As I said in my previous post in this series, I love touring factories, particularly woodworking shops where I really know what I'm looking at. Everything is interesting: the layout, the materials, the machinery that's there and the machinery that's not there. The factory I got to tour in Dubai was, at first glance, very much like mine. But there were some real differences as well.
Our tour started in the engineering offices, which were air-conditioned. There were a dozen or so engineers, each working on computer drawings for various projects. I asked the manager how many people worked at the plant, and he told me he had more than 200 on staff. Two hundred! That's a pretty big operation. I'm a little dim on the exact breakdown, but my recollection is that he had 30 in sales and engineering (the office positions) and the rest were out on the shop floor.
They produced a variety of products: mil lwork (woodwork that is attached to a building, like custom paneling, doors and trim), furniture (chairs, tables and case goods, both upholstered and all wood), and tables (dining and conference). That's a very broad set of skills under one roof, and it would be tough to find a comparable operation in America, as our factories tend to be much more specialized.
For instance, I know a lot of companies here that do custom millwork. There are a few shops like mine that do custom tables, and there are companies that do custom upholstery, but I don't know of a custom shop that does all of that. If someone asked me for upholstered work, I would sub it to an upholstery shop. And it might send table work to me. This specialization allows us to develop very particular skill sets in our workers and helps amortize the cost of that training.
It's very difficult to make money in America if your workers are switching gears all of the time. They can never develop a competitive l evel of skill and efficiency, unless they are paid a low wage. And low wages don't buy you a worker who knows several trades. Large factories with a broad product line might have a bunch of skills in one place, but that would be pure production line work, with each worker doing a small set of tasks. This ends up requiring lower skills than my workers offer and paying lower wages than my workers get.
I asked the manager where he got his workers, and he told me that they were all foreign, as is he. They are hired on a contract basis to come work in Dubai. I asked him what he paid a shop floor guy, and he told me that it was the equivalent of a dollar an hour. I later tried to verify whether this was a typical wage for skilled labor in Dubai, but couldn't come up with a specific number. Unskilled labor has a legal minimum wage of 950 durhams a month (about $260) but I don't know whether anyone pays attention to that, or how many hours the workers are expected to work each day.
In any case, labor in Dubai is really, really cheap. A typical skilled cabinetmaker in the Northeast United States makes about $4,000 a month, not including benefits. Let's call it $4,800 a month all in. For that money, I could hire at least 10 skilled laborers in Dubai. I currently have five bench cabinetmakers, who together build between $180,000 and $200,000 worth of product a month. Replace them with 50 guys for the same price and we'd be churning out huge amounts of work. That is, if the workers in Dubai are as productive as my guys. And that's a big if.
Back to the tour. The factory had one feature mine lacks: a mezzanine level that provides a nice view of the shop floor. I had my iPhone handy, so I took a quick video of this scene:
The area visible here is about the same size as my shop floor, maybe a little bigger. Every green dot is a worker. I counted them, and there are 46 visible. (There may be more that are out of sight.) Compare that aga in to how many people I have in a comparable area: five. (Incidentally, the German factory I visited in April was much like mine - large space, tons of machines and very few workers to be seen.)
We went down to the shop floor to take a closer look. The factory was busy producing all of the millwork for an embassy in Ghana. This included lots of custom doors, trim molding and some large custom column wraps - huge wooden cylinders, hollow inside, that would hide structural steel columns in the embassy. This part of the building and, as it turned out, all parts except the office, had no air-conditioning. It was easily 100 degrees on the shop floor.
The workers were dressed in some kind of company garb - a green polo shirt - and most of them wore a dust mask. Many had towels wrapped around their heads to catch sweat. For all that, they weren't working at a very slow speed or at a very fast speed. They had the measured pace of guys who are used to a long day of physic al labor. One thing that surprised me is that people were working safely. In addition to the dust masks, the sanding room had an efficient dust-extraction system, and the finishing room had very nice spray booths. I didn't notice anyone with missing fingers, a common sight in older American workshops. The manager was proud of this, and I was impressed by his level of concern for worker safety.
Down on the shop floor I got a closer look at the work and the machinery. The work was pretty good, but it was noticeably different from the way we do things. We use a CNC milling machine - a computerized cutting machine that is essentially a robot - to cut all of the components of our jobs. It makes very precise parts, which are then assembled by my workers. We do hand work only to assemble precut parts (which is highly skilled work, believe me). In the Dubai shop, all the curved parts, in fact all the parts, were cut by hand, using relatively simple tools, and then assembled wi th screws and nails. That's how we used to do things 10 years ago, but we've found that the precision of the CNC cutter allows us to make much more complex work at high speed.
The Dubai factory didn't have a CNC machine. In fact, it had machines that were very similar to my older equipment. And it was noticeable that the quantity of tools was lower than in my shop. We have four table saws, it had one. We have three wide-belt sanders, it had one. We have two jointers, it had one. Again, keep in mind that it had at least 46 guys out on the shop floor, and we have only five. The value of the machinery I saw was maybe a third of the cost of what's on my shop floor.
The next thing I noticed was that quite a few of the guys were just standing around, generally near someone who was doing work. It wasn't clear to me what this was all about - are they apprentices? Helpers? Are workers so inexpensive that businesses just hire a big pile of them and it doesn't really matter whether they produce anything? Or is there a government subsidy that makes this kind of hiring economical? I wasn't there long enough to figure it out, but I saw this so many times that I gave the phenomenon a name: the stand-around guy. You can see two examples in the video below:
I'm sure there's an explanation, but the way things were done was obviously unproductive. There were always many more people doing things than I would have assigned to the same task. Here's another example: six guys running a panel across a jointer to straighten a long edge.
That piece may be large, but it's not that heavy, probably about 100 pounds. If we had to do this in my shop, two guys would take care of it. But we would never have to do this task, because our CNC machine would have cut the part at exactly the right size. In my shop, an engineer in the office would have defined the cuts that made the part. In the Dubai shop, it was done out on the shop floor and adjustment s were made as needed. Doing things this way slows a project down a lot - every part has to be fitted and refitted to the pieces it touches. A complex project takes a huge amount of fussing so that it fits together correctly. And it's all hand labor of the highest skill level. Once a part is cut too small, you start over. You don't want anyone but your very best guys on that task. Our use of robotic cutting has pretty much eliminated the need to do this unless the project is extremely complex.
We went to the different areas of the shop, and the pattern was repeated. There would be a guy working hard, with one or two helpers who weren't. The work was well made, with sturdy joinery. A lot of stuff was being produced, as you might expect with 200 workers. And the shop was creating an astonishing variety of work. From the millwork for the embassy to upholstered banquettes for a restaurant to conference tables just like the ones we make.
It was also obvious that there were a number of very highly skilled workers, including a guy who could cut intricate veneer patterns with a knife, and another who was carving beautiful flowers out of wood. They were turning out very sophisticated work with very simple tools - the definition of great hand skills. But schooled in the tough economics of American manufacturing, I was most struck by the number of stand-around guys.
Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside of Philadelphia.
