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This chapter is a history of key computer applications in manufacturing across three periods of time, beginning in the 1940s and extending to the early 2000s. Key uses included business and accounting, numerical control, integrated computer manufacturing, CAD/CAM, Computer Aided Manufacturing, robotics, and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). It concludes with a description of supply chains and extent of deployment of all uses in manufacturing.

Although steel no longer plays as big a part as it used to in today's global economy, it remains a fundamental yet very heterogeneous commodity as it comes in several different types and its production involves a number of diverse processes. The quality of the material is thus dictated by the equipment it has been processed on, the people who deal with the material, and the process control. This chapter looks into the situation of three companies: 1) Tokyo Steel Manufacturing Co., a Japanese Level 2 IT user; 2) Nucor Corp., a Level 2 IT user from the U.S.; and 3) Nippon Steel, a Level 3 IT user from Japan. This chapter provides an overview of the industry in a Japanese setting and in a global setting, and studies the strategies and roles the IT plays for the three firms.

Joe B. describes how he met and fell in love with his wife, Katharine, and tells of the births of their first two children. He talks about his work as a Heinz salesman and then at Kawneer Aluminum Manufacturing, followed by his first coaching job at a small high school in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, where the dilapidated infrastructure needed his personal labor to clean, paint, and repair. He details Katharine’s many responsibilities as the wife of a coach.

Hong Kong's economy has experienced rapid structural changes over the past three decades. The service sector grew speedily in terms of its share in employment, nominal GDP and real GDP, while the manufacturing sector shrank significantly. Such a rapid structural change can be attributed to the relocation of manufacturing industries to the Pearl River Delta. Ostensibly, the expansion of manufacturing production in mainland China gives rise to an enormous demand for all sorts of supporting services in Hong Kong. This chapter examines the growing service sector in the territory. It explores the changes in labour productivity over time, the rise of intermediate production services and the government's role in a service economy.

Thischapter argues that land and river phosphate mining led to a dynamic local fertilizer manufacturing industrywhich had a profound impact on Charleston and Beaufort, South Carolina, southern agriculture, and America’s fertilizer industry. The industry included local, regional, northern, and European entrepreneurs who used the nearby rock to increase production, lower prices, and overcome southern farmers’ skepticism of commercial fertilizers. Increasing state regulation also led to the growing importance of lawyers, and lawsuits over mining and environmental pollution had significant consequences for fertilizer companies. Sixteen companies had formed near Charleston by 1884, some of which maintained small urban factories, but the most successful established sprawling works on the Charleston Neck. Eight Charleston firms—Wando Mining and Manufacturing, Sulphuric Acid and Super-Phosphate [SASP], Carolina Fertilizer, Stono Phosphate, Atlantic Phosphate, Pacific Guano, and John B. Sardy’s Wappoo and Ashepoo ventures—provide salient examples with which to study the companies’ origins, plant, marketing, workers (including working conditions and the 1873 strike), and legal problems.

This chapter illustrates the series of post-suicide investigators, including the police, ombudsman and coroner. It examines the 2013-2016 suicide cluster at HMP Woodhill to illustrate these investigations, their value and their limitations. It concludes that the post-suicide investigations are broadly Article 2 compliant and offer no shortage of vigorous critique, but also explains that Article 2 does not require that lessons be learnt and does not direct accountability to those with the capacity to implement said lessons. This is a greater limitation in England and Wales than the more commonly recognised issues with family participation and independence. The discourse of lesson learning is shown to be unhelpful in many cases of prison suicide, manufacturing mystery where there is none. It is not a mystery when prisoners die with untreated mental health problems because the prison’s mental health team is severely understaffed and has been for years, as identified multiple times by multiple prison overseers. The discourse of lesson learning also obfuscates the role of deliberate political decisions in reducing staffing levels and increasing the prison population such that staff are set up to fail and cannot follow Prison Service Orders and Instructions.

This chapter describes the birth of the three industries, from the discovery of phosphate rock to the development of a viable if risky land mining business. After the war, Charleston’s gentlemen-scientists (Nathaniel A. Pratt, Francis S. Holmes, and St. Julien Ravenel) discovered that the “stinking stones” along the Ashley River could revolutionize fertilizer manufacture. They convinced local entrepreneurs (including Williams Middleton and F.H. Trenholm) and northern acquaintances to invest and together began to resurrect the local economy through mining phosphate rocks along the Ashley River. The industry did not begin as a colonial relationship with the North. Motivated by desperation, patriotism, and greed, the lowcountry’s entrepreneurs responded enthusiastically to opportunities and developed diversified companies(including the Philadelphian-dominatedCharleston Mining and Manufacturing Company and the mainly southern Wando Mining and Manufacturing Company) that strengthened rather than challenged the region’s agricultural economy.By 1870, land mining was well-established in the lowcountry, and elite whites envisioned the industry as the savior of South Carolina and perhaps the South.

This chapter examines the legal issues surrounding an employer's proselytization of its employees. When an employer engages in proselytizing of its employees, it may be violating Title VII because workers who find themselves in those circumstances are more likely to endure repeated violations of their rights rather than risk losing their jobs by reacting negatively to efforts to convert them. Similarly, a job applicant made aware of the religious beliefs and practices of an employer may decide to ignore its proselytization endeavors in hopes of gaining employment. This chapter considers a number of court cases to show that an employer is always skating on thin ice when it proselytizes in the workplace, including those involving the Sports and Health Club, the Townley Manufacturing Company, and Preferred Home Health Care.

This chapter explores the phosphate river mining industry, which had mainly different owners, laborers, and locations than land mining. Most laborers were Sea Islanders, and most river mining took place near Beaufort. The rivers were public domain so mining was subject to direct state regulation and taxation. Widespread debatesamong weakened Democrats and divided Republicans in legislative halls, on the pages of the Charleston Daily Courier, and at public meetingsover royalties, corruption, exclusive rights, monopolies, riparian rights, dredging, and navigation made regulation of this industry one of the most contentious issues during Reconstruction and beyond. Dangerous yet profitable for its workers, the river mining industry made a strong start in its first five years led by the most significant companies and businessmen,the Marine and River Phosphate Mining and Manufacturing Company (William L. Bradley), the South Carolina Phosphate and Phosphatic River Mining Company (black Republicans), the Oak Point Mines (Wyllie Campbell & Company), and especially the dominant Coosaw Mining Company (Robert Adger).

Packing Insulation Was Mike Patrick’s first job at Midwest Manufacturing. He was one of 300 men, mostly young, hired in January 1959 to help Admiral, a Chicago-based company that owned the Galesburg factory, meet America’s seemingly insatiable postwar appetite for appliances. He had failed an eye test during the nurse’s exam at the factory and had to get glasses before he started. Patrick had suspected he needed glasses because he always had trouble see­ing the chalkboard from the back of the room in high school. But because he was an athlete, he didn’t want to tie glasses around his head during basketball games. New hires got the nastiest, most grueling jobs, and stuffing insulation— which was like prickly cotton candy—into bare metal cabinets was one of them. The cabinets came from the metal-cutting area of the factory known as the “black line,” because the steel, darkened with oil, hadn’t yet been painted. The black line was the birthplace of these early Admiral refrigerators. Flatbed semis unloaded massive rolls of thick steel from Chicago—the plant used 10 rolls a day, 50 million pounds a year—that cutters and folding machines would shape into five sides. Gun welders then joined what would become the back, the two sides, and the top and bottom of the refrigerator. They left the door for later. The fused steel cabinet dangled from an overhead conveyor as it rode to the paint shop to be cleaned of its oily residue and painted. It would continue on the conveyor to a cabinet bank, where the empty cabinets gathered until they were needed on the line. When the scheduler called for them, men would slide the cabinets to the line across a concrete floor, which had been treated with a smooth, protective coating to prevent damage. A young man then spread scalding, gooey tar into the corners and up and down the creases of the bare metal cabinets. He shot the tar out of a pistol-gripped nozzle attached to a long canvas hose that he snaked in and around the metal shell.

Annette Dennison Was asleep when a girlfriend called her with the news. It was mid-morning on October 11, 2002, her thirty-fifth birthday. Annette, a self-proclaimed “night owl,” had worked the second shift the night before and pulled into her driveway in Monmouth at 1 a.m. after the sixteen-mile trip from the warehouse in Galesburg. Monmouth, over forty years after Michael Patrick made his first commute to Appliance City in 1959, was still a town of about 10,000. Home to a hog slaughterhouse on one side and little Monmouth College on the other, Monmouth claimed to be the hometown of gambler, gunfighter, and lawman Wyatt Earp. “No way!” She sat alone, dazed. Her boys were at school. Her husband, Doug, was at the factory getting briefed by managers from Newton. Happy birthday, Annette, she thought. Now find something else to do with your life. A flood of emotions overwhelmed her that morning. She had been stuck in the factory since she was 22 and didn’t care for the mind-numbing work. Recently she had spent her evenings on an electric forklift in the Regional Distribution Center zipping through a landscape of brown cardboard boxes. She loaded and unloaded washers, dryers, microwaves, stoves, and refrigerators in and out of semis, one after the other, all night long. Most Maytag appliances built in Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio came to the cavernous warehouse across the street from Appliance City. On the forklift Annette would sometimes daydream about getting out, but the work had become comfortable. She had spent nearly her entire adulthood in the factory. She had girlfriends, drinking buddies, and an assortment of familiar and friendly faces she would miss. It was through them that Annette had developed strong loyalty to the factory and even to the brand itself since she started in 1989, the year of the first Maytag refrigerator. A million questions popped into her head. She had always been a Type A personality and planner, and this was so sudden. She had no idea what to do.

It Was a cold evening in early December 2006, and Tracy Warner had just returned home from Willits Primary School. Ryan had just sung in the “Winter Wonderland” musical there. Christmas lights dotted F Street, adding some warmth to her modest block in the heart of Monmouth, Illinois. She looked like a new woman, and, judging by her smile, she knew it. The jeans and T-shirt—the uniform of the anxious, soon-to-be-unemployed line worker and picketer of a couple years earlier—had been replaced by a red V-neck sweater, silk blouse, and an aura of confidence. She was wrapping up four fall semester classes and a journalism internship at the school’s news­paper, the Western Courier. She had done this while raising Ryan and frantically looking for a job. She was set to graduate on the following Saturday from Western Illinois University. The dream Warner had dreamt a thousand times while piecing together refrigerator doors on the Maytag line for over fifteen years was coming true. “Look at this,” she said, handing me an essay. “It’s a paper on Rawls’ theory of justice. He said that we have to stand behind a veil of ignorance to make fair decisions.” Her reference fit the moment. John Rawls’ 1971 Theory of Justice poses a hypothetical world in which all societal roles are shuffled behind a metaphorical “veil of ignorance.” Behind this veil, one does not know to what role he or she will be assigned in the new social order. It is only from there, Rawls argues, can one truly judge the fairness of various social roles and relations. The CEO, for instance, would have to experience the lives of workers he put out of work. Warner still saw Ralph Hake as a great villain—and it was not just because of the factory closing and the gutting of her working life as well as the working lives of her friends and co-workers. Warner had embraced the changes as best she could, and she and Ryan would find a way to survive.

In April 2010 George Carney found himself stacking and banding wooden boards to be made into roof and barn trusses. His new workplace was Roberts and Dybdahl, a lumberyard in Milan, Illinois. Carney was paired with a partner, an automated cutting machine with five enormous shark-toothed saw blades that bit loudly into lumber and dropped boards onto the tray below. Now 51, Carney was using his body to earn a living again, even if the job paid only $9 an hour, a shade above the Illinois minimum. The first week he put in 60 hours. “It was a hard job. It was perfect for me.” On April 29, his ninth day on the job, Carney’s life changed forever, again. Two days after an unremarkable Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspection, a two-by-six shot out of the saws like “a ball out of pitching machine.” Its long side smacked right into Carney’s skull, and in an instant his world went dark. In the previous year Carney had been bartending while he lived in his son’s extra bedroom in Matherville, Illinois. He served “fancy, high falutin” drinks at the Oak View Country Club starting in late May 2009, after being unemployed for a couple of months. Members liked Carney because he would remember their names and favorite drink. The “whisky-beer man” learned to make cosmopolitans, martinis, manhattans, and other country club mixes. “I always told myself I was shy, but everyone tells me I’m not. I feel uncomfortable with it, but I seem to be fairly sociable.” In August he added a day job at Milan Lanes, a bowling alley and bar, and was working almost every day. Still, it was a “pretty low point” to be a working-age man living in his son’s extra room. It was a role-reversal that neither of them relished. “You don’t feel like you got anything,” Carney said of the year after leaving the Town Tavern. Then Carney’s father succumbed to cancer in March 2010.

Despite environmental advantages and a rich ancient history of manufacturing and agriculture, centuries of unstable and corrupt rule has decreased and impoverished the population and meant Egypt was not able to fulfil its potential in production or cultivation. This chapter laments the lack of skilled workers and low quality of manual work, but also points to the areas in which Egyptians excel, namely architecture (mosques, public buildings, and private dwellings). It then turns to commerce: listing exports and imports from Europe, and the ways in which things are bought and sold, looking at merchants and merchandise, shops and markets, as well as beggars. Finally this chapter address water and irrigation, cultivation of Nile lands, according to seasons of the floods, and Nile navigation as a source of income.

At the same time as the tensions between Britain and its thirteen colonies led to the American Revolutionary War, the development of industrial cotton cloth manufacturing in Britain made possible older hopes of imperial control and monopoly. British innovations in production processes and product development were extended to emulate and reinvent a range of other Indian goods, from hookah pipes to palanquins, which had no markets in Britain but growing markets in India. Nevertheless, British production did not necessarily domesticate such goods, and people in Britain and the United States instead adopted other goods manufactured and fashionable in India. Old economic and fashion patterns continued even as major shifts began in the global geography of production. Once again, the British government needed to craft a regulatory compromise amongst interests in Britain, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

The changes to the Company charter in 1813 were not confined to the Company’s trade; they reflected the rise not only of British cotton manufacturing but of Company rule and of evangelical sentiment. British and American evangelicals, missionaries in India, and Company servants debated whether spiritual and material conversions in India would or should happen together and the proper modes and aesthetics of British rule. Rather than fading away, contests over the adoption of Indian goods and norms continued. Nevertheless, India and America had, in some measures, been converted. America had finally become the cotton-cultivating India dreamed of by seventeenth-century English thinkers and adventurers, though it remained unclear the extent to which India had become a new America.

This chapter discusses how Anthony Overton’s relocation to Chicago in 1911 proved to be one of the wisest moves of his life. Within a short period of time, the once frustrated entrepreneur established an important business niche in one of America’s leading cities. Yet Anthony Overton’s first years in Chicago were not without challenges. Within a year after his arrival, the sudden death of his wife, Clara, forced Overton to reorient both his personal and business affairs. He subsequently began to more fully incorporate his daughters and other attractive young females as the “public face” of his personal care products company. This maneuver helped increase the Overton-Hygienic Manufacturing Company’s prominence in an industry then dominated by his primary competitors, Annie Turnbo-Malone and Madam C. J. Walker.

In 1916, Anthony Overton established the Half-Century Magazine as a venue to more effectively market Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company products. To deflect charges of shameless self-promotion, Overton put forward a female employee as the owner, editor, and public face of this women-oriented periodical. Overton’s skullduggery included submitting anonymous editorials and publishing articles under a pseudonym (McAdoo Baker) to convey his beliefs regarding business enterprise, racial identity, and personal conduct. Above and beyond Overton’s deception, the Half-Century created a commercial environment where black female readers were not exposed to racially insulting personal care products ads. This advertising policy, along with Half-Century’s sponsorship of a contest extolling the beauty of African American women, enhanced Overton-Hygienic’s position in the marketplace.