[E91 Hoarder]

Interesting article by BBC about aging workforce in Germany. This one talks about BMW factory specifically.

After the government raised the retirement age to 67, there more and more of aging workforce on German factories. At the same time there is a shortage of young experienced workers. BMW has started adopting its factories to be more comfortable for older workers:

Around the world, BMW employs 96,000, three-quarters of them in Germany. With the changing demographics, the average age is around 40 but it expects that to rise to 46 by 2020.

It's not quite what you expect on a relentless production line in a BMW plant in Bavaria: as the shells of cars trundle by, a sixty-year old man in his company overalls bends and stretches under the instruction of a young physiotherapist in a white coat.

It's one of the ways in which the huge plant at Dingolfing has been adapted to make the working lives of its 18,000 employees better - or at least longer.

Apart from the exercises on the shop floor and in gyms near the assembly lines, the work-stations where workers sit and stand have been modified to minimise stretching and awkward movement.

There's more daylight - where most factories don't have windows, Dingolfing does, and psychologists say this cuts stress.

Workers can see each other and this, too, reduces stress, according to the doctors who redesigned the factory with age in mind.

There's also much more flexibility to the speed of the assembly line. "It removes stress from the operator," said manager, Barbara Bergmeier. "If you think that you're the slowest component of the system, it really creates stress for you. If you consider that if you make a defect, the whole shift has to do half an hour overtime to get the volume - that's a source of stress."

The rest of the article is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16257072

[Bobby Pynes]

Cool story bro...

Just kidding

[queensfield]

They had a piece on it too on 60 minutes. It talked about special shoes and floor that are easy on the knees, special tools to make vision easier etc. They tracked the statistics on the older worker plant only and found that after implementation of their older worker-friendly environment, the defects went down substantially.