Midas

Week 1 Guidance

 

 

Some history about the past in Operations Management:                                               

     Agriculture was the first manufacturing industry in America and represents the best of all of us. The factory workforce will face changing roles and responsibilities as we move into the future.  At the center will be whether the current management system will adequately meet these new challenges.  In order to understand where we are going we must realize where we come from and how we got here.

 The Industrial Revolution: the Beginning

     The Industrial Revolution began in the eighteenth century and transformed the job of manager from owner-manager to professional, salaried manager in the nineteenth century. According to Stevenson (2011), the United States was predominantly an agricultural society and the scope of manufacturing was of household manufacturing, small shops, and local mills. The inventions, machines, and processes of the Industrial Revolution worked to transform both business and management. With the industrial innovations in factory-produced goods, transportation, and distribution, big business came into being. New ideas and techniques were required for managing these large-scale corporate enterprises.

Some basics                                                                                            

     Dark and grim: those are the terms that come to mind when we visualize the early nineteenth century factory.  In our mind’s eye, we see buildings that are covered with smoke spilling from chimney stacks, clouding the horizon and

covering the surfaces of homes & countryside with layers of soot.  According to Licht (1995) masses of faceless men, women and children walking through those factory doors destined to become the major players in a blending of American society.  What we think of, as a flood of change was actually a series of different smaller currents that met to create the foundation of our current culture.  Very slowly, the tides of change had moved across our land in such a manner that every man, women, and child would be caught in the flow of “the modernization of labor" (Trachtenberg, 1982, p. 83).

     At the turn of the 19th century, the evolution of labor in the United States was going through great pains of expansionism that stressed the abilities of the country to adapt to survival.   By reviewing the inter-relationships of the interplay between the social culture and labor movement we are able to see how intertwined everything really was.  Trachtenberg (1982) pointed out that we must think of culture as the way of life (values, perceptions, patterns of behavior) of the whole society.   The larger question is how much influence did the modernization of labor have on the working community as a whole, both socially and economically?  While this is a very large subject, the labor movement involving the drive for a ten-hour workday serves as a perfect example of the strong relationships between social and economic systems.

     How has the influences of American manufacturing systems effected our managerial evolution to its current levels?  Has the history of labor actually had an impact on our society?  Those are powerful questions that are very deep in scope and need to examine in very broad terms.

History of American Manufacturing Labor

     It was the rise of the factory system that presented the actual beginnings of the labor movement in the early 1800’s.  Workers often worked up to 80 hours a week for an extremely low level of wages and the working conditions only got worse over time (Prude, 1987).  When the labor systems were brought over from Europe, there was a strong desire to mimic the old systems.  That was impossible to do due to the differences of the social cultures and geographical influences.

     American manufacturers faced two primary problems when it came to its work force: a small workforce in a sparsely settled country, and having to adjust the working habits of its workers to meet the pace of newly introduced technology. One of the beginning problems was that there were not enough workers in a country that was sparsely populated and that the land was cheap.  It was extremely easy to relocate yourself and raise a family off the land and earn income from home production.  But the introduction of industrialization created a shift from home production to domestic outwork, centralization and increased divisions of labor, factory building and lastly, mechanization (Licht,1995).  This, along with European societies experiencing a population boom, would have a major impact on the national and religious makeup of the workforce in the very near future.  While the work force was small, it meant that the manufacturers and other employers were forced to pay higher wages to lure workers off the farm or to lure immigrants to come from abroad.  The labor earnings were two to three times higher than for workers in Europe. This fact alone would cause additional repercussions in the future years.

     The American factories having to pay higher wages than their European competition which put them at a disadvantage - but actually it laid the ground work for what was to be our foundation of manufacturing to this day – by actually encouraging them to make greater use of technology.  The American factory management would focus increasing interest in “labor saving” devices-- machines that would replace the use of people.  This would create the basis of what is known as the American System of manufacturing, the use of the assembly line for high volume production.

     By the early 19th century, Europeans began to note that factories in the US made much greater use of machinery--technology--than they did.  This reliance on machines would later give the Americans an important technological edge that we continue to maintain to this day.  The error, made in Europe, was the perception that they did not have to adopt technology because their labor cost was so low and they were too comfortable with the old systems of single piece manufacturing. The factory workforce began to grow with the introduction of technology to the manufacturing scene.  While in the next few weeks we will be learning more about where that technology has taken us, remember the foundations of which it all began.  It has been an interesting journey and the best is yet to come.

     Overall, the United States has come a long way the operations management. You will read and understand more as the week’s progress and you move forward in your learning. Best of luck to you on your educational journey. The more you put into this topic/subject the more you will understand. Please add as many concepts and principles to your everyday life as well as your workplace. That will help you more to understand what you are learning!

References

 

Licht, W., (1995). Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press

Stevenson, W. J., (2011) Operations Management (11th ed.) New York, NY: McGraw Hill/Irvin. ISBN: 9780073525259.    

Trachtenhtenberg, A., (1982). The Incorporation of America:  Culture & Society in the Guided Age. New York: Hill and Wang.