Over the past half-century, the Japanese auto industry, led by Toyota Motors, has risen to the peak of world car production, taking an ever-increasing share of the world market away from the US companies that had controlled the industry since the birth of the assembly line. What accounts for this fundamentally important development? Opinions are, unsurprisingly, sharply divided. Mainstream media, defending US employers, attribute American firms’ declining competitiveness to the recalcitrance of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which it views as defending the laziness and greed of its members, who blindly resist every management initiative at every level, from the shop floor to the bargaining table. Some union sympathizers, by contrast, including supportive intellectuals and academics, see it as resulting from employers’ insistence on controlling the labor process and seeking to raise profits through intensifying exploitation — at a time when Japanese producers have already clearly demonstrated the necessity of capital–labor cooperation for achieving their historically unprecedented productivity growth and rates of innovation. The differences in these two perspectives could not be starker, yet both miss the real transformation of the auto industry.
The Logic of “Flexible Production
In their article “Collateral Damage: How Capital’s War on Labor Killed Detroit,” Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz offer an original, highly sophisticated, and comprehensive version of the latter approach. They argue that, starting in the 1940s, the US auto industry gave up on the system of “flexible production,” originally installed by Henry Ford, in order to implement a new production system that aimed to defeat the unions and assure management’s dictatorship over the labor process. Flexible production had not ceased to deliver record rates of profit and increases in productivity, but it had become unbearable to the Big Three employers because of the leverage it provided workers. It depended for an important part of its productive efficiency on locating factories close to one another in order to facilitate coordination between them, relied on a single source (“mother plant”) to provide key components for the whole system, and employed just-in-time methods of delivering inventories, all of which made for pressure points that workers could attack in order to disrupt production.
The new system of “dispersed production,” according to Murray and Schwartz, sought to shift the balance of power by depriving workers of precisely these pressure points, opening the way for managers to step up class struggle to intensify labor and hold down wages. The Big Three accomplished this by dispersing factories over wide geographical areas, building redundant plants that duplicated one another’s output, and dismantling just-in-time delivery. They therefore chose to step up control over the labor process and directly assault workers rather than enhance labor-management collaboration to create a faster-growing “pie” that could simultaneously support higher profits and better compensation to workers.
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