Management Gets More Than It Deserves

In the factories that I visit, I find that management often gets more than it deserves from the production workers.  I remember a woman at a workbench, taking four parts from bins and using a machine to drive a rivet through all four to make a sub-assembly for a circuit breaker. She did this over-and-over, but her rhythm would often be broken because one of the parts had the hole for the rivet off location and therefore would not go together easily with the other three.  She would struggle to make them go together, and sometimes succeed in forcing the rivet through all four parts.  Other times she would eventually set aside the defective component and reach for a replacement, which, all too often, would also be so far out of spec as to be unusable.

The Undercover Boss

The premier of Undercover Boss took place last night, immediately after the Super Bowl. In this latest version of a “reality show,” Larry O’Donnell, President and Chief Operating Officer of Waste Management strips off his suit and tie and goes to work in several jobs in his company, as a guy named Randy, making a “documentary” about seeking entry level work. He sorts recycling, cleans portable toilets, attempts to pick up flying debris at a landfill and (for the first time in his life) is fired for not having what it takes.

He spends a day helping collect residential trash, where he discovers that his female boss for the day has to pee in a tin can while at work, because her schedule does not permit her to take the time to do it any other way. She also feels resentful of the inspectors who sometime follow her in unmarked white pickup trucks. Jaclyn, an administrative assistant to the a landfill manager on an administrative assistant’s hourly wage, is also the scale operator, the scale supervisor and handles all accounts payable and accounts receivable. She’s had cancer five times by the age of 25 (she is now 29) and supports a household that includes, in Larry’s words, three families. She has her house up for sale, because she cannot afford it.