TQM too far (Total Quality Management)

Workplace computer automatization and  procedural optimization has already leveraged profits to unprecedented levels and now they are coming for the souls of their employees.

Edwards Deming captured the Japanese audience at Toyota with a business management philosophy of continuous improvement... and the rest of the business world swiftly followed. This gave us a rapid culture of change for improving process, design and production by incremental adjustments. The idea of quality control as a culture of determining best practices for operational efficiency has brought us many innovative gains to do more with less and faster - very good business sense indeed.

TQM movement has leveraged the business model out in all the good ways, now you the consumer are being affected in all the bad ways. Have you noticed how thin the meat paddies have gotten on your Big Mac? Have you noticed that at Tim Hortons your honey crueller is half its original size and your cherry cheese danish is one third the pastry it used to be? That your frozen chicken breasts look more like chicken fingers after you have cooked them and the water has evaporated? And your foot long Subway sub is not a foot long! Well, you can blame TQM for that, because it's not always quality of the product they are improving - it is the stock price. Less for more when you buy, more for less when you work. The problem lies where optimization practices have pushed every frontier, and the only thing left for them to squeeze is the worker's dignity.

 

Have you called your cell phone provider recently? Or any 1-800 number for that matter? Have you been hung up on, or had a rep treat you with contempt when you inconvenienced them by asking another question? Were you told to hold the line a moment and abruptly transferred to another department only to have to start all over? Or maybe you called and the rep barely spoke English?

Behind the scenes, these reps are told that they have to solve all of your problems in three and a half minutes to meet aggressive productivity targets. But that's not enough – they must also beat out their co-workers if they want to be able to choose the shifts they want, so they can get off work in time to pick up little Johnny from daycare. If by chance the worker is not motivated by the numbers, they make it personal.

If you started such a job 20 years ago, the work conditions would have been much better. You would have had a starting wage of $35,000 annually, capped out at $52,000, and you would have had the luxury to solve problems at your leisure. Today, doing the same job with computers and advanced software applications, productivity has gone up exponentially. Yet the pay for this computer savvy super worker has dropped to a starting wage of $23,000, and it is capped out at $31,000. And if you can't afford the rising cost of inflation you can work overtime, because your low wage compels you to do so.

If you find yourself transferred abruptly, chances are your time ran out. Have you called through to these 1-800 numbers whose IVRs are so convoluted you got lost in menu options? That was no coincidence. They are designed to avoid you until you give up and go to the website address that they have been repeating in your ear. Their hope is that you go to your computer and seek self-serve options online and solve your own problems.

We have seen the wave of disposable products: you buy something and it falls apart the day after the warranty expires. Now we have arrived at the day the employee has become a disposable-dehumanized commodity. It's time to raise our pitch forks and form an angry mob to fight oppressive TQM strategies that are creating economic slavery and abusing the workforce.