ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses first some aspects of the design of production processes and later their connection with industrial relations. It provides the edited text of a lecture given in 1977 at a conference of production engineers, which was later published in their journal. Production engineers see the operator's part in production systems as sets of disembodied tasks, with associated costs. The methodological break-through that the author wants to describe comes in the work of a group of production engineers in the University of Stuttgart. They have been researching on alternatives in production design and strategies for selecting from them. In existing systems they are working on methods of costing that should include at least some of the human costs, like absenteeism and labour turnover, so that the real costs of a system may be known and more realistic choices made. Companies have to formulate what they want to do in agreement with the local works councils, estimate the costs.
