Labour

My company sells manufacturing equipment to China from Australia. A reverse on the norm I must say.

It can be pretty frustrating watching our Chinese customers run their factories because they ‘leave’ so much profit on the factory floor by running their factories very inefficiently. Fortunately for them, their costs are so low they can still dominate this industry.

My customers counter that they cannot run any complex operational models that would make them more profitable because their labour is not interested or trained to do so.

Typically employees in China shift around jobs every year, often within the same industry, looking for a higher salary. This is because no one has thought to offer them, the fully trained operator, a pay rise within their current jobs. It just isn’t done.

In addition employees simply do not feel much obligation to their employer, and are not particularly interested in making the place ‘better’. In fact they typically want to come to work, do their job in rote fashion, not have to think and then get the hell out of there at the end of the day.

When a problem arises there is usually a concerted effort to cover it up, or pass on the responsibility to someone else. The Chinese really are practised in the art of getting around and avoiding authority. And they see their employers as ‘authority’. I have seen senior managers in Chinese companies spend months coming up with and executing expensive ‘contingency’ plans that allow them to hide problems when they arise, just so they keep to their KPI’s.

I don’t want to be too hard on the Chinese and I must say I have dealt with many people here in Australia, say in the public service, who have a pretty similar set of attitudes. The whole thing is a sort of historical left-over from the days when labour really was labour. It really should have no place in Australia today.

But in order to break this cycle of indifference and boredom, I think it is really up to management to make the first step. Now that will be hard when the ‘owner’ of a business, in the case of the public service, is the government…