General Motors’ layoffs can be traced back to its quest to turn people into machines-Quartz

2021-12-07 06:46:58 By : Mr. qing zhu

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When General Motors announced last month that it would shut down small car production and seal up its Lordstown assembly plant outside of Youngstown in northeastern Ohio, the news felt inevitable. Although General Motors manufactured 9 out of every 20 new cars sold in the United States between 1950 and 1980, its market dominance has long since faded. Like Detroit’s two other “big three” automakers, General Motors has been cutting shifts and closing factories for decades, destroying cities like Youngstown in the United States.

However, nothing that led to the layoffs of 1,500 workers in Lordstown is inevitable-General Motors' failure, foreign small cars' victory, or even the decline of Detroit's industrial power-as long as you know where to look. About half a century ago, as the first gusts of global competition began to hit the American economy, a landmark strike in Lordstown provided GM with another option and prompted the rest of the United States to rethink our relationship with work.

In the late winter of 1972, the workers in Lordstown rebelled against GM's experimentation with a bold new management style that emphasized automation while treating the assembler as a small part of a giant machine. Their uprising became a national symbol of blue-collar dissatisfaction. As the media claims, "Lodstown Syndrome" is driven by the idea that in order for American society to flourish, people need work, yes, but more specifically, meaningful work—— This purpose goes beyond simply fixing the spring to the left rear axle of the Chevrolet. In the national debate that followed, the United States considered how a society that ignores the overall treatment of work would harm the competitiveness of its workers and ultimately the health of its communities.

The 1972 strike—or more precisely, General Motors’ response to the strike—marked the beginning of the company’s long but uneven decline, characterized by repeated impulsive bets on fancy, unproven futures Technology, while underestimating the value of its workers. So, long before GM CEO Mary Barra announced the news at the end of November, we already knew how the GM story ended. But Lordstown told us at a strange moment in 1972 what could be used instead.

That was 1970. General Motors is the largest company on the planet, with revenues of 22.8 billion U.S. dollars ($152 billion in today's U.S. dollars). The newly launched Lordstown Assembly dazzled the world. It is characterized by a highly mechanized assembly line, computerized quality control, and its resistance: 26 robots zip up the chassis like a mantis on a crank, fuse steel plates together, Become the body of the car. The most automated factory in the history of the industry, the factory is a revolution in manufacturing efficiency-"the dream of an industrial engineer," said John Russo, who worked at a General Motors factory in Michigan in the late 1960s and later became A worker relations scholar and director of the Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University.

As eye-catching as the robot phalanx is the workforce selected by General Motors to sweat with them. An article in Time magazine (pay area) in February 1972 declared: "The labor force-long hair, braids and bell bottoms-is the youngest of all genetically modified plants." In fact, Lordstown has more than 8,000 assemblers. The average age of workers is 24 years old. They are also the most educated and ethnically diverse workforce in the history of the industry, Russo said. Many people have fought in Vietnam.

Why change completely? Foreign competition — once a stimulus for the company that GM dominates the market — is rapidly solidifying into a small but real threat.

It was through the Model T that the American Volkswagen owned a car for the first time, because Henry Ford's mass production made luxury goods that could have been purchased suddenly become affordable. But the company that transformed car ownership into a core cultural institution in the United States was his company’s rival, General Motors. Although Ford made the same boxy car for everyone, the same monotonous black, but General Motors pioneered the modern concept of branding and mass marketing. Each of its brands has a unique appearance, price, and consumer base--or in the words of Alfred Sloan, Jr., the industry visionary who led General Motors decades before World War II. , "A car suitable for various wallets and purposes."

By the 1950s, General Motors marketing had so thoroughly penetrated the collective psychology of Americans that its five iconic big tents had become a symbol of the country’s emerging class and cultural affinity. The economist Robert Gordon explained in his book "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" that old money is riding on Cadillac, and the country's management has promoted Buick. "Further downstream in the status chain are Oldsmobile, Pontiac and the ubiquitous Chevrolet. These are the best-selling cars in the United States year after year. They are eagerly bought by the newly unionized working class and are gaining momentum. During the transition of their middle class status, they can afford to equip their subdivision houses in their suburbs with at least one car, usually two," he wrote.

The key to the attractiveness of cars and the company's profitability is GM's innovation know-how-it can continuously develop new methods to make cars more dazzling, more comfortable, and more fun to drive.

Many of these breakthroughs are practical: self-starting engines (as opposed to manual cranks), car air conditioners, automatic transmissions, and power steering. But design is also critical. The pace of innovation was so fast that by the late 1950s, every new model introduced by General Motors was very different from its predecessor.

"In the 1920s, GM surpassed Ford by offering cars that were replaced every year, and General Motors ensured that it remained the leader in styling and technology," Fortune magazine long-time industry reporter Alex Taylor III in "Sixty to Zero: A Deep Look" Wrote in the car. The collapse of General Motors and Detroit's auto industry. "Its cars from the 1950s are all brand new. Their styling captures the suppressed desire for change during the war, with an exciting spirit that is close to gorgeous: a two-tone color scheme, an amazing rear wing, and a highly compressed V-8 engine. ."

The uniqueness of the General Motors brand is largely due to the fact that they operate as independent departments. This means that Chevrolet engineers must not only compete with Ford and Chrysler, but also with Pontiac and Oldsmobile to define the frontiers of power, comfort and style. What its brand does share, however, is that their cars are getting longer and more profitable new features—and therefore heavier.

The continuous upgrade of style and quality is critical in business, because the challenge GM faces is similar to that of Apple's iPhone today: a fully saturated market. According to the economic historian Emma Rothschild (Emma Rothschild) published in 1973 on the Lordstown Council's book Paradise Lost (Paradise Lost), by 1970, 29% of American households had There is more than one car, and it was only 7% 20 years ago. American consumers have enough cars to travel. In order for them to continue buying new models, they must be persuaded-with its steady stream of must-have new models, General Motors has perfected its approach.

These ingenious feats made General Motors the first company in history to exceed $1 billion in revenue, and it did it in 1956. In that ten years and the next ten years, it was the most profitable company on the planet. GM's domination of the American auto market is undoubtedly thorough. Between 1950 and 1970, every but two years, Americans paid more for new General Motors than Ford and Chrysler combined.

From this condescending position, it is easy to rule out competition. In the beginning, anyway.

Volkswagen of Germany introduced the Beetle to the United States in 1949. It happened to have sold two cars.

Within ten years, these wealth have improved greatly. The stubby cars specially produced by Volkswagen and other European automakers found a market among Americans who could not afford Detroit's expensive steel giants. Soon, Japanese cars — Toyota launched the Corona in 1965 and Corolla the following year — began to appear on the streets of American West Coast cities. In addition to the price tag, foreign cars tend to be cheaper in the long run. They are smaller and lighter than American models and travel farther per gallon of gasoline. Their reliability also translates into lower maintenance costs. The reputation spread. In 1963, only 5% of cars purchased in the United States were foreign-made. By 1967, this share had jumped to 13%.

Obviously, GM has had enough of these upstarts. Paul Ingrassia, a senior automotive market reporter, in his book "Comeback: The Fall & Rise of the American Automotive Industry."

In 1968, General Motors announced the launch of its first ultra-compact car, which was full of challenges.

If the company has any doubts, it will defeat the bugs and corolla flooding on American highways, and it hasn't shown it. GM claims that its new car will weigh less than 2,000 pounds and will be priced at $1,800, which is the same as the Beetle and has GM's iconic innovation.

In order to produce the world-class small cars expected by the industry, General Motors chose its crown jewel factory and spent approximately US$100 million to equip the factory with cutting-edge robots, automated production lines and computerized quality control systems, and is known for it. Lordstown Assembly will be the only US factory producing GM's new "import killer" subcompact car, which will be named Chevrolet Vega.

The hype is huge. In May 1970, General Motors launched an ad that said only two words: "You will see." Four months later, when Vega finally arrived at the dealership, General Motors was again unexpected. But this is the first time in history, not very good.

Vega looks very beautiful-certainly more fashionable than the dwarf form favored by foreign automakers. But it is also nearly 400 pounds heavier than promised, which is $300 more expensive. The disappointment did not end there. The features that should have made it lighter and improved fuel consumption make it easy to leak oil. "Chevrolet dealers replaced so many Vega engines that they joked that these engines are'one-off'," Ingrassia pointed out in "Crash Course: The Road to Bankruptcy and Rescue of the American Auto Industry." Its exterior tends to rust prematurely and bend under pressure. Most importantly, shortly after the start of Vega production, the union and the auto workers union carried out a 67-day national strike against General Motors, resulting in a shortage of new cars at dealerships.

Awakening should be rude. This was the first high-profile failure of General Motors—of course, it was the result of wrong workforce management, but it was also the result of half-baked engineering and incomplete quality control. The company could have been reorganized to get Vega back to normal. But firmly convinced that Lordstown Assembly's state-of-the-art automation can ensure the quality — and the output needed to make low-margin subcompact cars profitable — GM has doubled.

First, it fired hundreds of Lordstown workers-reports vary, but the numbers ranged from 350 to 700. Then General Motors handed over the extra work to those who stayed. Many people who were laid off were engaged in quality control work. In order to make up for the production loss caused by the strike in 1970, GM accelerated the speed of the assembly line. These choices will have a significant impact on the views of Lordstown workers about work, and ultimately affect the views of American consumers about General Motors.

Kenneth Picklesimer, 72, started working shortly after opening in Lordstown in 1967. His first job was to put a carpet on the chassis of Chevrolet Impalas, as their steel skeleton slides past him. When each new car appeared, workers scrambled to add parts and adjustments 60 seconds ago, and then the production line quickly sent the car to the next stop.

In the early 1970s, his job was to install a coil spring on the rear axle and fix it in place with a gun. His arm remained in the same position for most of his 11 hours of work a day. The spring weighs 10 pounds; groping to snap your fingers and smash your wrists is well known. But this was nothing compared to the work in front of him who was responsible for bolting the axles to the body with a 40-pound air gun. "When it twisted," Picklesimer said, "it was hit so much that it almost pulled you off your feet."

59-year-old Tim O'Hara, who has worked there for 41 years and recently retired from Lordstown, said that in addition to physical stress, assembly work is a painful and cumbersome Combinations require unwavering focus at the same time. The pressure is immense.

"We have many people who were hired and resigned on the same day because they cannot bear the mental impact, such as being tied to a place, unless someone replaces you, otherwise you can't go to the bathroom," O said'Hara, he is currently The local 1112 vice president of the American Auto Workers Federation. "Everything is in order. You must be mentally capable of accepting it, not everyone is like this."

When Picklesimer started working in Lordstown, he worked for Chevrolet. But in 1971, due to the creation of the ultimate combustion element in this already flammable situation: the General Motors Assembly Department-or the workers called it GMAD, it all ended.

So far, GM’s five brands—Chevrolet, Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Cadillac—operate in different ways, allowing engineers and plant managers to coordinate with each other in part design and how to organize assembly. , And through distributors, direct feedback to loyal customers.

However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, General Motors controlled its factories under a single central authority, GMAD, thereby cutting these links. According to an April 1972 article in the New York Times, by 1972, approximately 93,000 workers nationwide and approximately three-quarters of General Motors’ production had been absorbed under the control of the department.

GMAD embodies GM's new strategy of centralization and automation to increase production and cut costs. Its head, Joseph Godfrey, embodies GMAD. As the flat-head sports son of the former GM president, Godfrey is everything that the hippies in the Lordstown workshop don't have. He spent the whole day studying forms printed out on the computer, and focused ruthlessly on the big picture.

"We must compete with foreigners," Godfrey told the New York Times. He said the way to do this is to cut costs. The key is technology-Lordstown's robotic welders, high-tech assembly lines, and a new computer system for monitoring output and quality.

How do workers fit into this vision? For Godfrey, their contribution can be reduced to a simple calculation of how much activity can be squeezed from them. He said: "Within a reasonable range, and will not endanger their health, if we can take a person for 60 minutes [pay-per-hour], we will do it right."

how? Line speed, one. At Lordstown's usual speed of 60 cars per hour, the assembly line is hard work, but feasible. In fact, by increasing the speed of the production line to 65 or even 70, General Motors can reasonably squeeze out a few cars per hour. Instead, management accelerated the speed to a dizzying 100 cars per hour. "It believes these measures are reasonable because the Lordstown line is designed to produce up to 140 cars per hour," Ingrassia wrote in the Crash Course.

In other words, Godfrey's plan is not to increase productivity by making it easier for employees to do more and faster work. Instead, it just forces them to do so. O'Hara said this was unheard of at the time and now. "In the entire history of automobile manufacturing, we are the only factory in the world that produces 100 cars per hour."

The acceleration of the production line meant that assemblers had to squeeze into just 36 seconds the same work they had done in the past 60 seconds. Russo explained that in order to keep employees in step with this crazy pace, superiors have instituted new strict disciplinary measures to increase harassment and threats.

"GMAD is known as a kind of Gestapo, unfettered,'if you don't like it, get out of here'," he said. (In addition to studying the labor history of Lordstown, Russo has some first-hand experience with GMAD methods, having worked at the Oldsmobile factory in Michigan during the department’s reign of terror. He recalled that the foreman told him,'Shut up , College student, do your job," when he came up with ways to improve the workflow.)

Many GMAD strategies seem to be short-sighted—sometimes downright stingy. Employees who mark defective parts have been criticized by their supervisors, and even cutting corners on quality will eventually increase warranty costs and eat into profits. Kenneth Picklesimer said that the foreman prohibited the common practice of Lordstown workers who protected each other on the production line so that everyone could take a break. "Managers are just starting to become real bastards," he said.

As it happens, many of the 700 or so workers laid off by GMAD in its cost-cutting campaign were quality control inspectors, because new computer systems and advanced automation technology leave little room for human error.

In any case, this is the assumption of GMAD. But this new technology has not been tested. Even the strictest supervision cannot change the fact that, as Ingrassia pointed out, Vega is too complicated to be assembled at warp speed.

General Motors is about to discover this in a difficult way.

In the beginning, the story went like this. Vegas started off the assembly line, their seats were chopped off, the windshield was broken, the ignition key was stuck in the lock, or other seemingly intentional defects. As Time magazine reported in February 1972, a large number of defective cars quickly caused backups in the overflow area of ​​Lordstown. With no space to accommodate the completed Vegas, the managers had to do an incredible thing: stop the assembly line. According to "Time" reports, GM's production loss was about 40 million U.S. dollars.

The workers in Lordstown are launching a guerrilla attack on the world's most powerful company, and the media are not paying enough attention to this. Vega’s apparent vandalism proved the irresistible and dramatic manifestations of the new source of anxiety that plagued the American public in the early 1970s: absenteeism, turnover, worker defaults, and widespread dissatisfaction commonly known as "blue-collar depression."

However, despite media reports at the time, it is completely unclear whether most of Vega's flaws were intentional.

"The production line is too fast and the workers don't have enough time, so they just leave their parts in the front seats. This has become a symbol of industrial destruction, but in reality it is just a reaction to the speed of the production line," Russo said. "I'm not saying that some people didn't say'go to hell' [and destroy the car]. But the initial reason was that the line went too fast."

This is consistent with what Picklesimer remembers.

"I did hear from reliable sources that several people had damaged several cars because of their anger, but I don't think this has reached the level stated by the company," he said. His experience supports a more mundane explanation: the assembly line is moving too fast, people cannot complete the work, and quality control personnel have been fired.

In any case, GMAD fought back. A large number of managers are forced to work overtime, and at the same time, arbitrary harassment and disciplinary actions have been intensified. In March 1972, about five months after GMAD took over, the workers in Lordstown voted to strike.

This is not an ordinary strike. money is not a problem. At approximately US$4.50 per hour (US$28.50 in today’s US dollars), excluding the US$2.50 fringe benefits, the wages in Lordstown are approximately 25% higher than the national average hourly wage. But as Gary Bryner, the 29-year-old local UAW head during the strike, said, the attitude of employees to work is more than just pay.

"In my opinion, the omnipotent dollar is not the only thing," said Breiner, as Studs Terkel's 1974 book "Work: People talk all day about what they do and what they do to themselves Feel as described in. "There is more-how I was treated. I have to say what I do and how I do it."

The union hopes that GM will re-employ laid-off workers and restore more flexible former GMAD work rules. But the frustration of workers is broader than the problems the union aims to solve. For many people, the problem is that their work is monotonous-because they have to repeat a task for 11 consecutive hours, the boring brain and the body are stressed.

"[Although GM’s robots] have some ideas about assembling cars. People still have to have people. If these guys don’t stand up and fight, they will also become robots," Breiner said at work. The increase in assembly line speed has further eroded the ability of workers to fully experience humanity. "Thirty-five or thirty-six seconds to complete your work-including walking, picking up parts, assembling. Go to the next job, never let up, never stop and think. The people in our factory work hard to keep this up. ."

For his part, Godfrey dismissed this concern and told Auto News, “In my opinion, we have the biggest problem when we disrupt that kind of monotony.” He continued: “Workers may Will complain about monotony, but spending years in the factory makes me believe that they like to automate their work. If you insert new things, you will break the rhythm of the work, and the work will become chaotic."

But the workers in Lordstown do crave freshness and challenges. For example, the historian Jefferson Cowie recalled in "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Workers Class" (Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Workers Class) The factory (where workers perform a series of tasks and master various skills) is regarded as a "distant industrial paradise". According to Rothschild's "Paradise Lost" report, other workers in Lordstown are eager to allow Japanese auto workers to play table tennis during their breaks.

Will previous generations of factory workers silently endure the tyranny of GMAD? perhaps. In the past, blue-collar workers knew better about unemployment and poverty, especially during the Great Depression. However, their children and grandchildren grew up in a wealthy era.

With their beards, beads and Afros, the workers of Lordstown believe in self-esteem and self-expression. During the rise of the civil rights movement and anti-war radicalism in the late 1960s, many people did not trust authority and were willing to be warlike. Cowie wrote: "They take drugs, socialize across ethnic groups, and dream of a world where work is meaningful." Breiner ended the official call with "peace." In fact, the prominent status of factory veterinarians undoubtedly affected the views of many workers. Russo recalled what a Lordstown worker named Ed York told him in an interview with his book Steeltown USA: "I have 500,000 Vietnamese trying to kill me, but I survived. What can the management do to me? ?"

But pure anti-dictatorship resistance is not the motivation for the strike. In the workers’ own words, their main goal is to “be treated like American workers,” Cowie said, “not as part of a profitable machine.”

This novel attitude towards work quickly won an attractive new name: as BusinessWeek calls it, "Lodstown Syndrome" is featured in publications ranging from "The Country" to "Playboy." National topics. Although Newsweek referred to the strike as "Industrial Woodstock," the Wall Street Journal editorial page-hardly a friend of labor-lamented the inhumanity of the Lordstown workers in an editorial titled "Soul Must Panic" change.

There is no doubt that GM executives are also panicking. According to the New York Times, by mid-March, the lost production, including 50,000 unsold Vegas, was estimated to have cost 150 million U.S. dollars (approximately 916 million U.S. dollars today). Due to the undecided production of Vega, GMAD was forced to give in, which exceeded the usual expectations under Godfrey. Many workers who were laid off in 1971 have regained their jobs. Those who were suspended for disciplinary reasons were rehired and paid back wages. Essentially, the factory was restored to its pre-GMAD conditions-although the assembly line maintained a top speed of 100 cars per hour, according to Bryner at work reports and New York Times reports on the factory. Very satisfied with the terms, the workers in Lordstown voted to end the strike on March 26. The next morning, 22 days after the strike began, they returned to Las Vegas.

Although the strike has ended, the country’s business and political leaders continue to think hard about the syndrome of the same name and the deeper discomfort exposed by the strike. These dissatisfaction sparked intense cultural introspection, including Senate hearings and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy's failed efforts to pass the "Worker Alienation Research and Technical Assistance Act of 1972."

However, the most notable thing is the work of the large-scale task force commissioned by Elliot Richardson. Elliot Richardson was a long-term civil servant who served as Richardson at the time. President Richard Nixon's Minister of Health, Education and Welfare. The result of this work is a report entitled "Working in the United States", which offers courses that could make the workplace—and even American society—become better.

This huge report was published at the end of 1972 and explored the quality of work life and its impact on American society. In its grim and firm findings, GM's Lordstown plant was listed as A.

The report first boldly asserted that work is not only an important source of self-esteem and self-worth, but also an important source of human nature. The report goes on to say that when work becomes rote and highly standardized, workers cannot distinguish their labor from that of animals. The worst example of "unsatisfied work" comes from the automotive industry, "the assembly line, its typical manifestation".

The problem lies in the "scientific management" principle pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor, that is, the two key variables that determine factory efficiency are unit cost and output. Taylor's strategy overcomes individual skill differences by reducing craftsmanship to the most basic component tasks, thereby making it possible to standardize the work quality of thousands of workers. This concept has long ago helped increase factory productivity by making mass production possible. Automation simply advances this process by allowing technology to take over certain tasks in the chain of activities.

The author of the report wrote: "This is the attitude behind the construction of the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, which is the newest and most'efficient' auto plant in the United States."

They said that the Lordstown strike in 1972 "highlighted the role of human factors in productivity." According to the report, the problem is that because technology allows management to further subdivide production into simpler tasks, the work itself has become so boring and abstract that it "dehumanizes" workers. This “current concept of industrial efficiency is convenient but mistakenly ignores the social part of the equation.” The report suggests that if there is no human satisfaction with craftsmanship and creativity to motivate workers, it will take more and more authoritarianism for workers to continue their tasks. Measures-this strategy is destined to be counterproductive. After all, the author asks: "If his workers go on strike because of the oppressive and dehumanizing experience of working on the'perfect' production line, what are the benefits for the employer to have a'perfect and efficient' assembly line?"

The authors say that, in fact, technology has failed to fulfill its promise of freeing humans from drudgery and squeezing profits from their talents. In contrast, new jobs created usually require minimal expertise, thus preventing workers from honing their skills. This hinders career mobility and keeps people in the same state of boredom for decades. Nonetheless, the United States continues to provide more and more rigorous education for young people—even if work and life have little opportunity to apply it.

Changes in the economic structure have exacerbated these dynamics. The large companies and bureaucracies that have emerged in the past few decades have organized work to maximize top-down central control and stifle the independence of workers. The author believes that although the riots in Lordstown put "blue-collar depression" in the first place, the rise of computers has also caused a similar "white-collar dilemma."

"With the shift from manufacturing to service," they wrote, "the tyranny of machines may be being replaced by the tyranny of bureaucracy."

However, companies have not adapted to their huge impact on American society. Under the status quo, companies are free to ignore the social costs they incur, including "work-related illnesses" such as alcoholism, drug abuse, mental and physical illnesses, violence, welfare dependence, and political alienation.

The report’s broad recommendations can be distilled into a simple two-part reform. If the United States is to treat the root cause of Lordstown’s syndrome, not just its symptoms, American companies must manage their employees in a way that encourages their participation and allow them to share short-term profits. According to the report, these changes will help lead to "healthier and more efficient workers and citizens." The author pointed out that although the implementation of these changes will be undertaken by companies and unions, the government can act as a catalyst for reforms, and cited the Swedish government's measures to help companies such as Saab and Volvo change their assembly line operations.

Will this analysis prompt the government to take the lead in promoting the cultural shift advocated by its authors? We will never know. Whatever momentum this report might have, it was quickly overwhelmed by political scandals. In 1973, Richardson was appointed as Attorney General. Only a few months later, in the infamous Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon ordered him to fire the special prosecutor who was investigating the Watergate scandal. In a move that shocked the country, Richardson resigned. Less than a year later, Nixon also stepped down.

The greater hope and ambition of Work in America — the vision of satisfying work itself as essential to the health of American society and democracy — now only exists in the footnotes of academic journals. The free market ideology that became the doctrine of the Republican Party in the late 1970s (and severely affected the Democratic Party in the 1990s) completely rejected the report’s overall notion that people and their jobs are community resources-therefore, how to choose the value of these resources And distribution should ultimately depend on society and enterprises.

In the end, General Motors finally gave up its authoritarian management style. It began to allow workers to participate more actively in the production process, and the increasing attention to ergonomics improved the physical stress of working conditions. Russo of Youngstown State University said that although these reforms continued throughout the 1970s, they were mainly in response to the Lordstown strike.

However, for most assemblers, the tedious and inflexible situation continues. Former Lordstown worker Kenneth Picklesimer installed springs on axles for 17 years. "I prefer to mix it up, but I don't have the opportunity or choice because... there are too many people with higher qualifications who can bid and get other jobs."

At the same time, GM continues to spend heavily on large capital investments, believing that the secret of competitiveness lies in replacing humans with technology. But like Lordstown, this expenditure has had little effect. As car analyst Maryann Keller wrote in the book Rude Awakening published in 1989, a GM executive observed that between 1980 and 1985, the company spent 450 The billion-dollar capital investment is jaw-dropping. Despite these expenditures, its global market share rose by only one percentage point to 22%. "With the same money, we can directly buy Toyota and Nissan," the executive said-this will immediately increase GM's market share to 40%.

One of the victims of the Lordstown showdown was Vega. After its debut, sales peaked in 1974; in 1977, General Motors was completely retired. Although the strike undoubtedly tarnished Vega's reputation, the facts proved that General Motors' quality problems were deeper and more persistent. By the mid-1980s, design and engineering flaws represented by Vega had condensed into reputation.

"General Motors is the object of ridicule at the suburban table," Harvard management guru Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote in her influential 1984 book "Masters of Change." "Cars are a common topic, and everyone I meet seems to have an anecdote to explain why American automakers are losing out to Japanese manufacturers. In all these stories, cost is not so much a perception of quality differences. It's better to say it's a problem."

In addition, the dynamics of the US auto market has undergone profound changes during this period. After two oil prices hit the United States in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, resulting in a permanent increase in gasoline prices, GM's albatross — unable to make small, fuel-efficient cars for the masses — became a real weakness.

By the late 1970s, Japanese automakers had achieved decisive victories in the battle for the subcompact car market-they had won in terms of performance, reliability, and cost. how? Facts have proved that car quality is not strictly a function of factory machinery. In fact, the secret of Japanese success may come directly from working in the United States: believing that people want to do a good job and treat them accordingly.

When Honda established the first Japanese-branded American car factory in Marysville, Ohio in 1978, it brought values ​​that were very different from those prevailing in Lordstown.

At General Motors—as well as Chrysler and Ford—factory life is organized by a distinct, ubiquitous hierarchy. Managers like heated parking lots, where cars are washed every day, and the fuel tank is filled with free gasoline. They wear ties and have lunch in the luxurious executive restaurant.

Not at the new Honda factory. Parking is strictly carried out on a first-come, first-served basis. The managers wear the same uniforms as the fitters and change their clothes in the same dressing room. As Ingrassia stated in the Crash Course, Honda insists on calling its assemblers "colleagues", not just "workers". Shigeru Yoshida, who led Honda’s efforts, explained that the key is to make managers and "employees" think they have a common sense of purpose.

It's not just Honda. As the trade expert Clyde Prestowitz (Clyde Prestowitz) stated in the book "Trading Places" (Trading Places) published in 1988, Nissan Motor launched the first in Smyrna, Tennessee in 1983. In an American beachhead, a Ford veteran named Marvin Runyon was hired. Runyon wore the same blue jumpsuit as the fitter and had lunch with them in the company cafeteria. He said that bridging the symbolic gap between the assembly line and the executive office is the key to establishing employee identity with the company.

Among all Japanese automakers, Toyota is known for transforming culture into consistently high productivity and quality. Toyota's success lies in its management's trust in employees to find and correct defects. The company groups its assembly lines into "quality circles", which are small teams responsible for quality control. The task of these teams is to find defects when the car goes offline. When a worker finds a defect, he has multiple repair options. Among them, the most extreme option — and symbolic — is the Andong Line, an emergency brake that stops the assembly line as soon as it is pulled.

Economist Paul Collier provided some useful financial background to illustrate the importance of this responsibility. "By its very nature, assembly line production is so integrated that the cost of stopping the production line is very high. At the Toyota plant, it costs $10,000 per minute," the Oxford University professor explained in his new book "The Future of Capitalism" . In other words, pulling the power cord unnecessarily will cost the company more in a few seconds than the worker's own monthly income. Collier said this power "shows that management truly trusts their employees to work for the company, not against it."

The Andon Rope example involves more than management strategy. Instead, it reveals the core difference between Toyota and GM's basic assumptions about motivating people to work.

"Fundamentally speaking, American companies often don't trust workers," Keller wrote in The Rude Awakening. "There is a general attitude,'If you give them an inch, they will walk a mile' because they really don't want to work. For example, the idea that a worker in a factory has the right to stop the production line to solve the problem is heresy. Wouldn't such permission lead to the widespread suspension of every whim?"

Obviously, not at the Toyota plant. The operating assumption is that everyone is there to do a good job. The job of management is to help assemblers obtain the resources they need. The company has neither the concept of "quality control" nor the inspectors responsible for its execution. It goes without saying that everyone treats their work with the highest standards. Ensuring flawlessness is not the last step in the production process; the whole process is expected.

Keller believes that, by contrast, GM's distrust of its workers ultimately prevented it from making great cars. This is why the company turned the assembly work into an interlocking chain of discrete tasks, performed by robots as much as possible. The definition of responsibilities is narrow. Workers have to perform their specific tasks again and again. The managers made sure they did. But no one focused on the entire product. In this highly fragmented process, "quality" is not a common standard; it is a step in the final process, when a "quality control" inspector (or, under Godfrey's supervision, a computer) check has been completed car. By then, it will be too late to demand any more.

Instead of building flawless cars, workers simply complete the work assigned to them. The workers did not build cars together to motivate their ambitious goals. They cannot control the effectiveness of the process or the quality of the parts used. Therefore, the management relies on threats and intimidation to keep them moving forward-in the process, it has deepened the gap between us and them.

GM missed the opportunity to learn from the Lordstown strike. Fortunately, another opportunity appeared ten years later-under the initiative of General Motors.

In 1983, General Motors boldly cooperated with Toyota to produce small cars at a factory near Oakland, California—the company was renamed NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Company). The goal is to let General Motors managers grasp the secrets of Japan's competitiveness. Keller said that GM’s bosses thought Toyota’s manufacturing prowess could be attributed to its automation. The 16 American employees sent by GM executives to NUMMI learned that Toyota's excellent quality and efficiency are largely due to its training and attention to employees. The results are impressive.

"At the time, GM had a scoring system, and 145 was perfect. If it reaches 120, most GM plants will celebrate," Ingrassia wrote in Comeback. "Nummi soon started producing cars with an average of 15 points or more higher. In the end, Nummi even made some cars reach the perfect 145."

But nothing happened. "Instead of going back to the 16 of us and saying,'Here are some secrets, what is it? How do we use it to our advantage? No one has ever asked us this question," said Steve, one of the 16 employees. Steve Bera told NPR in 2010. Bella resigned in frustration, ending his 20-year career at General Motors—and taking away the expertise he had accumulated in NUMMI.

Nearly three years after the Lordstown strike, the quality of General Motors is still affected by the deep mistrust between employers and employees. In 1998, Keith Bradsher of the New York Times reported: “The factory’s working rules are often the least flexible of the three automakers. Other tasks.” Workers worry that if work rules don’t exist, the foreman will make unreasonable demands. "Bradsher said that by contrast, Ford and Chyrsler prioritize labor relations, and more generally, treat their workers better.

Its failure in the small car market helped push General Motors — and other companies in Detroit — toward a larger car market with higher profit margins. This strategy has proven to be profitable, but it also has risks. Throughout the 2000s, oil prices rose steadily and peaked in July 2008. This was one of several factors that pushed General Motors into US government-led bankruptcy during the financial crisis. Perhaps fittingly, that year, Toyota finally ousted General Motors and became the world's largest car manufacturer-General Motors has claimed this position for 77 years.

Even bankruptcy did not hinder GM's small car ambitions. In 2010, just like in 1968, General Motors challenged again. And, again, the hype is intense. The Chevrolet Cruze is the main new model to debut since Chapter 11.

And, naturally, Lordstown will succeed. Mark Reuss, President of General Motors North America, said in the New York Times (pay area): "The rebirth of the U.S. economy began in Lordstown, where a world-class large-capacity vehicle was built in the heart of the United States. Car." Launch time. "This is the first time we have proven that we will win in this market."

This is a reasonable choice. As the best-selling model abroad, the Cruze can travel 40 miles per gallon of gasoline, while the Honda Civic has 36 miles. But since the car's debut in the United States, low fuel prices have rekindled Americans' intermittent love affair with trucks and SUVs, which has dealt a cruel blow to car sales. Last year, Americans purchased approximately 4.6 million passenger vehicles, a decrease of approximately 18% from 2014.

Under the leadership of former engineer Mary Barra, who took over as CEO in 2014, GM now puts high-quality cars and safety standards first, sales and market share damn it. But old habits are hard to change. Like the rest of Detroit, General Motors dominates the U.S. large car market, allowing it to earn a premium far higher than its profit on small cars. Coupled with the decline in small car sales, this is why it is not particularly surprising that General Motors announced in November 2018 that it would cease production of Cruze and most other cars. In fact, GM is not alone: ​​Ford announced last spring that it would stop producing new cars for the US market, while Fiat Chrysler abandoned US passenger car production in 2016.

One of the many reasons why working in the United States is so fascinating is the disturbing accuracy of its social decline predictions. At this point, Lordstown once again becomes a convenient Chart A. The unemployment rate in the Youngstown area around Lordstown is higher than any other city in Ohio. As the closure of steel mills that began in the late 1970s promoted deindustrialization, the crime rate in Youngstown rose; the city was notorious for organized crime and corruption. The opioid crisis hit Youngstown particularly hard.

As for the fate of the Lordstown plant, it is still possible for General Motors to upgrade the plant to manufacture one of its new models, as the Youngstown residents we interviewed quickly emphasized. (General Motors did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.) Or, the Lordstown Council may continue to stand, but it is empty. This is a huge roadside reminder that corporate elites are destined to deprive humans of skills, The need for learning reduces labor costs by reimagining people as machines, outside of independence and production purposes.

For Tim O’Hara, GM’s recent decision in Lordstown is ironic, because the plant is now—finally—“manufacturing what we may have been The best quality car ever built." He was talking about Cruze. Last year, Consumer Reports rated it as the best compact car on the market, a title usually dominated by Toyota and Honda small cars. After half a century of hard work, Lordstown finally broke the curse of Vega.

Or is there? Last year, GM’s Cruze sales decreased by nearly a third compared to 2014. It may be that General Motors relied too much on marketing to Red State consumers who liked its trucks very much, at the expense of the opportunity to reach consumers of small cars. But Kenneth Picklesimer still traced the original sin of GM's small car quality back to the early 1970s. "I think this view can be traced back to Vega," he said.

Picklesimer retired in 2015. The timing was good: his last 12 years in Lordstown were his best time. Finally freed from the spring bolt connection, he was assigned to a new job, coordinating with engineers to design parts and plan production for Cruze and his predecessors.

This is the long-awaited breakthrough from decades of repetition. But the significance of this work to Picklesimer is much more than that. "I love it. It gives me the opportunity to learn and teach others. I can make changes to... Cruze and make suggestions to make them better cars that are easier to assemble," he said. "We can make a difference this way."

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