Manufacturers Demand a Flexible Workforce. But Are They Flexible Employers?

A new report from the Manufacturer’s Alliance Foundation and business consultancy Aon has analysed the major issues facing US manufacturing as the Covid pandemic approaches its end. Worker flexibility is universally identified as an important issue for manufacturers, particularly in an era of broken and disrupted supply chains and production schedules that are difficult to match with consumer demand. But there’s another side to the story.  

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There are hundreds of industry associations out there, and in manufacturing it’s no different. Most are industry or sector specific, but an important blanket organization is the Manufacturer’s Alliance. Their affiliated foundation has published a State of Manufacturing report in collaboration with Aon, and with the light at the end of the Covid tunnel, it’s more than the usual “state of the Union” address. Covid has been hard on manufacturers, damned hard, and has thrown a set of problems at industry that are as bad or worse than any crisis since the Great Depression. 

An economy that is locked down is not an economy that buys things, and even when demand is there, manufacturers face plenty of problems: labor shortages, and even when labor is available, a productivity killing set of necessary safety protocols, with a risk that a single Covid spreader can cripple an operation. And the supply chains that feed manufacturing? Broken, unreliable, and expensive. And it’s the same for manufacturers getting their goods to market. Try find a shipping container today, or a reasonably priced way to get goods across a continent or an ocean. 

But the real news embedded in the extensive and well research report is that both employer and employee attitudes toward manufacturing work have changed, fundamentally, and in ways that are unlikely to go away after we return to normal, post Covid. Labor is a market, and while economists usually think of it in terms of its market clearing price, wages, there is a new factor at play now, flexibility. Mass production has traditionally been the most inflexible part of the labor economy. It’s all hands on deck on the assembly line, and the Chevys don’t stop moving on the line because one worker wants a short shift. 

But the ability to flex time, split shifts, swap shifts with coworkers and generally reshape the meaning of the work week is now identified as a major factor in the implicit negotiation between manufacturing employer and worker. One small example is daycare. Knowledge workers discovered that it is possible to work productively from home, and if childcare is handled intelligently, keep the child at home too, with considerable cost savings. 

That’s a significant benefit, and workers on the production floor are looking for something similar, either through flex time, part time, or the ability to “horse trade” working hours with other employees. Unions used to negotiate simple forms of this, but the kind of flexibility demanded today is way beyond the shop steward deciding who gets the overtime. Yet despite the emphasis on flexibility in production processes, the division of labor is still the fundamental cost reduction strategy in mass production. Training everyone to do everything gives the ultimate in flexibility, but Henry Ford didn’t mass-produce $300 cars by training an army of craftsmen. 

To produce, the staff has to show up. And as a team, they have to show up at the same time. This has created a new sort of class structure during the Covid pandemic, a rift between workers that must work at the business, and those that can work remotely. Remote work is yet another advantage of individuals in the knowledge economy, and to entice a new generation of production personnel and tradespeople, some of the advantages the knowledge workers have discovered in the Covid era are going to have to flow down to the shop floor. How? 

I suspect that cross training is going to be an imperative, and I also suspect that management is going to have to think about assembling small teams, tasked to complete several functions on the production line, with no direct management control over how these tasks are accomplished or who does them. If a young single man wants to pick up an extra shift by relieving a nursing mother, systems have to be designed to accommodate this. If a worker needs Wednesday afternoons off to care for an aging parent, same thing. 

It’s going to be complicated, and it may require higher level of empowerment and self-management amongst production personnel. But there’s a nationwide labor shortage, and wages are rising. To get and keep good people, manufacturers are going to have to find a way to offer some of the advantages that those IT workers enjoy working from their kitchen tables.