Discount Tutor
Maoxiaoying
7.docxRead the Toyota Motor Corporation and Employee "Suggestion" System case that can be found in the sixth chapter of the textbook. Using ethical theories and principles learned in this course, especially subsidiarity and natural law, analyze the moral worth of the decisions made by Toyota. Also discuss the various options open to Toyota, and choose the one you think would have been the best. Justify the choice you make using resources from this course. You are encouraged to submit your own threads to this discussion as well as respond to threads left by other students. 350 words.
Lecture:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-law-ethics/
Rubric:
Toyota Motor Corporation and Employee “Suggestion” System:
The principle of subsidiarity can be applied to business settings for reasons that go beyond poverty alleviation. The practices of a division of Toyota Motor Corporation are a case in point.
In 2012, Toyota sold more cars than any other company in the world, with an estimated 9.71 million vehicle sales. It has spent many years at the top of the sales list and although it has had some issues with recalls in the past several years and leadership stumbles, overall it is highly respected and regarded as an innovative company. One reason for this is the Toyota Production System (TPS), which differs significantly from the systems that have historically been used in US car production.
A joint collaboration in Fremont, California, between General Motors (GM) and Toyota that began in the early 1980s illustrates the differences in the US and Toyota systems and how the principle of subsidiarity relates. There had previously been a GM plant in Fremont, but it was the worst production facility in the US system due to the systems in place there, the relationship between management and workers, and the poor work ethic and drug and alcohol culture of workers. After it was shut down, it sat idle and no new industry moved into the facility. Toyota suggested this site as a place where GM and Toyota could collaborate. Toyota offered to teach GM all of its production facility secrets if GM taught Toyota how to work within the US market. Although Toyota had been exporting cars to the United States, it wanted to open production facilities here.
The first step of the working relationship involved former Fremont United Auto Workers workers going to Japan to for two-week training sessions. Then when enough employees were trained, the California location could open and begin production. When the US workers first arrived at the Toyota plant in Japan, they could not believe how different the production line was. In the TPS, managers and employees work together. Everything has a team-based approach. Each individual has a job to complete, but each is part of a group and a team with a leader. If someone makes a mistake or cannot keep up with production or there is some issue on the line, the worker will pull a cord that alerts others with a light and a happy little song that there is an issue. If the worker and others who come to help cannot resolve the issue, they pull the cord again and stop the entire production line. As soon as the issue is resolved, the line begins again.
After the issue is resolved, someone at the company would later find out how the issue could be dealt with in the future so there is no need to stop the line. If an employee offers a suggestion for a different type of tool or a different arrangement for storage and availability of tools or anything else that ultimately saves the company money due to a smoother production process, that employee will receive several hundred dollars in a bonus. This is part of what the Japanese call kaizen, or continuous improvement. Everyone is expected to make suggestions to improve the production process and maintain a focus on the quality, not the quantity, of the products. This explains why the US workers saw mats for the workers to stand on, cushions for them to kneel on, and shelves that travel along with them while they’re working to make reaching for tools easier and more efficient.
Although recent information is not available, the phenomenon of the Creative Idea Solution System was documented in the the 1980s and early 1990s. The system was begun in 1951 and between that time and 1988, about 20 million suggestions were turned in. It got to the point at which two million suggestions were turned in each year at a rate of forty suggestions per year per worker. About 95 percent of employees participated in the program and their suggestions were adopted at an astonishing 96 percent rate. This system made it very clear to employees that they were an integral part of the team, they were an expert in what they did on the line, their feedback was critical to the company’s success, and quality of process and product were highly valued.
In contrast, the US workers explained that they were trained not to ever stop the production line for any reason whatsoever. Henry Ford’s focus on the production line from the very beginning was quantity. If there was an error, the car should continue through the production process and could be fixed later. Everyone had to keep up with the timing of the system in order to maintain the quantity targets. The Fremont workers explained that if the bumper for a different type of car was on the line to be placed on the wrong car, they were to put on the wrong bumper and everything else around it and then it would be brought out to a lot to be fixed later. Workers could earn overtime fixing the cars, even though they might not have the expertise for the particular type of work they were doing. Not only did the workers have to continue the movement of the line if a car part was wrong or installed incorrectly but also if someone fell into a pit or had a heart attack, everything was to continue. No one ever asked the workers how consistent issues could be fixed. The workers and management did not get along at all and even though the system made costly errors and had sacrificed quality for quantity, the system remained in place.
