An insight into dealing with failure comes from a book called, “Falling from Grace” by Katherine Newman. She has studied various groups who have collectively failed. Among them are blue-collar workers fired buy the Singer Sewing Machine Company in Elizabeth New Jersey. That company was for many years a caring, family style company which imparted a family feeling to workers, and which value would piecemeal production in fine craft of sewing machines. As the company changed, priority was given to rapid production. Not only did the product to deteriorate, but the protective family attitude to workers changed. Workers were laid off as they succumbed to the demands and shoddiness of mass production. She wrote, “Singer workers have no cause to be committed to. But they do have a collective understanding why their jobs were taken away. The factory closed because people in power turned their back on the tradition that Singer stood for. Workers had promised to work with pride and contentment according to the standards of a craft ethic of the company. In exchange they received employment security and management's recognition of the need to invest in the worker. What they got, instead, was a personal taste of industrialization.”
What does the future hold as computer advances and robotics takes a greater piece of the world-force?
Comments