers to the state of machines. He followed workers with a stopwatch, observing their every movement and specifying precisely how workers should move, when they should rest and where they should put tools and parts, creating a system his critics called the “Iron Cage”. For the next 60 years, assembly-line systems gave workers well-paying but soul-crushing jobs.

In the 1970s, Swedish manufacturers started to experiment with the use of semi-autonomous teams in auto manufacturing. Companies like Volvo allowed small teams to work as a unit in building cars, letting team members make decisions about how to structure the work, who did what tasks, etc. This process greatly increased workers’ sense of autonomy and responsibility, but it ultimately proved unsuccessful in producing enough cars quickly to meet market demands.

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Current experiments with flextime may face similar challenges. Manufacturing is most efficient when it is standardised and, in many cases, this leads to the use of robots rather than humans to do most assembly work. Nevertheless, there is still a need for humans in many workplaces, and the ethos of work seems to be moving in the direction of structuring jobs that were once heavily regimented in ways that will allow workers more control over their lives.

I doubt that the managers of GE plants that are experimenting with flextime thought they were helping to break the Iron Cage, but I applaud any program that gives workers some semblance of humanity. It is time to push Taylorism and all other workplace ideologies that treat workers as interchangeable cogs in a great and merciless machine to the dustbin of history.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ

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