Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf]

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Funny, I remember the discussion of this paper at my university a few decades ago. On your topic, I remember also a case that was discussed on a disinvestment of a fully automated factory. Loads of money was invested in the automation, but on several spots it still needed humans to glue the processes together. This work was so limited and dumb that no workers could be found who were able and willing to perform this task. As a result, parts of the automation was reverted.

It seems that we've long since reached the point where most professionals should be spending most of their time training for abnormal conditions (and the rest of it handling them), but instead we have a rising managerial class whose primary function is to find people to fire: those who haven't produced a visible result in the past couple of days or so.

I see a factory like that! At one point the only remaining work was when something went wrong. The production line ran so fast, if something went wrong it produced enough garbage for 15 people to clean up. Not sure how they arrived at 15 but with fewer it took longer to resume production.

I estimate the thing crashed from 2-3 times per day to every 3 days or so with the later more often. Took about 15-20 minutes to clean up with 15. Say 1 person would need 4-5 hours. Then they gained 4.5 hours of production per incident (with 15 people)

15 * 8 hours * 3 days = 360 hours

each of the 4.5 hours would then cost 80 man hours.

Better numbers with more frequent crashes.

Investors didn't like to see people sit, chat and drink coffee most of the day.

The solution was to remove some machinery and all of the chairs. People had to work with insane speed to keep up. No time to scratch your itch, the work spot was designed for a machine, the one in storage.

Imagine working there and going from drinking koffie all day to insane speed conveyor belt work because someone put the machine in storage because an investor might visit 1 time per year.

Really brings out the best in people (ehm!)

for a film interpretation of this paper: playtime by jacques tati