Assembly Line essays

Assembly Line essays The modern moving assembly line stemming from Ford Motor Industries in the early twentieth century, transformed the nature of the national and world economies, of their forms of labor, lifestyles, and politics. In fact, the current capitalist market system owes its foundations largely to the implications of the assembly line. As John Allen notes, the Ford model implied four fundamental aspects of large-scale mass production: the moving assembly line, specialized machinery, high wages, and low-cost products. Each of these things in turn affected the way industrialized nations evolved and influenced world economic, political, and social policies. The assembly line model of labor replaced the traditional artisan or craft-based system of labor in which highly skilled persons completed particular tasks based on their training and education. Within the assembly line framework, workers no longer needed to be trained or educated; they simply performed routine tasks and essentially began to operate as cogs in a giant machine. The elimination of craft guilds and of family-based manufacturing was one of the major social changes concurrent with Fordism. This social change also entailed far-reaching and sweeping economic changes. Market economies like that of the United States became increasingly dependent on industry. Moreover, this led to increased governmental control of economic systems and policies, especially as monopolistic control of the market became a social, political, and economic Furthermore, the intervention of government into labor and economics arose out of the basic economic and social needs of individual workers. For example, one of the side-effects of the assembly line model was mass unemployment, which under the craft system rarely occurred because of the naturally piecemeal nature of the work. In fact, modern factories created the concept of "employment," and the a...