Thirty Years Later, “Keep the Line Running” Is Still the Message
When I was a young engineer at GM's Livonia Engine Plant in the mid-1990s, I wrote down some of the things production workers said to me. One of them stuck, a worker in a machining department:
“I want to stop the line to do my quality checks, but management says to keep the line running.”
I've told that story in a few places since, including in Practicing Lean. I always thought of it as a period piece. Old GM. Pre-NUMMI thinking that hadn't caught up yet. Something that got fixed.
Last week I went looking at what current autoworkers write about their jobs on public review sites. An assembly line worker at a Ford plant in Michigan, posting in June 2026, described the shift this way:
“Will do whatever to keep that line running.”
Same plant, a different worker, two years earlier: “keep that line running and do your job they don't bother you.”
Thirty years. Different company. Same sentence.
What I looked at, and what it can't tell you
I read employee reviews for Ford plants in Louisville, Kansas City, and Wayne, Michigan. Roughly sixty reviews, first page each, most of them posted in the last two years. That's a small, unsystematic sample from a site where people mostly write about pay, shift schedules, heat, and whether their supervisor is any good.
So this doesn't establish anything about how those plants operate. Anonymous reviews can't do that. What they can show is the language people reach for when they describe the work, and the language is consistent.
An assembly line worker in Louisville, December 2025:
“Only numbers matter not quality like they preach. The line doesn't stop.”
A door, deck, and hood fitter in Louisville with 32 years in, October 2025, wrote that the job is more about quantity, and that quality could be taken a lot more seriously.
Another Louisville assembler described the hardest part of the job as standing around doing nothing when the line went down, waiting for maintenance to get it running again.
That last one is the detail I keep thinking about, and I'll come back to it.
This is not just a Detroit Three problem
It would be easy to tell this as an old-line American automaker story: GM, Ford, and Chrysler struggling to escape habits formed during the era of mass production.
The employee reviews do not support that clean distinction.
At BMW's plant in South Carolina, a material handler wrote in 2020:
“Have to get that daily number or you'll be working massive overtime. Dont stop the line for anything.”
The title of the review was even more direct: “Its not premium quality its premium quantity.”
A Mercedes-Benz team member in Vance, Alabama, wrote in 2023:
“They say they care about quality but it's always been quantity over quality.”
At Honda Lock, an automotive supplier in Bremen, Georgia, a former quality team leader wrote:
“Quantity over quality seemed to be the norm.”
Honda Lock is a supplier, not a Honda final-assembly plant (and no longer owned by Honda), so that distinction matters. But the comment came from someone whose formal responsibility was quality inside a Japanese-owned American automotive operation.
The most revealing example may be Hino Motors in Williamstown, West Virginia.
A logistics employee wrote in 2019 that understaffing led to constant scrambling:
“There is often scrambling to cover spots to keep the line running. The team leads and reliefs are normally covering a spot and not really available to lead their team or step in to cover a process.”
At the time of that review, Hino was not merely another Japanese manufacturer. Toyota had made Hino a consolidated subsidiary in 2001. It was part of the Toyota corporate family.
That does not make the review evidence about a Toyota-branded passenger-vehicle plant. Hino had its own management, products, workforce, and operating history.
But it raises a more important question than corporate nationality:
What happens to an andon-style response system when the people who are supposed to respond are being used as replacement labor?
The team-leader title may still exist. The organizational chart may look Lean. But if the team leader is covering a station, there may be nobody available to answer the signal, help the worker complete the cycle, contain the defect, and investigate why the problem occurred.
The cord is not the system.
The response is the system.
The word “andon” does not appear
The word andon did not appear in the Ford reviews I read or in the relevant worker discussions I found.
That absence alone proves little. Andon is Toyota's term, and workers at other companies have no reason to use it unless the company has adopted that vocabulary.
More interestingly, workers rarely described the underlying response loop:
- A worker recognizes that the standard cannot be completed.
- The worker immediately signals for help.
- A team leader arrives within the remaining cycle time.
- The team leader helps resolve or contain the problem.
- If it cannot be resolved before the vehicle reaches a fixed position, the line stops.
- The organization learns from the abnormality instead of merely restarting production.
That is more precise than saying every pull immediately stops the line. Toyota describes the worker activating a call button to alert the leader. In a fixed-position stop system, production continues briefly while the leader responds; the line stops at the designated position if the problem cannot be resolved in time.
In 2008, the BBC reported that workers at Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky plant pulled the andon cord about 2,000 times a week, while workers at a new Ford truck plant in Dearborn pulled it about twice. I wrote about that number in April and asked whether anything had changed in the years since.
But I notice that the corporate vocabulary of Lean changed enormously during the past thirty years, while “keep the line running” remains recognizable to workers.
The executives are saying it out loud, which is to their credit
In July 2024, then-Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares told analysts that too many US-built vehicles needed rework, and named the Sterling Heights plant that builds the Ram 1500. He described what happens when the repair backlog gets bad enough:
You have to “stop the main plant to do the job and clean the mess.”
Well, yeah,
The internal measure he was pointing at is direct run rate, the share of vehicles that need no rework at the end of assembly. At Sterling Heights it was, in his word, not good.
Read that next to the reviews and something clicks. You stop the line either way. Toyota stops it for a few seconds at one station when one person raises a hand to pull a cord or press a button. Sterling Heights stopped a whole plant to work through a backlog of trucks that were already built wrong.
You stop the line in the moment… or you end up with a much more costly line stoppage later.
The difference isn't whether you pay. It's whether you pay in seconds (or minutes)– or in weeks.
Ford's Jim Farley has been similarly blunt. In a July 2026 interview with The Detroit News, he said that over forty years in the industry he watched Ford
“Fall in love and fall out of love with quality like four times.”
I want to be clear that I think saying these things publicly is the right move. A CEO who names a quality problem in front of Wall Street is doing a version of what this whole field asks frontline workers to do every day. That's harder than it looks and most executives don't do it.
The question is what comes next, and whether the person naming the problem is describing something happening to the organization or something they're inside of.
How it lands on the floor
When Tavares made those comments, a Reddit thread filled up with reactions. Some readers thought it was refreshing that a CEO would admit the trucks weren't good enough. Others read it as blaming the guys building them.
One commenter, who said he'd been there 26 years:
“The employees only do what management tells them to do.”
I'd agree. Leadership / management leads the way. Or doesn't.
Another described workers raising manufacturing problems before the truck ever needs rework, and said it “falls of deaf ears.”
I can't verify any of that. They're anonymous comments from strangers on a truck forum. But the second one is a precise description of the thing I've spent a book trying to explain. People aren't always silent because they're scared. Plenty of them speak up. More often, they go quiet because they spoke up, and nothing happened, and then it happened again. Futility.
A third commenter described a weld gun failing at a plant after the weld audit position was outsourced, with a couple hundred vehicles going through before anyone caught it. Same shape as the story Jeff Liker told me about Ford's Dearborn truck plant, where a team leader role was created to respond to andon pulls and then compared unfavorably to a sister plant that ran without one. The role went away. The cost showed up somewhere else.
As they used to say at GM:
“We'll save money no matter what it costs us.”
The part I'd push back on, including against myself
There's a version of this post that says nothing has changed in thirty years, and I don't believe it.
That Livonia plant I worked at got a new manager, Larry Spiegel, who had been sent to NUMMI to learn how Toyota ran things. He told 800 of us that the era of blaming workers was over. The plant went from the worst of the worst to the top quartile within a few years. That was real, and I watched it happening.
Farley says Ford has fallen in and out of love with quality four times. Four times out means four times in. Those up-cycles were real too, and people worked hard to produce them.
So the honest claim is narrower than “nothing changed.” The culture problems keep coming back. Something in how these plants are managed regenerates it, and the improvement work that pushes it away doesn't seem to hold once the person driving it moves on.
Which brings me back to the Louisville worker standing around waiting for maintenance.
A few years ago I was on a tour of Toyota's truck plant in San Antonio. Kaizen came up constantly, on the walls and in what the guides said. Somebody on the tour finally asked the obvious question: everyone out there looks completely occupied building trucks, so when do they actually do the kaizen?
The answer was that they do it when the line is down. Or they ask to stay after their shift and work on it, on overtime.
Same event. The line stops. At one plant that's dead time. At the other it's the time you have. And somebody at the second plant decided that paying a person overtime to improve their own work was an investment rather than a cost to be cut.
What I'm still trying to find out
I'm working on a book about why people stay quiet at work, and the Ford andon question is one I haven't closed. If you worked at a Ford, GM, or Stellantis plant in the last twenty years, in any role, I'd like to hear what actually happened when someone raised a problem. Anonymous is fine. The form is in the April post.
I'm particularly interested in the response side. Not whether there was a cord or a button, but who came, how fast, and what they did when they got there.
