Tag: Britain

OM in the News: Britain Promotes Apprenticeships to Help its Industrial Base

British apprentice learning high-integrity welding
British apprentice learning high-integrity welding

Despite relatively high unemployment in Britain, especially among young people, there is a marked shortage of skilled manufacturing workers, writes The New York Times (Jan. 20, 2014). The problem is so acute that the government and industrial companies are behind an unprecedented push to get teenagers into apprenticeships to close that gap. The British government is trying to catch up with Germany and Switzerland, which have retained their competitive edge with the help of well-honed apprenticeship programs.

 A third of employers across Europe say that the lack of skills is causing major business problems in terms of higher costs, insufficient quality and lost time.  27% of the 2,600 companies surveyed by McKinsey note they have left an entry-level vacancy unfilled over the past year because there were no eligible applicants. Statistics like that, and the fact that about a quarter of people under 25 are jobless in Europe, prompted Britain to act, committing £1.57 billion to apprenticeship training last year. About 2.7 million new jobs in British manufacturing are expected by 2020, of which 1.9 million will require engineering skills. Companies will need to double both the current number of qualified recruits and of apprenticeships to fill those positions.
Britain is among the worst in the developed world at equipping its young people with numeracy and literacy skills. The career aspirations of high school students showed them to be heavily skewed toward jobs in acting, media and professional sports. Part of the challenge for Britain is turning around the bad reputation that apprenticeships can have, often being associated with dull, menial tasks that evoke images of Oliver Twist, the Dickens character who faced life as an apprentice to a chimney sweep. Britain has a record of apprenticeships back to medieval times, when boys were hired as young as 7 and often worked in brutal conditions.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. What are your student’s views towards apprenticeships?

2. Why is such training as important in the US as in Europe?

OM in the News (and Video): Quality of Life at Amazon

Amazon's warehouse in Wales.
Amazon’s warehouse in Wales.

“On its home territory, Amazon.com is routinely hailed as a jobs machine,” writes The New York Times (Dec.2, 2013).  Thanks to its warehouse building spree, it is hiring tens of thousands of workers, plus many more for the holidays. President Obama has called Amazon “a great example of what’s possible… the kind of approach that we need from America’s businesses.”

The recession might have cut deeper in Europe, making the question of new jobs even more crucial, but the attitude there is much cooler toward Amazon and its high-tech ways. In Germany, there is continuing labor strife. France is erecting barriers against the company’s aggressive discounting. And in Britain, the warehouses have been compared, in a story in The Financial Times, with a “slave camp.”

That shocking charge resurfaced in the latest investigation when a BBC reporter, Adam Littler, briefly went to work undercover at Amazon’s Wales warehouse. His report, broadcast last week on the show “Panorama,” (click here for the 1/2 hour video) showed him hustling to keep up with the demands of his hand-held scanner, which gave him only a few moments to find each product. In his 10-hour night shift, Littler said: “I managed to walk or hobble nearly 11 miles. We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves.”

Michael Marmot, a labor expert identified by the BBC as “one of Britain’s leading experts on stress at work,” told the TV show that with “the characteristics of this type of job, the evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.” Amazon’s own expert disagrees, of course, and we have to question the shock value displayed in the video. The real question for your students is how are labor standards set–and whether they are fair to both the company and employees. For another view altogether of Amazon’s sophisticated warehouses in the US, watch this 3 minute video.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. How can labor standards for this job be set (see Chapter 10)?

2. What are the ergonomic issues addressed in the video?