1) Late return to work
2) Tipsy / drunk workers taking longer to get stuff done
3) tipsy / drunk workers doing stuff worse, thus needed it to be reworked
4) tipsy / drunk workers not inspecting properly leading to increased returns from customers
5) the occasional broken / lost item (with JIT this can be a considerable delay if it's the right item)
6) occasional broken tools
7) sober workers resentful at drunk workers and at bad management not doing anything about it.
etc etc.
Yep, a lot of this is down to management, but the UK has a poor reputation for the quality of middle management in industry.
I was talking to my boss once, he worked in London for a while. He once said that the biggest difference between American workers, and English workers is attitude towards alcohol.
I don't care about this one. Butt-in-seat time is an outdated measurement.
2-6) Pretty easy to deal with this: your workers are behaving irresponsibly by coming in drunk and making mistakes. So you terminate them and get people who can deal with alcohol responsibly (I don't mean you can't have a drink at lunch, just be professional and don't get drunk when you're supposed to be working).
> but the UK has a poor reputation for the quality of middle management in industry.
If you find a place that has good middle management let me know and I'll have a look! :)
Drunk/tipsy employees are a safety hazard in such an environment etc.
Do these directly apply to other industries or settings? Depends :)
I agree. There's a large local aerospace company. What time do the shop-floor workers have to start? 8:42 am.
They enforce it too; fellow workers, bosses, everyone polices that start time.
In factory work, being on time matters. Because you're taking a widget from the person to your left, adding value by performing some operation on it, and passing it to the person on your right. If you're not there, and there isn't someone who can fill-in, then the assembly line stops and the firm ships no widgets.
Be late often enough, and you get fired.
I'm very glad that software development work isn't like that, btw. I am not cut-out for Taylorism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principles_of_Scientific_Ma...
Or even better: realize that work getting done is what counts, not the exact time your butt hits your seat.
> Employing that one semi-functional alcoholic destroyed hundreds of person-hours of work, because people were less restrained when they went to the pub at lunch time.
What are you saying here? That hundreds of man hours were destroyed because people became a little more laid back? Do you have any evidence to back up that this is really what happened?
Or do you mean people came in totally trashed and actually destroyed equipment? If that's the case I'd blame the manager(s) for letting that happen more than once.