You know, man's love/hate relationship with automation has been around a long time. Take the 1936 classic Modern Times.
Nat sound film: Section five, speed 'er up! 4-1
Charlie Chaplin is in a frenzy, he's tightening bolts on the factory line. The boss straps him into a person-feeding machine so his hands can keep working while his mouth eats lunch. It's kind of a nightmare of productivity, where men are captive to machines. But manufacturers today have a different vision.
HILL: At the end of the shift, my operators go home. Their machines continue running in the building with nobody in it.
John Hill owns a small business called Midwest Mold Services. The company designs and builds metal molds for plastic parts … parts that wind up in medical devices, or as the emblem on the back of a Cadillac. Hill says in the old days, shaping these metal molds was a job for …
HILL: One machine, one operator.
Now one operator programs multiple machines to carve steel almost continuously. Unattended. Lights out. So this is only part of Hill's business, but it's the part that puts his productivity per actual employee on steroids. He says that productivity keeps his prices competitive and keeps 30 people well employed.
HILL: If I was more, you know, it's all about me, I could get rid of five more guys and buy two more machines and say life is good. But it's hard to tell somebody they don't have a place here anymore.
When it comes to manufacturing, productivity and jobs are two lines that don't play together well on a graph. Corey Greenwald learned that the hard way. Twenty years ago, he got a degree in automated manufacturing technologies, but found that people fought it. Said it would take away jobs. And you know what? He says…
GREENWALD: They were right, they were absolutely right. What they didn't know is, is that it wasn't going to be their biggest enemy - their enemy was gonna be developing countries around the world that had really cheap labor.
Over those same twenty years, the U-S lost about 6 million manufacturing jobs. Today, Corey Greenwald has restored a few of them. He runs a lights out machine shop called Hard Milling Solutions, in Romeo, Michigan. He says the technology gave him his life back.
GREENWALD: Now, we don't even have to check in on the machines unless they call us.
Take the other weekend … Sunday afternoon…
GREENWALD: I'm on Lake Michigan at the beach with my kids, uh (bling!) and my phone starts going off. And I'm thinking what is that?
Check the blackberry … it reads something like:
GREENWALD: V56-1, email notification.
Which means that particular machine has stopped. Greenwald can then go online and look at the machine, through a surveillance camera. He can log into the machine itself and diagnose the problem. He can recalculate and reload the program, from Lake Michigan or Bangladesh. The only he can't do remotely … is press start. Someone still has to go in for that.
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Back at Greenwald's machine shop, 5:30 rolls around and Jeff Bond closes up for the night.
BOND: Just shut the lights off, yep for lights out machining. Actually, it's a good feeling when you go home and they're all running like that. It's almost like having a night shift crew without having one, you know.
When all the workers left for the night, I stayed a minute, just to listen. This is the sound of the new manufacturing - a shop where machines run through the night, but I'm the only person here. For Changing Gears, I'm Kate Davidson.
