The Squeaky Cog

Blisters and Moleskines, take 2

Posted: 3rd October 2011 by alex in Uncategorized

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photo credit: Flickr usr bluman

I don’t like the last thing I wrote on Moleskine, don’t like it one bit. There’s no moral to the story, just a grumpy old man kvetching about how he can’t get his favorite esoteric notebooks. It’s time for a do-over.

Moleskine is giving us a glimpse of the future, a glimpse of what products and production and stock shelves will look like when it’s drop-dead-simple to make a new product. The magic of Moleskine is in the production–they have a set of machines that can literally make anything within a certain class of product.

Take a look at this moleskin-esque notebook supplier in Guangzhou: They have a production line that can make just about any style of notebook, and they specialize in custom orders and low volume production. A notebook costs $.5, and they have a minimum order of 1000 notebooks.

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/448946289/OEM_high_quality_hardcover_notebook.html

So, with production like this, it costs $500 to go from a design to production. They deliver seven days after you pay them. That’s insanely accessible. The barrier to entry is so low, it can’t even really be considered a barrier. It takes far more money and time to design the product than it does to bring it into production, but even the design effort isn’t a big deal. If you’re a company like Moleskine, that has a brand and a way (web stores, retail shelves, etc) to put new products in front of people, why not experiment with a lot of new products? The cost of designing, of experimenting, of trying out a new idea is so low (and Moleskine’s ~1000% profit margins on their $16 dollar notebooks are so high), that even if a new product sells terribly, it’ll probably break even.

What’s interesting here is that Moleskine’s retail presentation hasn’t caught up with the flexibility of its production. They have 400 products that they’re actively selling, but you haven’t heard of most of them. Their store shelves have no advertising, no way of telling consumers about a new product. They just have an undifferentiated pile of products on a shelf. Who knows, maybe that’s enough. The bottom line, though, is that Moleskine is a business where the bottleneck isn’t the design or the production, and Moleskine is pushing it for all it’s worth, cranking out new, different products at a mind-boggling rate.

I have mixed emotions when I look at the Moleskine shelf. On one hand, I see a pile of exceedingly similar products, where the product I love is buried somewhere in a pile of shit I don’t care about. One the other hand, I see a product meritocracy; a world where the barrier to entry for a new product is almost nil, and it’s so easy and cheap to try out a new idea that it happens all the time. Where the products people love rise to the top and the others fall to the wayside. Where sales aren’t correlated to advertising efforts, but to the utility of the product. The low barrier to entry does for journals what online blogging did for publishing–it’s cheap, it’s easy, and anyone who cares can contribute and get ideas out into the world. There’s one thing the Moleskine shelf lacks, though, and that’s a way to search for the product you want in a field of similar, but inferior products. It needs a search engine.

My Moleskine craze has just begun. More on Moleskines soon.

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photo credit: flickr usr flyingturtle

Swing and a miss, maybe?

Posted: 3rd October 2011 by alex in Uncategorized

Moleskine makes fabulous notebooks. They’re these small, no-frills, hardcover notebooks that are well-made, easy to carry, durable and sexy. I’ve been in love with them for a couple years now, enough to spend the ridiculous $15 per notebook over and over again. I buy into the product and the brand. I’ve experimented with the lower-cost knock-offs, and I come back to moleskine products again and again. They won me over with a superior product, and they’ve made me into a perfect, loyal customer who’s enthusiastic about their product.

And then the MBA grads seem to have taken over Moleskine’s product strategy. The company originally produced and sold one basic product–a simple, unlined journal. The business-school-case-study thinking points in a clear direction: expand your userbase by releasing similar products, produced using the same techniques and sold through the same distribution channels. The next products were simple enough: lined journals. Graph-paper journals. And then it began to get weird.

One of the business development staff at Moleskine must have called a series of brainstorming meetings on “redefining the journal.” Within a year, Moleskine started releasing specialized journals for everything someone could possibly want a journal for. There’s dog journals, for writing about your dog. Recipe journals, for writing about recipes that you like. Tokyo journals, for writing about your experiences in Tokyo. I’m sure each of these journals only costs a couple thousand dollars for an intern to design, and the cost to put another journal into production must be marginal.

Soon, Moleskine started releasing every possible combination of notebooks. Notebooks packaged together. Moleskines in various colors. Product-focused moleskines. Lifestyle-focused moleskines. Co-branded moleskines. The moleskine display rack in stores grew and grew. As of September ‘11, there were about 100 unique products in a moleskine rack.

The irony, of course, is that this expansion is completely obnoxious to the bread-and-butter moleskine customer. It actually takes five or ten minutes of sifting through the piles of uselessly branded moleskines to find the simple, original journal. The added logistical difficulty of keeping a hundred different products on shelves means that the notebooks I want are often out of stock. But what I really don’t understand is what moleskine, the business, gains from this craziness.

It seems like moleskine is chasing small, niche groups of customers, in the hopes of capturing users who don’t identify themselves as journal-keepers. In the business developers’ minds’ eyes, dog owners worldwide are wandering aimlessly through bookstores, flipping through the journal section, and pausing as they find the expansive “dog journal” section on the moleskine rack. ”Hmm,” the dog owners say to themselves, “I’ve been having lots of thoughts about my dog, but I haven’t had a good place to store them. Maybe I’ll keep them in this convenient little book, which has helpful labels for different types of dogs thoughts. Look! If I have thoughts about my dog’s behavior, I’ll jot them down in the ‘behavior’ section! Thoughts about it’s diet? There’s a ‘diet’ section! At long last, I’ve got a way to organize my little doggy thoughts. I’ll take eight!”

Honestly, I can’t imagine how many incremental customers moleskine gets for every incremental product. Someone at the company seems to be infatuated by the low incremental cost to add another product, but they don’t really do anything other than to produce a random notebook and shove it on a rack. There’s no advertising, no way to educate users about a new product, presumably because the advertising cost would dwarf the additional revenue that the advertising would drive. Maybe this flood of products is a kind of alpha-beta test to see which notebooks actually sell.

Unfortunately, it seems to be working. Moleskine is sold in stores around the world. They have over 400 products sold on their web store. I see them everywhere. The company’s been around for fourteen years, and shows no signs of stopping. I know people who swear by their products. It’s just so strange to see a company drown out its popular flagship product in a quagmire of poorly differentiated, niche products. I’m simultaneously disgusted, confused and amazed.

factory v1.0

Posted: 4th April 2010 by alex in factory, open source, operations, production, solutions
Tags: dream, factory

Image courtesy of Bern@t

The Factory
Alex Hornstein et al.

It is extremely difficult for small businesses in America to transition from a polished design of a product to low-volume production of that product. The process of finding, vetting and co-ordinating all the manufacturing capacity needed to produce low volumes of a finished good takes prohibitive amounts of time andmoney, presenting a significant obstacle to small businesses producing competitive products. American manufacturers do an excellent job offering rapid prototyping services to produce single units, and manufacturing becomes viable once more in larger volumes, starting around a thousand units a month, but the space in between those two service, which spans three orders of magnitude, is a gaping hole in American manufacturing capability.

To fill this hole, we propose a general-purpose factory that specializes in producing small volumes of products designed by small businesses. The goal of this factory is to be an enabler at every step of the product development cycle, helping small businesses get cost- effective, quality products into the hands of customers. In order to attain this goal, the factory will implement an innovative, well-designed strategy that incorporates elements of just-in-time manufacturing, value-added production, operations, social engineering and interface design, as detailed below:

Just-in-time manufacturing: There have been a great deal of advances in just-in-time manufacturing in the last decade, allowing a factory to respond quickly to market need for a number of different products. By using cutting-edge technology that has fast setup times and tool changes, as well as continually refining job setup procedures in-house, we can bring setup time to a minimum and be able to cost-effectively produce a wide variety of parts on short notice. This manufacturing style fits very well with low-capital businesses, allowing for flexible, responsive production and many opportunities to iterate and perfect a product’s design.

Value-added production: A common problem for product designers is that existing low- volume manufacturers are too specialized. One manufacturer might make plastics, while another makes printed circuit boards and another does electronic assembly. Coordinating many manufacturers to produce many components of a product is a logistical nightmare. Low-volume manufacturing follows an 80-20 rule: 80% of a set of consumer goods can be produced with 20% of the machinery. Under that rule, we plan to offer a number of popular manufacturing processes under one roof, offering tight control over logistics and a one-stop shop for the production of most consumer goods within our scope. Additionally, we will offer value-added services such as design for manufacture consulting, rapid prototyping, and factory drop shipping. The goal is for a client to be able to give us a design for a product, a list of orders and a credit card number, and we’ll get those products into customers’ hands.

Operations: Part of the product development cycle is developing a robust supply chain, ensuring that production will not be interrupted or delayed if one supplier has a glitch. We will find primary and backup sources for all components used in a product we produce, as well as partnering with contract manufacturers, should our own production equipment malfunction or be over-utilized. We will be completely transparent about our sourcing and production practices, as a means of ensuring our clients of our reliability as well as maintaining what we believe to be the best, most effective business practices.

Social Engineering: Social engineering has a number of implications for this model of factory. In the most literal sense, it’s possible to bring together many small businesses that are independently producing small volumes of similar products and combine their orders,
producing economies of scale on material costs. In a related vein, there is a significant market in the US for consumer products released under an open-source hardware license, a license that makes the design of the product freely available and allows others to use and modify the design for commercial purposes. Businesses designing open-source products fit perfectly into our target client demographic. As we develop a repertoire of open-source products, we’ll be in a position to support designers using simple open-source products as building blocks for more intricate products.

In a broader sense, we strive to create a positive social environment in our production facility. We plan to recruit capable designers and builders to work in our production environment, and strongly push principles of worker-controlled production, feedback, and redesign of production methods. We believe that by hiring workers who are themselves designers, promoting constant education in the factory environment and maintaining a sane, social culture around production, we can develop and improve in-house techniques for effective manufacturing in our business model.

Finally, we aim to recruit a very different set of workers than most manufacturing facilities. We’d like to attract and foster a culture of budding designers and entrepreneurs who will benefit greatly from the hands-on manufacturing experience they’ll get by working at the factory. We can offer subsidized manufacturing time, worker-led education and shared-risk funding on products workers design (on their own time) to attract top talent in our area. We believe that the factory’s potential as an educational facility and incubator for budding entrepreneurs is as great a social benefit as the service it provides to existing underserved businesses.

Interface Design: A major limitation of the current model of manufacturing is how designers interact with manufacturers. Communication in manufacturing hasn’t changed much since the 80s, and as a result, the process of getting a product produced in 2010 involves looking up a manufacturer in a large directory, calling or emailing a salesperson, going back and forth for several days over product details or price or lead time, ordering a sample, possibly visiting the plant, and then finally ordering a production run. We believe from the bottom of our hearts that this must change. We will dedicate a great deal of effort towards developing a suite of tools to simplify and streamline the process of going from a computerized design to a finished part, with the ultimate (and most likely unattainable) goal of making production of a hundred units as simple as printing a hundred copies of the design.

Every one of the elements described above is instrumental in making high-quality, low volume products viable in America, but not a single idea in this document is new: the philosophy, the machinery, the market–they all exist, and they’ve been explored and tested by pioneers far more ambitious than us. All we’re suggesting is a synthesis, bringing cutting-edge ideas and innovations in manufacturing into a single factory and focusing them on the needs of the expansive, under-served world of small product-based businesses. We believe there’s huge potential for growth, for social good, and for improving the way manufacturing is done in America, and we hope to God we’re right.

‘Pull’ production for ten products a month

Posted: 2nd April 2010 by alex in factory, operations, production, solutions
Tags: efficiency, manufacturing, production, waste

Image courtesy of ♥ellie♥

‘Pull’ production is a great method for lightweight, just-in-time manufacturing. There are books upon books written on the topic, but briefly, it’s the idea that you only perform a manufacturing process when there’s a demand for that process. This is in contrast to the traditional “push” method of production where a manufacturer makes a guess as to the future demand for a product, produces a big batch of products for the forseeable future and stores the finished goods in a warehouse, shipping them out as the orders come in. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with push manufacturing, but when things go wrong, it doesn’t fail gracefully: if the manufacturer guesses the demand incorrectly, a lot of goods sit around taking up space in a warehouse or the manufacturer has to scramble to put out another run. Additionally, any error in the design or manufacturing process affects all the products in that run, with no easy way of detecting and fixing the error. Pull manufacturing ties in nicely with a system of product design and production that’s more responsive to demand and issues with the product.
Pull manufacturing isn’t always viable: it requires a responsive, flexible production facility, fast supply chains and good integration with the design and distribution teams. It’s especially difficult to implement in low margin, low volume products, where the volumes aren’t high enough to justify the hassle of setting up a responsive assembly line to make production match demand. Perhaps more intriguingly, though, is the question of whether pull manufacturing is useful for small volume manufacturers, and how you’d actually implement the pull concept if you’re making something like ten products a month.

In some ways, push and pull manufacturing blend together in low volumes. If a manufacturer doesn’t have enough capital to do a large production run, the manufacturer must produce in many small batches, running each batch with capital freed up from the sales of the previous batch. While this manner of production doesn’t benefit from economies of scale and can’t keep a production line anywhere near full capacity, it is very conducive to good design and production practices. Limited by cash flow, supply must closely track demand, overproduction is kept at a minimum and the return period on capital invested is kept short. Additionally, the short, periodic design runs tie in very well with iterative design practices, providing convenient opportunities to fix bugs and make improvements in the product based on user feedback. The greatest weakness is the relatively high cost of manufacture, as the cost of the setup time on the machines isn’t amortized over very many products and it’s necessary to use slow, multipurpose machines for production rather than specialized machinery. This weakness can be addressed by the production facility investing in machines with fast setup and high throughput. Products produced in low volume without a direct supplier of materials and components will simply never be as cheap as mass manufactured goods, but by carefully designing the production environment, simplifying the process of finding manufacturers and offering value added services at other parts of the production cycle, it should be possible to bring the final retail cost of low-volume parts reasonably close to mass-produced goods. Just how close, and just how reasonable are exactly the questions this blog aims to address.

Grease, drugs and sabotage

Posted: 26th March 2010 by alex in factory, failure, humans, manufacturing, production
Tags: factory, failure, human rights, humans, labor conditions

Image courtesy of Losvizzero

Wayne Strattman, class of ‘72 diploma in hand, was looking for a summer job. As one of Bristol, Connecticut’s newest high school graduates, he was faced with the harsh reality that it’s not easy to get a job right out of high school, and so he went to work for Bristol’s largest factory, the New Departure Hyatt division of General Motors.

The link below is to a paper he wrote a year later in college about his summer working at the New Departure Hyatt grind shop making ball bearings. It’s a story about what happens when workers are treated like industrial robots, and the smoldering foundation of the New Departure Hyatt grind shop stands witness to the unpleasant outcome.

Labor v. Management, by Wayne Strattman

Crossing over to the dark side: why finance matters in low-volume production

Posted: 26th March 2010 by alex in finance, manufacturing, open source, production, solutions
Tags: cost, finance, maker, production

Image courtesy of arteyfotografia

There’s a catch-22 in low-volume manufacturing:

If you produce just a couple products, the cost per product is really high, your product’s retail price will be really high, nobody’s going to want to buy it, and you won’t have any money. If you produce many products, the manufacturing cost per product will come down and your product’s retail price will be really cheap, but you need a lot of money up front to produce a lot of parts. This system works fine unless don’t have a lot of money, in which case you’ll be able to make a couple expensive products that nobody will want to buy.

Unfortunately, most commercial Makers don’t have any money. (A commercial Maker, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is a garage hobbyist who cranks out lots of projects on her own, and is producing one or two of her products to sell, largely to other makers)
The unfortunate truth that it’s more expensive to make a product in your own basement than it is to build it in China, fly it over to the US, ship it across the country and sell it in a Walmart at 100% profit margins. The bottom line is that the odds are stacked against a DIY product maker being able to produce a consumer good cheaply enough to be competitive, even against inferior, but cheaper, mass-produced goods.

And this is where someone stepped in and did something really big in the world of DIY product makers: the guys at liquidware developed a mechanism that allows micro-investment in a low-volume product, giving the produce maker the capital she needs to front a high-volume run and crank out cost-effective products. The mechanism is called the Open Source Hardware Bank, and this won’t be the last time you hear about it.

I won’t dive into the inner workings of the Open Source Hardware Bank (you can get all the details you’d want on their website and in this blog post), but here’s the brief overview: say I’ve got a design for a DIY defibrillator kit, and I’d like to produce it. Problem is, I’ve only got enough money to front the production cost of 10 defibrillators, and in quantities of 10, each kit costs $1000, which is way too much. If I could make fifty kits at a time, I’d get volume price breaks on the components, and the assembly cost per kit drops way down. To do a run of fifty kits, I’ll need to raise enough money to cover the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) for the remaining forty products, so I put a blurb on my website explaining what I’m trying to do, and that I’m looking for investment. Through the Open Source Hardware Bank’s model, a random stranger(call him Jasper) can be cruising the internet and stumble across my project. Jasper thinks my product is cool and thinks that it’s a worthwhile product that people will buy, so he invests enough money for me to manufacture five units. Once I manufacture and sell the units, I’ll be able to repay Jasper’s investment, with interest. For now, I keep on waiting and looking for investment until I get enough cash to build fifty units, and then I pay the manufacturer to do a production run, get my kits in, and start selling them. As I sell the kits, I pay Jasper and my investors back with the profits of the kits or, if they’re interested, with the kits themselves. At the end of the day, thanks to the Open Source Hardware Bank, I’ve been able to sell my own homebrew products at a competitive cost, Jasper and my other investors made a decent return on their money, and thanks to my profits, I’ll have an easier time producing products in the future.

I’m not saying that the Open Source Hardware Bank is the perfect solution to funding low-volume production, but I think it fills a huge void in the viability of making cost-effective, small-run products. Finance mechanisms like the bank are crucial tools for enabling independent design and production, and it gives me great hope for a bright and shiny future.

The new factory

Posted: 25th March 2010 by alex in factory, foreign v. domestic, manufacturing, production
Tags: factory, insourcing, maker, production

Gear image by toniVC

American manufacturing is struggling. This isn’t going to be a post about why we’re struggling, but rather the implications of being a country without a strong manufacturing base, and a suggestion for how we can counter that unpalatable future.

This is what I’m afraid of: the short-term, cost-driven thinking prevalent in most large American companies wins out and American product design companies move all of their volume production offshore to take advantage of cheap labor offered by underdeveloped countries willing to fuck themselves and their people’s human rights over in exchange for infusions of American cash. Losing production capability in our country means that there’s a significant cost to American companies trying to produce a product: a company has to give one of their employees blueprints for their product, send them over to a manufacturing country and have them live there for a couple months, at least, while they find a factory who’ll produce it. The starting cost for getting a product manufactured is many thousands of dollars, and that’s just in travel, salary and living expenses. There’s many more thousands of dollars needed to set up an assembly line, and yet more thousands to pay in shipping and export duties before your first product ever touches American soil. The lack of onshore manufacturing facilities, coupled with a high startup cost for simple, low-volume production would effectively bar small independent designers from producing physical products. The only people who could bring products to market would be cost-cutting corporations who can plunk down tens of thousands of dollars without batting an eye to buy a squalid room full of machinery and underpaid workers in some godforsaken developing country where they can crank out crappy, unfixable injection molded parts for export to the US where we’ll all buy them with our expendable income, use them for a month until they inevitably break and then chuck the junked carcasses into our slowly growing landfills. Over time, the underpaid engineers in developing countries who currently contract out a growing chunk of our product design realize that they can just cut out the middleman and design, manufacture and sell products to America on their own for far more money than they’re getting now. Having lost their ability to design or produce the things around them, Americans progress towards the ultimate goal of living curled up like passive consumerist slugs in our suburban homes, fed by intravenous tubes of sugar water and cheap consumer goods coming in from China and blissfully spending what remains of our money until the barbarian hordes sweep in from the North and devour us.

What’s that? The meeting at the docks is next week? Sorry–I keep getting my dates confused.

Rhetoric aside, I believe there’s a better way. I don’t have a ready alternative for the extremely high-volume production of consumer goods that’s currently done overseas, but I do think there’s a space in the market for a factory that specialized in making low-volume (1-1000 units/month) parts for independent designers and small companies in America.
The savvy American manufacturers have reacted to cheap offshore production by specializing and focusing on certain value added services, like drop-shipping and quick-turn prototyping, that offshore manufacturers can’t do, either because of the geography or culture. American manufacturers, however tend to be specialized. One company will make quick-turn plastics, and another will do low-volume circuit assembly, but there’s no single company that can easily and quickly crank out a consumer good. Additionally, factories everywhere tend to stratify by production capacity. One factory will make 1-10 units for you, another will make 1,000-100,000 units, buts it’s rare to find a factory that can start at 1 unit and ramp up gracefully and cost-effectively to around 1,000 units a month. As a result, the process of scaling up production capacity often involves ‘graduating’ from one manufacturer to another to another, sucking up time and money with each switch. I believe the status quo is cost and time-prohibitive to small companies bootstrapping a new product line, and I believe it drives large companies offshore prematurely in search of a better, less painful production system.

And that’s exactly what I’m proposing: a general-purpose, low-volume production shop that has the machinery in house to produce ~80% of the consumer goods around us. I believe that such a shop, if it’s done right, could effectively lower the barrier to entry for small companies to introduce and scale new products, and I believe it can be a viable alternative to offshore production for companies that want a quick run of a couple hundred products.

Well, that’s all well and good, but how is it possible to actually create and run this factory sanely and crank out cost-effective goods? Frankly, I don’t have the answer. This post is about this concept, not the implementation, and the implementation certainly won’t simple enough to encapsulate in a five-paragraph essay. I believe that there are many pieces in America that can be put together to turn this factory concept into a reality. In the coming months, through research, interviews, essays, and eventually building a fucking factory, I aim to describe, demonstrate and make publicly available a model for effective low-volume production in America.

Until then, keep buying those phenomenally cheap consumer goods and stay on the lookout for those IV lines pumping sugar water from China. They’ll be coming any day, now.

Fear on the shop floor

Posted: 24th March 2010 by alex in humans
Tags: auto, detroit, human, manufacturing

I recently went to work for a week in a factory in the suburbs of Detroit, programming industrial robots for car manufacturers. The factory itself wasn’t owned by one of the carmakers, it was one of the thousands of plants in Michigan that exists to make products for the auto industry. This one made parts for the assembly lines in car factories, and from the look of things, business wasn’t doing so well.

It’s my first day in the plant, about twenty of the guys on the shop floor are assembling The Flipper, a 20-foot tall behemoth machine covered in day-glo orange safety paint, squatting in a puddle of hydraulic fluid. The Flipper takes in heavy car parts like a door or body panel, flips them over, and shoots them out the other end. The workers are wrestling the machine’s parts into place, connecting cables and fluid and everything else a giant honking machine needs.

A few days later, I’m standing on the shop floor when a factory engineer comes bursting out of the office cubicles. The engineer is a huge man, towering a good half a foot over me, and he’s striding across the floor with the resolve and momentum of a charging elephant, pausing briefly to snatch a blueprint for the Flipper from a toolchest. Every inch of this man screams fury–not just fury, but red-faced apoplectic shiteating rage. Neck veins bulging, he marches up to the shop foreman, shakes the blueprint in his face, and pointing at the Flipper, turns the blueprint upside-down. And the shouting begins. The engineer bellows at the foreman and the workers, who are standing dumbly around and on top of the Flipper, shuffling their feet. What the fuck are you thinking, who the fuck is so fucking stupid to fucking put a fucking… The foreman starts shouting back at the engineer about how the fuck’s it his fault, you can’t tell a fucking thing from the drawing. After ten minutes of bellowing, the engineer stomps back to his cubicle and the workers start yelling at one another. Then the factory owner, another huge man comes stomping onto the floor and yells at anyone within eyesight, stopping only when he’s overtaken by a coughing fit. Half an hour later, everyone returns to work, breathing slightly heavier than normal. “Jesus,” I think, “what an awful way to exist.” The next day it happens again, but this time it’s directed at the group I’m working with. We’re programming a robot to follow a line of colored tape on the factory floor, and while it’s following the line, it’s wobbling back and forth as it does. One of the engineers, a huge bearded man who designs industrial machinery, watches our robot as we put it through its paces. Looking at his face, it’s clear that an internal storm’s brewing. And then it unleashes. Why the fuck isn’t this robot going straight? Your fucking robot’s fucking wobbling all over the fucking place. It fucking needs to work, and it’s NOT FUCKING WORKING! He’s stomping up and down the shop floor, shouting hard enough that the air in front of him is visibly distorted. He’s not really listening for a response, so we take cover in an office looking out onto the shop floor, and we see him stomp red-faced past the window for fifteen minutes, his unanswered bellows echoing off the factory walls. When we step back out on the floor a few minutes later, he’s grasping a metal ramp that our robot drives on and is ripping it out of the floor. While I was working in the factory, I wrote this off, blaming it on the personalities I was around, thinking it was a Michigan thing, or that these guys were just hicks or pissy or that this was just how they were. It wasn’t until I was telling this exact story a week later back in Boston that I realized the extent of the anger, the stress, the raw emotion I had witnessed, and I know without a doubt that it’s not normal. People can’t function like this; the stress alone will kill you in a few years. I wasn’t seeing the effects of ego or a pissing contest–what I was seeing was raw fear. In a city with 50% unemployment, in a factory that exists to serve the expansion of a dying business, every one of the workers knows that it doesn’t take much for their company to go under, and if it does–well, there’s nobody else hiring. Any little thing going wrong can start in motion a chain of events that forces everybody at the plant to go move to another city in search of work. What I witnessed was the very human reaction to that knowledge. Everyone at this company is living in dread, waiting for the other shoe to drop. These are capable, talented men locked in a structure that’s too rigid, too dated, too tangled in industry hierarchy to save itself. Everyone in the factory knows this, and they’re working through it, consumed with fear and anger, because there’s nothing else they can do.

This is the human aspect of America’s failure to figure out manufacturing, and you know what? It fucking sucks.

The Squeaky Cog

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