Am I a Robot?

Am I a Robot?

Along the history, people have been looking for better and more efficient ways of production to meet the rapid increase of demand of the consumers. One of those methods was found and defined as mass production1. Mass production is a production method to produce a large quantity of goods for the public. These products of mass production are highly standardized, with assembly lines being a perfect example.

Manufacturers can produce goods in large quantity without having received orders for these products. Mass production has its unique characteristics. In a mass production, the job of the workers is repetitive. Every worker is assigned a certain task and then repeats this task again and again, using the same tool and materials to produce different parts of identical or similar products.

The labor in mass production which is responsible for producing standardized components and then assemble them is highly unskilled. They are like robots, doing their jobs mechanically. These unskilled labor force sometimes catch our attention from television or newspaper, etc.

There has been news, reports and researches about the physical and mental health problems of the workers in a mass production. The well-known Taiwanese factory Foxconn2 which is in charge of the production of most of the Apple products, has been criticized about the working conditions of its workers. In this company, some workers have committed suicide due to high stress and boring life in the factory. Recent reports also point out that workers in mass production always repeat the same work, day after day. Although they could be more efficient by being expert at one certain task of the process, they are running higher risk of getting burnout syndrome3.

The symptoms of burnout syndrome include distress, exhaustion, loss of motivation, negative attitudes towards work, and even desperation. Job burnout is a kind of psychological stress caused in the process of working. As a result, people with burnout would be noticed a reduced efficiency in the workplace.

Nowadays, burnout syndrome is becoming more and more common. The increasingly competitive and demanding working environments are the main cause. In a mass production factory, the workers have high possibility of getting burnout because of the nature of their jobs.

I’ve been looking for information and thinking about the efficiency and health problem of the workers in a mass production, so I propose the following two research questions:

1. In mass production, is it more efficient that everyone just focuses on one certain part of the whole process or everyone knows all the parts of the line so that they have an idea about how the whole process functions in order to have a feeling of belonging to the job?

2. In mass production, is it better for the health that everyone just focuses on one certain part of the whole process or people switch their works with a certain frequency?

Research design:

We can design a simple experiment but it will last relatively a long time. We have three lines of mass production, producing exactly the same product. The characteristics of the three lines are:

Line 1: Traditional mass production line. Everyone has his/her own specific work and just know how to do this work. The workers stick to their own parts of the production process for the whole experimental period;

Line 2: Traditional composition of a mass production line but all the workers know how to work on other parts of the process although they still have their own works and stick to these works for the whole time;