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I’m a great admirer of the Japanese because they know
where they’re come from , they know where they’re at,
And they know where they’re going. And most important,
They have a national strategy to get them there .
They also know to make good cars. During the 1970s. Their cars were actually better than ours. That’s not true
any longer , but many Americans still believe it .
How did Japanese cars get so good? It starts with the
workers. To begin, labor costs over there are much higher than ours. Japanese workers earn about 60 percents of what American counterparts take home. They don’t have automatic cost-of-living increases tie to the Consumer
Price Index, as American workers do. And they don’t
have the same array of company –paid medical benefits that
took the consumer several hundred dollars a car.
Japan’s workers are also more productive than ours. I
don’t mean that they’re better , merely that they operate
by a different set of rules.
There are really only two job classifications in Japan:
skilled and unskilled. Depending on that needs to be done on
a given day, a worker may perform a variety of jobs. If the
floor is clean, he’ll pick up a broom and sweep it without
worrying about that’s part of his job definition. Naturally
this sense of responsibility leads to much great efficiency. |