This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Saturday, February 21, 2004
Increasing Manufacturing Jobs in an Election Year -- From the NY Times, In the New Economics: Fast-Food Factories? (go read the whole article before it disappears into the Times' for-$ archives)...
Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling automobiles?
That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the United States economy.
[...] Counting jobs at McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food enterprises alongside those at industrial companies like General Motors and Eastman Kodak might seem like a stretch, akin to classifying ketchup in school lunches as a vegetable, as was briefly the case in a 1981 federal regulatory proposal.
But the presidential report points out that the current system for classifying jobs 'is not straightforward.' The White House drew a box around the section so it would stand out among the 417 pages of statistics.
'When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a 'service' or is it combining inputs to 'manufacture' a product?' the report asks.
[...] David Huether, chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers, said he had heard that some economists wanted to count hamburger flipping as manufacturing, which he noted would produce statistics showing more jobs in what has been a declining sector of the economy.
'The question is: If you heat the hamburger up are you chemically transforming it?' Mr. Huether said.
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