What are the advantages and disadvantages of division of labour in a factory making a large ship, a pair of trousers and a computer?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of division of labour in a factory making a large ship, a pair of trousers and a computer?
Division of labour is where the process of making a product is divided up to different people who specialise in that area. This division has many advantages and disadvantages. Division of labour takes place in all sorts of different paid jobs.
A large ship is made up of many materials, which are both natural and man-made. There are many different jobs to making a ship. There are jobs from making the materials, fitting the materials and managing the way in which made. The jobs are divided up between a lot of people. This has an advantage as specialised people specialise in their own area, which makes the ship of better quality for example a financial advisor would make a bad job of building the ship as he knows about figures and probably has not much knowledge of wood work. This improves the quality of the ship immensely. With many people working to make the product who work as a team the speed in which the ship is made increases. Whereas if a small team worked on things they would approach each part of the making bit by bit which would be time consuming. With having a large team, reliability is a main part of the making of the ship. If one person pulls out of the job the construction will come to a standstill as employees rely on other employees to get the job finished e.g. If a builder decides to stop working the electrician can’t wire up that certain point of the ship. If one person stops it backfires.
