Continuous Improvement and Changes to Work Organisation and Training in the Australian Automotive Parts Industry

This paper examines the experience of two similar but contrasting firms in the Australian automotive parts industry in their attempts to adopt continuous improvement during the 1990's. The firms are similar in having devolved responsibility for quality checking to employees, having adopted standardised operating procedures, and having had good management union relations under the metal industry award. They differ in that one is an assembly operation while the other is a manufacturer, the first has a mainly female workforce and the other a mainly male workforce, and the first has moved further in flattening management structures and decentralising decision making. The impact of these changes on employees, particularly their skill levels and work stress, is explored, with a focus on the tensions between employees' improvement initiatives and management's standard operating procedures. The impacts of negotiated vocational training schemes and competency-based classifications are explored in light of the similarities and differences between the firms.