Industrial engineers need data to design better processes. Accidents that cause injury obviously have the highest priority not only because of employee concerns, but because they’re bad business (and this is the callous data side): even with an endless supply of cheap replacement labor, it’s better to keep your current skilled workers than to train new replacements.

I really don’t know how the Chinese view their engineers. I do know that corporate America has spent the last 15 years trying to make the case that another class of skilled worker, developers, are commodity resources. As long as you have good requirements, the theory goes, any developer should be able to code your application for you. That does not work in practice, in my experience, because developers are not interchangeable parts. One is not just as good as the other and I have yet to see requirements that were so perfect that a knowledgeable developer could not improve upon them by asking the right questions.

I would not be surprised to find that the Chinese, with a vast labor force, do not have an enlightened view of the individual value of good engineers.