Time Machine

Team assemblers

Name: Team Assemblers: employment and wages since 1984
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

In brief

BLS last counted US team assemblers as their own occupation in May 2016: 1,112,780 jobs. Median pay was $30,060 a year in May 2016. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 250,000 from 1984, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for team assemblers: Collaborative robots, 2010 to 2022.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS's 2025-35 employment projections do not list this occupation on its own.

AI exposure studies

8.8% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
0.97 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2016.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Team assemblers: jobs and pay since 1984 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2016]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-2092

Chicago

Future History. "Team assemblers: jobs and pay since 1984." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2016. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-2092.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_51_2092, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Team assemblers: jobs and pay since 1984}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-2092}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2016}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

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2000now

Country

US Employment · latest actual (2016)

1.11M

Est.

OEWS stopped publishing this occupation on its own after May 2016. It counts team assemblers only within 51-2098 (Assemblers and Fabricators, All Other, Including Team Assemblers) in May 2017 and 2018, and within 51-2090 (Miscellaneous Assemblers and Fabricators) from May 2019, so this series ends in 2016.

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage · latest actual (2016)

$30,060

Est.

≈ $39,288 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1913

December 1, 1913: Ford installs the first moving final-assembly line at Highland Park, Michigan. The chassis assembly time drops from 12.5 hours to 1.5 hours. The single-station assembly model (one worker, one operation, repeated continuously) is institutionalized as the dominant form of American manufacturing. This is the starting point from which the team assembly model will define itself in opposition, 70 years later.

Beat · 1982

Honda begins automobile production at its Marysville, Ohio plant: the first Japanese-brand automobile manufactured in the United States. (Honda had started motorcycle production at the same site in 1979, making Marysville the first Japanese vehicle manufacturing site in the US.) The Marysville plant operated under Honda's team assembly model from the outset, with workers organized into small teams responsible for multiple operations and collective quality accountability. This was the first large-scale demonstration that a Japanese team production model could operate successfully in an American manufacturing context with American workers.

Beat · 1984

December 10, 1984: the first Chevrolet Nova rolls off the NUMMI line in Fremont, California. The plant employs approximately 2,500 workers at opening (reaching 5,500 at peak); over 85% are the same UAW members GM had laid off in 1982 when it closed the Fremont plant as unmanageable. Under Toyota's Production System, including team-based work and the andon cord, Fremont reaches quality levels comparable to Toyota's Takaoka plant within a year. The demonstration effect is immediate: if the same workers, organized differently, can produce at Japanese quality standards, the problem is not the American worker, it is the American production philosophy.

Beat · 1990

"The Machine That Changed the World" is published by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos, reporting the results of MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program five-year comparative study of automotive manufacturing worldwide. The book names the Toyota model "lean manufacturing" and demonstrates, in detail, that Japanese transplants in the US achieved approximately twice the productivity of comparable domestic assembly plants. For production assemblers, the book's findings had a paradoxical quality: lean manufacturing was more productive partly because it engaged the assembler as an active problem-solver rather than a passive station-operator, but it also required more output per worker. The book becomes the most influential manufacturing management text of the 1990s and accelerates the conversion of US plants to team-based structures.

Beat · 1994

January 1, 1994: NAFTA takes effect. For US team assemblers, the agreement's most immediate consequence is the accelerated shift of sub-assembly work to Mexican maquiladoras: wiring harnesses, seat assemblies, and small-parts sub-assemblies begin migrating south within years. US automotive final assembly (which is team-assembler work) largely remains domestic: the vehicle is too large to ship economically. But the upstream sub-assembly work that feeds those final lines shifts, reducing the total US team assembler footprint in automotive manufacturing.

Beat · 2009

June 1, 2009: General Motors files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the fourth-largest bankruptcy in US history at the time. Chrysler had filed on April 30. The two bankruptcies, combined with Ford's near-miss (averted without federal bailout), forced rapid restructuring of the US automotive assembly footprint. Dozens of assembly plants closed or were sold; tens of thousands of team assemblers lost their jobs. NUMMI, which had run for 25 years as the symbolic proof of lean manufacturing's potential in the US, closed on April 1, 2010, when both GM and Toyota withdrew. Tesla later purchased the facility for $42 million and reopened it to build electric vehicles: the next chapter for team assembly on the same Fremont floor.

Beat · 2022

August 2022: President Biden signs both the CHIPS and Science Act ($39B in semiconductor manufacturing subsidies) and the Inflation Reduction Act ($369B in climate provisions, including EV battery manufacturing incentives) within eight days. The legislation triggers announcements of new manufacturing plants that represent the deepest reshoring investment since World War II. For team assemblers, the EV transition is particularly consequential: an electric vehicle requires battery module assembly that is labor-intensive and precision-demanding, a natural fit for team-based production, but eliminates many traditional ICE sub-assembly operations. The net effect on team assembler employment is contested: EV platforms require fewer total assembly hours per vehicle but the rapid growth in EV volumes is expected to sustain or increase the total assembler workforce in automotive manufacturing.

Beat · 2024

The BLS Employment Projections program, which counts all jobs including the self-employed, puts team assemblers at 1,467,100 in 2024 and projects little or no change through 2034, despite the widespread deployment of collaborative robots and more than two decades of automation investment. (OEWS stopped publishing team assemblers on their own after May 2016, so the plotted series ends there.) The occupation's resilience is partly explained by its own defining characteristic: the multi-station rotation that BLS uses to define the category is also the property that makes it automation-resistant. A robot that can be programmed to perform one precise operation still cannot respond to the judgment calls that arise when a team assembler rotates to a new station, encounters an out-of-tolerance component, and must decide whether to pass it, rework it, or pull the andon cord. That decision, made thousands of times per shift across 1.5 million workers, remains human.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1984

On December 10, 1984, General Motors and Toyota jointly celebrated the start of production at NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.) in a converted plant in Fremont, California, that GM had shuttered two years earlier as too troubled to operate. The workers who filed back in were largely the same ones GM had laid off in 1982: UAW members, many of them veterans of the old Fremont plant's worst days, a facility that had been known internally as GM's 'worst plant in America,' notorious for absenteeism, wildcat strikes, and a rate of one formal grievance filed for every worker per year. What made NUMMI different was not the building or the machines: those were largely inherited from GM. What was different was the production philosophy Toyota brought from Takaoka, Japan: the Toyota Production System. And at the center of TPS, the thing that most surprised the returning Fremont workers, was the team. In GM's old world, an assembler had a station. You stood at that station, performed your assigned operations on each car as it came by, and did nothing else. You were responsible for your bolt or your seam or your clip. If something went wrong upstream, it was someone else's problem until it reached your station, and then it was the foreman's problem, not yours. The job was deliberately narrow: a principle that traced back to Frederick Winslow Taylor and the belief that specialization maximized efficiency. Toyota's answer to Taylor was the team. Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda, rebuilding Toyota in the 1950s, could not afford to dedicate one worker to every station: the company was too small, the product mix too variable. So they trained workers to rotate, to learn five, six, eight stations in a production sequence, to move through the work rather than wait for the work to move past them. The team, not the individual, was responsible for the section's output and quality. When a problem appeared anywhere in the team's zone, any team member could pull the andon cord and stop the line: an act that on an old GM floor would have been grounds for termination. At NUMMI, pulling the cord was expected. It was the mechanism by which defects were caught and improvement was made. Within a year of NUMMI's launch, quality at the Fremont plant matched Toyota's best Japanese facilities. The same workers, the same union, the same city: different team structure, radically different results. Word traveled fast. Honda had already opened its Marysville, Ohio plant in 1982 for automobile production (motorcycles began there in 1979). Nissan opened in Smyrna, Tennessee in 1983. Toyota opened its own stand-alone Georgetown, Kentucky plant in 1988. And American manufacturers began the slow process of adopting team-based assembly: a process codified and accelerated when MIT researchers published 'The Machine That Changed the World' in 1990, naming the approach 'lean manufacturing' and documenting, in precise engineering terms, how much more productive the team model was than the mass-production line. BLS created SOC 51-2092 in the 2000 occupational classification revision, finally giving a code to the workers who had been redefining American manufacturing for fifteen years. By 2000, team assemblers were estimated at roughly 1.5 million: the occupation at its peak. The next twenty-four years would test that model against forces none of the NUMMI architects had anticipated.

Cited forecasts · present → 2026

Will AI replace team assemblers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"

2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)

97%

probability

What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 51-2092 Team Assemblers: probability of computerisation 0.97, rank 646 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

8.8%

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 51-2092.00 Team Assemblers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.088, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.176; GPT-4-rated β 0.235. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for team assemblers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you herePerform quality checks on products and parts.

Perform quality checks on products and parts.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you hereReview work orders and blueprints to ensure work is performed according to specifications.

Review work orders and blueprints to ensure work is performed according to specifications.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you hereRotate through all the tasks required in a particular production process.

Rotate through all the tasks required in a particular production process.^[2]

Where your edge is

Tools of the era

How has the work of team assemblers changed since 1913?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Ford moving assembly line: single-station mass production (pre-team era)
The occupation that would eventually become SOC 51-2092 has its shadow history in the single-station assembly line that Henry Ford introduced at Highland Park on December 1, 1913. Ford's innovation reduced chassis assembly time by fixing each worker to one station and moving the work past them. The logic was compelling: specialization meant the worker needed to learn only one motion, and repetition built speed. By 1914 Highland Park employed thousands of workers, each responsible for a single discrete operation. This model dominated American manufacturing assembly for four decades and set the philosophical baseline against which the team model would later be defined in opposition. For the individual assembler, the Fordist line meant: do one thing, do it thousands of times per shift, and expect no say in how the work is done.
Effect on the work
The moving assembly line created the mass-production assembler as a new occupational type, not a craftsman who built a whole product, but a specialist who performed one operation on every unit. Wages were relatively high for unskilled labor but the work itself offered no variety and minimal agency.
Toyota Production System: multi-station team model developed in Japan (not yet US)
Between 1948 and 1975, Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda built the Toyota Production System at Toyota Motor Company in Toyota City, Japan: a set of production principles that inverted the Fordist logic at almost every point. Where Ford specialized, Toyota multi-skilled. Where Ford fixed workers to stations, Toyota rotated workers through sequences. Where Ford made defects the inspection department's problem after the fact, Toyota made every worker responsible for quality at every station through the andon cord: a pull-rope at each workstation that stopped the entire line when a defect appeared. The team, not the individual station, was the unit of production. Workers were expected to know every operation in their team's zone, to cover for each other, and to participate in kaizen (continuous improvement) events that refined the work itself. Ohno later wrote that he was partly inspired by the American supermarket, observing that a store restocked only what customers took from the shelf, rather than pushing out product on a preset schedule. That just-in-time logic, applied to assembly, required workers who could adapt to variable production sequences rather than perform a fixed operation at a metronomic pace.
Effect on the work
In Japan, Toyota's team model produced dramatically higher productivity per worker than comparable US mass-production facilities: the MIT IMVP study (Womack et al., 1990) found Toyota's Japanese plants required approximately half the labor hours per vehicle of comparable US plants in the late 1980s. The US assembly worker had no exposure to TPS principles until Honda Marysville (automobiles 1982), Nissan Smyrna (1983), and NUMMI (1984) arrived.
Japanese transplants bring team assembly to US: NUMMI, Honda Marysville, Toyota Georgetown
The 1980s were the decade when the team assembly model arrived in the United States through the Japanese automotive transplants. Honda opened automobile production at Marysville, Ohio in 1982 (motorcycle production had begun there in 1979: the first Japanese vehicle production in the US). Nissan opened Smyrna, Tennessee in 1983. NUMMI (the GM-Toyota joint venture in Fremont, California) opened in December 1984. Toyota opened its own stand-alone plant in Georgetown, Kentucky in 1988, establishing it as Toyota's first fully independent US manufacturing facility. Each of these plants operated under TPS principles: workers were organized into teams of four to eight, rotated through all the operations in their team's zone, and were responsible collectively for quality within that zone. The contrast with the Fordist single-station model, which still dominated US domestic manufacturers, was vivid enough to attract a five-year MIT research program. The result, published as "The Machine That Changed the World" in 1990, named the model "lean manufacturing" and made the case, with detailed productivity data, that it was fundamentally superior. By the early 1990s, GM, Ford, and Chrysler were all reorganizing their assembly plants into team structures, not from preference, but from competitive necessity.
Effect on the work
NUMMI demonstrated the most striking proof of the team model's potential: the same 5,500 workers who had been the least productive, most strike-prone workforce in the GM system became, under TPS, a facility that matched Toyota's Japanese quality benchmarks. The lesson that spread was not just about production efficiency but about what the assembler's job could be when workers were treated as contributors to improvement rather than interchangeable parts of a machine.
NAFTA + China-shock: offshore arbitrage reshapes the team assembly market
The North American Free Trade Agreement, effective January 1, 1994, eliminated tariffs on manufactured goods moving among the US, Canada, and Mexico over a fifteen-year schedule. For team assemblers, the most immediate effect was in automotive: the major transplants and Big Three automakers began routing labor-intensive sub-assemblies to Mexican maquiladoras, factories along the border that could pay assemblers a fraction of US wages under NAFTA's duty-free provisions. By 2000, Mexico had become the dominant location for automotive wiring harness assembly, seat assembly, and other sub-component work that had previously been done in US plants. Then, on December 11, 2001, China joined the WTO. Within five years, the "China shock", the wage arbitrage advantage of Chinese manufacturing, had eliminated assembly jobs in electronics, appliances, toys, clothing, and consumer goods at a scale that economists Autor, Dorn, and Hanson later estimated destroyed millions of US manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2011. Team assemblers in these sectors found that their multi-station skill set provided no protection against a facility closure. The Great Recession of 2008-09 then hit the automotive sector directly: GM and Chrysler both filed for bankruptcy in 2009; NUMMI itself closed on April 1, 2010. US team assembler employment fell from its peak of roughly 1.5 million to an estimated trough of under 1 million by 2010.
Effect on the work
The period from 2000-2010 was the most severe decade of decline for team assembler employment. Plant closures were concentrated in the upper Midwest (Michigan, Ohio, Indiana), in textile-adjacent states (North Carolina, South Carolina), and in California (electronics, apparel). Communities built around single large assembly plants faced the loss of their anchor employer with few equivalent jobs available.
Collaborative robots (cobots): Universal Robots, ABB YuMi, FANUC CRX work alongside teams
The concept of a cobot, a collaborative robot designed for direct interaction with humans rather than operation behind a safety cage, was invented in 1996 at Northwestern University by J. Edward Colgate and Michael Peshkin. Commercial deployment lagged by a decade: Universal Robots, founded in Odense, Denmark in 2005, launched its first commercial cobot, the UR5, in 2008. By 2020 Universal Robots had installed 50,000 collaborative robots worldwide, primarily in small and medium manufacturing operations. ABB launched YuMi in 2015: a dual-arm cobot specifically designed for small-parts assembly alongside human workers, capable of threading a needle and handling electronic components. FANUC introduced the CRX series in 2019, targeting automotive sub-assembly and electronic assembly tasks. For team assemblers, the arrival of cobots changed the job in a way that traditional industrial robots (which operated behind safety cages and replaced human stations entirely) did not: the cobot shared the workspace. A team assembler in 2022 might work alongside a UR10 cobot that handled the torque-critical bolting step while the human performed the alignment, inspection, and routing tasks that required judgment. The "lights-out factory", full automation without human workers, remained a vision more realized in narrow product categories (semiconductor wafer handling, high-precision PCB placement) than on the general assembly floor.
Effect on the work
Cobots have not replaced team assemblers at scale: employment recovered from the 2010 trough to 1.47M by 2024, a period of widespread cobot deployment. What cobots have changed is task composition: team assemblers are increasingly the judgment layer (inspecting, adjusting, and exception-handling around the robot's deterministic operations) rather than performing every physical step themselves.
CHIPS Act + IRA reshoring: EV gigafactories, semiconductor fabs, new demand for team assembly
On August 9, 2022, President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, providing $39 billion in manufacturing subsidies for domestic semiconductor production plus a 25% investment tax credit for manufacturing equipment. On August 16, 2022, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, with clean energy provisions including incentives for EV battery manufacturing, solar panel production, and energy efficiency equipment. Together, these two pieces of legislation triggered the largest announced US manufacturing investment since World War II: TSMC Arizona, Intel Ohio New Albany, Samsung Taylor Texas, Toyota North Carolina battery plant, LG Energy Solution Michigan, and dozens of EV-component suppliers. EV gigafactories (Tesla Austin, Rivian Normal Illinois, Ford BlueOval City Tennessee) require teams of assembly workers for battery module assembly, battery-electric drivetrain integration, and final vehicle assembly: all tasks that map directly to the SOC 51-2092 skill set. The transition from internal combustion to electric vehicles is the deepest redesign of the final assembly line since Ford invented it: EV platforms eliminate the transmission, exhaust system, and cooling infrastructure of an ICE vehicle, but add battery module assembly (a labor-intensive precision task) and complex high-voltage wiring. Team assemblers who developed skills in EV-specific processes (cell-to-module assembly, battery management system integration, high-voltage safety protocols) are positioned to ride this transition. Those in ICE-specific sub-assembly (transmission assembly, exhaust fabrication) face a longer displacement horizon.
Effect on the work
BLS projects essentially flat employment for team assemblers 2024-34, reflecting the balance between ongoing automation pressure and the new manufacturing footprint from CHIPS/IRA investments. The Semiconductor Industry Association estimated that CHIPS Act-incentivized projects would create 44,000 manufacturing jobs; many of these would be classified as team assemblers or related production codes.

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Team Assemblers employment and pay by year

On record since1984

Latest US employment1,112,780 (May 2016)Source: BLS OEWS May 2016Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$30,060 (May 2016)Source: BLS OEWS May 2016Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

United Kingdom (UK SOC 8149)
Employment, 2025
111,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in Assemblers and routine operatives, United Kingdom, 2025, taken as the sum of the cited cells for SOC 8141 + 8142 + 8149 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
Median pay, 2025
£26,975, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for the dominant constituent group, SOC 8149, within the combined Assemblers and routine operatives (SOC 8141 + 8142 + 8149), United Kingdom, 2025. Wages are the cited median of the largest constituent group, not a blend. Open Government Licence v3.0.
Australia (ANZSCO 8322)
Employment, 2025
28,600, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 8322 Product Assemblers, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
Median pay, 2025
A$62,192, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,196 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.

View all 17 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1984	250,000	$18,000	Est., Wikipedia (employment) Researched contextEst., University of Missouri Libraries (pay) Researched context	Report
1990	600,000	n/a	Est., Wikipedia Researched context	Report
2000	1,306,430	$21,470	BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic	Report
2003	1,138,100	$23,180	BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic	Report
2004	1,208,270	$23,750	BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic	Report
2005	1,242,370	$24,120	BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic	Report
2006	1,250,120	$24,190	BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic	Report
2007	1,167,150	$24,630	BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic	Report
2008	1,131,060	$25,620	BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic	Report
2009	997,390	$26,820	BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic	Report
2010	928,170	$27,180	BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic	Report
2011	952,300	$27,490	BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic	Report
2012	1,006,980	$27,640	BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic	Report
2013	1,058,100	$28,170	BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic	Report
2014	1,125,160	$28,370	BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic	Report
2015	1,115,510	$29,080	BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic	Report
2016	1,112,780	$30,060	BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic	Report

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Ford moving assembly line: single-station mass production (pre-team era)Ford moving assembly line1913–1950

Toyota Production System: multi-station team model developed in Japan (not yet US)Toyota Production System1950–1984

Japanese transplants bring team assembly to US: NUMMI, Honda Marysville, Toyota GeorgetownJapanese transplants bring team assembl…1984–1994

NAFTA + China-shock: offshore arbitrage reshapes the team assembly marketNAFTA + China-shock1994–2010

Collaborative robots (cobots): Universal Robots, ABB YuMi, FANUC CRX work alongside teamsCollaborative robots2010–2022

CHIPS Act + IRA reshoring: EV gigafactories, semiconductor fabs, new demand for team assemblyCHIPS Act + IRA reshoring2022–present

Team Assemblers employment and pay by year

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