Download or read book Career Opportunities in the Automotive Industry written by G. Michael Kennedy and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One in seven Americans is employed in some capacity by the automotive industry, and the number of cars and other vehicles on our roads is rising steadily.
Download or read book Wrecked written by Joshua Murray and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, automobile manufacturing was the largest, most profitable industry in the United States and residents of industry hubs like Detroit and Flint, Michigan had some of the highest incomes in the country. Over the last half-century, the industry has declined, and American automakers now struggle to stay profitable. How did the most prosperous industry in the richest country in the world crash and burn? In Wrecked, sociologists Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz offer an unprecedented historical-sociological analysis of the downfall of the auto industry. Through an in-depth examination of labor relations and the production processes of automakers in the U.S. and Japan both before and after World War II, they demonstrate that the decline of the American manufacturers was the unintended consequence of their attempts to weaken the bargaining power of their unions. Today Japanese and many European automakers produce higher quality cars at lower cost than their American counterparts thanks to a flexible form of production characterized by long-term sole suppliers, assembly and supply plants located near each other, and just-in-time delivery of raw materials. While this style of production was, in fact, pioneered in the U.S. prior to World War II, in the years after the war, American automakers deliberately dismantled this system. As Murray and Schwartz show, flexible production accelerated innovation but also facilitated workers’ efforts to unionize plants and carry out work stoppages. To reduce the efficacy of strikes and combat the labor militancy that flourished between the Depression and the postwar period, the industry dispersed production across the nation, began maintaining large stockpiles of inventory, and eliminated single sourcing. While this restructuring of production did ultimately reduce workers’ leverage, it also decreased production efficiency and innovation. The U.S. auto industry has struggled ever since to compete with foreign automakers, and formerly thriving motor cities have suffered the consequences of mass deindustrialization. Murray and Schwartz argue that new business models that reinstate flexible production and prioritize innovation rather than cheap labor could stem the outsourcing of jobs and help revive the auto industry. By clarifying the historical relationships between production processes, organized labor, and industrial innovation, Wrecked provides new insights into the inner workings and decline of the U.S. auto industry.
Download or read book American Automobile Workers 1900 1933 written by Joyce S. Peterson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1987-11-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive history of automobile workers in the pre-union era. It covers changes in the kinds of workers who staffed the auto factories, developments in the labor process and in overall conditions of work, daily life outside the factories, informal responses of workers to routinized, monotonous, and highly structured work, and automobile worker unions before the creation of the United Automobile Workers. Although the 1920s were seen at the time as a period of peaceful and cooperative labor relations, author Joyce Peterson looks beneath the surface to discover the many ways in which auto workers expressed their displeasure with and attempted to fight against working conditions. The book also examines the Briggs strike of 1933, the first strike to significantly register the impact of the Great Depression upon the automobile industry and to mark the end of the pre-union era. The automobile industry was a model of twentieth century mass production techniques, of managerial organization, and of labor relations. Studying automobile workers in their historical and social setting explains a great deal about the nature of modern industry—how it affects the daily life and work of employees and how workers see themselves as individuals and members of a working class.
Download or read book Autowork written by Robert Asher and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of original essays on the history of work experience in automobile factories, from 1913 to the present.
Download or read book Labor and Automobiles written by Robert W. Dunn and published by Edizioni Savine. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “...The purpose of this book is to present the true conditions of workers in automobile plants, and to contrast the wages of the workers in this industry with the millions of dollars in profits made by the corporations. This analysis is of particular importance, since the technical organization of the automobile industry has been held up, the world over, as the model achievement of American capitalism, and since its mass production and "labor management" methods are being copied by European corporations. The problem of how to unionize the automobile workers is one of the most immediate and pressing ones now before the American labor movement. About 450,000 workers in car, body, parts and accessory plants are outside the ranks of organized labor. Why has no sustained effort been made to arouse these speeded-up workers to fight for organization and better conditions? It is vitally important for us not only to suggest an answer to this question, but to point out how unionization of these hundreds of thousands of unskilled workers may be achieved....” ROBERT W. DUNN - February, 1929.
Download or read book Farewell to the Factory written by Ruth Milkman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study exposes the human side of the decline of the U.S. auto industry, tracing the experiences of two key groups of General Motors workers: those who took a cash buyout and left the factory, and those who remained and felt the effects of new technology and other workplace changes. Milkman's extensive interviews and surveys of workers from the Linden, New Jersey, GM plant reveal their profound hatred for the factory regime—a longstanding discontent made worse by the decline of the auto workers' union in the 1980s. One of the leading social historians of the auto industry, Ruth Milkman moves between changes in the wider industry and those in the Linden plant, bringing both a workers' perspective and a historical perspective to the study. Milkman finds that, contrary to the assumption in much of the literature on deindustrialization, the Linden buyout-takers express no nostalgia for the high-paying manufacturing jobs they left behind. Given the chance to make a new start in the late 1980s, they were eager to leave the plant with its authoritarian, prison-like conditions, and few have any regrets about their decision five years later. Despite the fact that the factory was retooled for robotics and that the management hoped to introduce a new participatory system of industrial relations, workers who remained express much less satisfaction with their lives and jobs. Milkman is adamant about allowing the workers to speak for themselves, and their hopes, frustrations, and insights add fresh and powerful perspectives to a debate that is often carried out over the heads of those whose lives are most affected by changes in the industry.
Download or read book When Good Jobs Go Bad written by Jeffrey S. Rothstein and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Chinese factories making cheap toys for export, to sweatshops in Bangladesh where name-brand garments are sewn—studies on the impact of globalization on workers have tended to focus on the worst jobs and the worst conditions. But in When Good Jobs Go Bad, Jeffrey Rothstein looks at the impact of globalization on a major industry—the North American auto industry—to reveal that globalization has had a deleterious effect on even the most valued of blue-collar jobs. Rothstein argues that the consolidation of the Mexican and U.S.-Canadian auto industries, the expanding number of foreign automakers in North America, and the spread of lean production have all undermined organized labor and harmed workers. Focusing on three General Motors plants assembling SUVs—an older plant in Janesville, Wisconsin; a newer and more viable plant in Arlington, Texas; and a “greenfield site” (a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility) in Silao, Mexico—When Good Jobs Go Bad shows how global competition has made nonstop, monotonous, standardized routines crucial for the survival of a plant, and it explains why workers and their local unions struggle to resist. For instance, in the United States, General Motors forced workers to accept intensified labor by threatening to close plants, which led local unions to adopt “keep the plant open” as their main goal. At its new factory in Silao, GM had hand-picked the union—one opposed to strikes and committed to labor-management cooperation—before it hired the first worker. Rothstein’s engaging comparative analysis, which incorporates the viewpoints of workers, union officials, and management, sheds new light on labor’s loss of bargaining power in recent decades, and highlights the negative impact of globalization on all jobs, both good and bad, from the sweatshop to the assembly line.
Download or read book America s Other Automakers written by Timothy J. Minchin and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2018 almost half of all vehicles made in North America were produced at foreign-owned plants, and the sector was on track to monopolize the market. Despite this, the industry has been overlooked compared with its domestic counterpart, both in scholarship and popular memory. Redressing this neglect, America’s Other Automakers provides a new history of the foreignowned auto sector, the first to extensively draw on archival sources and to articulate the human agency of participants, including workers, managers, and industry recruiters. Timothy J. Minchin challenges the view that the industry’s growth primarily reflected incentives, stressing human agency and the complexity of individual stories instead. Deeply human in its approach, the book also explores the industry’s impact on grassroots communities, showing that it had more costs than supporters acknowledged. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, America’s Other Automakers uncovers significant tensions over unionization, reports of discriminatory hiring, and unease about the industry’s rapid growth, critically exploring seven large assembly facilities and their impact on the communities in which they were built.
Download or read book Lean Work written by Steve Babson and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the controversial Japanese model of lean production and its impact on work and workers in the global auto industry.
Download or read book Between Fordism and Flexibility written by Steven Tolliday and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 1992 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the development of the automobile industry from its origins to the present in a perspective informed by current upheavals in markets, technology and work organization. The volume examines the international diffusion of the Fordist model, Fordism being the manufacture of standardized products using special-purpose machinery and unskilled labour. The book goes on to consider how far the recent changes in the industry mark a break with Fordism and draws on the implications for industrial relations and trade union strategy
Download or read book After Lean Production written by Thomas A. Kochan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly every country that produces cars views the automobile industry as strategically important because of its direct economic significance and because it serves as a bellwether for innovation in employment conditions. In this book, industrial relations experts from eleven countries consider the state of the industry worldwide. They are particularly interested in assessing whether the loudly heralded model of lean production initiated by Toyota has become pervasive.The contributors focus on employment practices: the way work is organized, how workers and managers interact, the way worker representatives respond to lean production strategies, and the nature of the adaptation and innovation process itself.
Download or read book Employment and the American Automobile Industry 1982 written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Subcommittee on Employment and Productivity and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book U S Automotive Industry written by Stephen Cooney and published by Nova Novinka. This book was released on 2007 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over one million Americans are employed in manufacturing motor vehicles, equipment and parts. But the industry has changed dramatically since the U.S. "Big Three" motor vehicle corporations (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) produced the overwhelming majority of cars and light trucks sold in the United States, and directly employed many people themselves. By 2003, most passenger cars sold in the U.S. market were either imported or manufactured by foreign-based producers at new North American plants (so-called "transplant" facilities). The Big Three now dominate only in light trucks, and are also now being challenged there by the foreign brands. The Big Three have shed about 600,000 U.S. jobs since 1980, while about one-quarter of Americans employed in automotive manufacturing (nearly 300,000) work for the foreign-owned companies. It is clear that the U.S. automotive industry has undergone many drastic changes that have had a net adverse effect on American interests. This book examines the causes of these changes. Congressional acts, increasingly stringent emission laws, the effects of NAFTA, labour unions and globalisation are all within the scope of this book.
Download or read book The automobile industry and its workers written by and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Transforming the Latin American Automobile Industry written by John P. Tuman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study looks at union responses to the changes in the Latin American car industry in the last 15 years. It considers the impact of the shift towards export production and regional integration, and the effect of political changes on union reponses.
Download or read book Wrecked written by Joshua Murray and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, automobile manufacturing was the largest, most profitable industry in the United States and residents of industry hubs like Detroit and Flint, Michigan had some of the highest incomes in the country. Over the last half-century, the industry has declined, and American automakers now struggle to stay profitable. How did the most prosperous industry in the richest country in the world crash and burn? In Wrecked, sociologists Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz offer an unprecedented historical-sociological analysis of the downfall of the auto industry. Through an in-depth examination of labor relations and the production processes of automakers in the U.S. and Japan both before and after World War II, they demonstrate that the decline of the American manufacturers was the unintended consequence of their attempts to weaken the bargaining power of their unions. Today Japanese and many European automakers produce higher quality cars at lower cost than their American counterparts thanks to a flexible form of production characterized by long-term sole suppliers, assembly and supply plants located near each other, and just-in-time delivery of raw materials. While this style of production was, in fact, pioneered in the U.S. prior to World War II, in the years after the war, American automakers deliberately dismantled this system. As Murray and Schwartz show, flexible production accelerated innovation but also facilitated workers’ efforts to unionize plants and carry out work stoppages. To reduce the efficacy of strikes and combat the labor militancy that flourished between the Depression and the postwar period, the industry dispersed production across the nation, began maintaining large stockpiles of inventory, and eliminated single sourcing. While this restructuring of production did ultimately reduce workers’ leverage, it also decreased production efficiency and innovation. The U.S. auto industry has struggled ever since to compete with foreign automakers, and formerly thriving motor cities have suffered the consequences of mass deindustrialization. Murray and Schwartz argue that new business models that reinstate flexible production and prioritize innovation rather than cheap labor could stem the outsourcing of jobs and help revive the auto industry. By clarifying the historical relationships between production processes, organized labor, and industrial innovation, Wrecked provides new insights into the inner workings and decline of the U.S. auto industry.
Download or read book Auto Slavery written by David Gartman and published by New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
