Product reliability is a key concern for manufacturers. We examine a significant but under-recognized determinant of product reliability: the rate of workers quitting from the product's assembly line, or its worker turnover. While modern manufacturers make extensive efforts to control defects...

Today's most sophisticated manufacturers produce immense quantities of complex goods in rapid response to fast-evolving near-term demand. To maintain high productivity under such circumstances, they schedule and staff large bodies of workers to efficiently dispatch highly variable workloads....