I was a manager in a factory that reprocessed Teflon. We bought scraps of it by the ton from various industries, ground it up, cleaned it, and then sold it to companies who could cast new produts from it, or use it as powdered lubricant.
The staff had Gautemalans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. None of these people grasped the concept of quality control. It didn’t matter if some scraps wree clean and bright white and others were covered with oil, tape, rubber, or whatever. If it was Teflon, it went into the Teflon grinder. The only distinction that mattered was if the bosses might notice that they put the crappy stuff into the high grade stuff and ruined an expensive batch.
Take that mentality and multiply it times 1,000 and you’ve got China. Not only do the workers not care in China, the bosses don’t care, either. They were trained on a system that prizes only one thing: quantity. If a large quantity of goods turned out to be trash, the ideal manager will revert to old habits and hide it. We used to see it; we imported scrap from there. The condition of what we received was laughable. No one saw what they were doing, so they did the worst job they possibly could.
This might work in a system that hopes no one will complain about the complete lack of quality in computer that’s not planned to last more than a few months, but it won’t work in a car that has to drive 150,000 miles in often harsh conditions.
Everybody thinks China is going to take over the world with their cheap labor and mass production. It’s not going to happen. I give them another thirty years before they forget all the bad habits they learned under communism. Those thirty years have not yet begun.
Interesting read! None of what you describe surprises me, but its sad to imagine Volvo under those conditions.