'Black Monday' looms over Ford's futureDetNews.com, MI -
... As a result, Ford's factory utilization rate is the lowest in the industry -- just 79 percent, Harbour Consulting said last week. ...
Stamping plant braces for Ford cutbacks
Wixom plant might be shut down
Ford closures to hit 29,000 jobs, 10 plants
Tomorrow Ford North America will announce massive job cuts and plant closures. The result of poor productivity? No the product of poor planning. Yep capitalism is all about planning, that's why Herr Dr. Marx saw it as revolutionary. Capitalism as reflected by large scale industrial production should be close to socialism with its ability to plan for production.
But in the eighties the Toyotaization of capitalism changed all that, it created just in time production, producing only goods needed immediately for production rather than stockpiling them. While this produced short term economic gains, it left capitalist corporations vulnerable to increased shortfalls due to strikes, natural disasters, or economic problems.
Toyotaism
Toyotaism is the Japanese version of Taylorism which, in this case, is a management technique that encourages workers to internalize self-monitoring and correction and that results in exploitation (Steingard and Fitzgibbons, 1993). Eiji Toyoda, founder of Toyota, visited Ford’s Rouge River Plant in Detroit, Michigan, USA, then the largest industrial plant in the US, and studied it during the spring of 1950 (Womack et al., 1990, pp. 48-9). That study, and an earlier one his uncle Kiichiro Toyoda conducted at Ford in the 1920s, became the basis of Toyotaism’s lean production.
Toyotaism is a modernistic discourse, which is hierarchical, capitalistic and environmentally exploitative (Boje and Dennehy, 1993; Clegg, 1989, 1990; Jameson, 1984a, 1984b, 1986). A sub-discourse, in the modernistic discourse, is the myth of progress. “Progress” is a privileged discourse and is given the power to define reality, to judge what is and is not “civilized”, “modern” and “superior”. In Toyotaism, the Toyota model of greenfield start-ups is deemed to be “progress” over what existed before. It is the easternization of less developed countries (Kaplinsky, 1994). The discourse of “progress” degrades the past as “inferior”, “inefficient” and “primitive” or said differently, “progress” confers privilege the economically and militarily more powerful version of reality over the weaker, to define what is and what is not civilized.
Kaizen’s emphasis on continuous quality improvement makes it a discourse concerning progress. Post-modern organizational theorists argue that kaizen is exploitative for it is stressful and encourages personal sacrifice for increased production quotas and corporate profits (Boje and Winsor, 1993; Redher, 1992; Steingard and Fitzgibbons, 1993; Winsor, 1993). It is a fanatical one-way system in which tasks have been heavily based on time and motion studies (Parker and Slaughter, 1988, p. 36). Job enrichment in kaizen systems creates the illusion of empowerment, all the while increasing employee interchangeability (Winsor, 1993, p. 115) and encouraging self-regulation, which results in increased output (Coriot, 1980). Self-management and worker control is an illusion. In reality there is a machine pace, team-peer pressure and intimidation (Redher, 1992). Workers are coerced into giving suggestions for improvement by publicly posting the quantity of suggestions per worker, and by linking suggestions to performance appraisal (Imai, 1986, p. 15; Winsor, 1993, p. 116).
Meanwhile large transnational corporations like Ford were buying up automobile companies in Europe and Asia in order to produce vehicles in those markets. But what they ended up producing was more American vehicles for those markets, which did not meet the need of their consumer markets. Thus Ford moved in a new direction, one that ultimately was a management decision of the CEO's and one that had disastrous results as the average worker at Ford is about to discover tomorrow.
Ford's fight for survivalWhat's happened is that Ford has almost completely reversed the shifts made in the radical reorganization a decade ago called "Ford 2000." The brainchild of former chairman and CEO Alex Trotman, Ford 2000 attempted to adjust to the increasing globalization of the auto business by eliminating regional organizations in Europe, Asia and South America and replacing them with five vehicle centers. Each of the five centers would be charged with developing a single class of vehicles -- large rear-drive sedans, small front-drive econoboxes -- and marketing them around the world.
Ford 2000 looked good on paper but really messed things up. A lot of local market knowledge disappeared with the elimination of the regional organizations, and lots of experienced managers went out the door too. Then, under Trotman's successor, Jac Nasser, the vehicle centers stopped sharing common components like air conditioners and shock absorbers and began developing their own, causing an explosion in costs.
Now Ford has recentralized product development and engineering to enforce an economical sharing of platforms and components across product lines. So engineering for a new small car platform known as C1 will serve as the underpinnings for cars marketed by Ford, Volvo and Mazda.
Ironically the very nature of planned mass production economics under capitalism was given a name. Fordism. It is the very model that Lenin saw the Soviet Union adopting for manufacturing, that Stalin implemented and was the ideal of production after WWII in all of the Pacific Asian countries. Manufacturing never left Fordism behind, it merely tinkered with aspects of the managing production but never the skelton of the model.
It was this new model of globalization, globalized industry;Toyotaism, that Ford management did not or would not adapt to.The could not move beyond Fordist production models, no matter their new forms of flexibility, because they tried to reproduce Ford industrial production models in each country not taking into account the ability to link plant production across national boundries. For example in North America Canadian plants are more efficient and modernized than American Plants, as are parts plants in Mexico. But despite this and NAFTA, Ford keeps plants open in the U.S. not for production purposes but for poltical optics. Hargrove worried about Ford's Monday announcementThe closing of the Rover plant in the UK last year shows how global automanufacturing no longer relies upon national based plant operations. The result of the closing of Rover caused only a momentary outrage. There was no General Strike like when Thatcher closed the Coal Mines. Rover occured during the election and was a poltical non-issue. New Labour under Tony Blair gained an unprecidented Third Government. Despite protest votes. Rover was less of an issue than Blairs stand on Iraq.
Automotive production is now world wide. And in fact we suffer classic capitalist overproduction in the market. Toyota has become the number one car maker in the world because it has adapted its production modes to be developed within other nations, with parts productions centred in Japan. Toyota is expanding its North American operations out of Canada, not the U.S. based on exactly this model.
Ford and GM maintain full car and truck production in North America, and compete with their own offshoots in Europe and Asia. This is their problem, they have only accepted globalization as a means of distribution not as a means of production.
Emerging Organizational Forms: Beyond Fordism
- This chapter analyzes our industries and postindustrial sectors, which are structured by flexibility, greater rationalization and the implementation of communication and information technology. Fordism, Toyotaism, Lean Production and Flexibility Specialization changed our work and our societies. These successful producers acquired advantages in the market by their ability to respond in a prompt and flexible way to signs given by the competitive market. The competition regarded price, quality, demand and delivery. The producers had to be able to adapt to the new form of production by readjusting their productive processes in order to reach the demands of the market. This ability reformulate relies on their strategy use of a type of machinery that can manufacture products.
- Fordism
- Fordism consists of just-in-time inventory control, and leaderless work groups. This approach to automated production literally deskilled the workers, which at the end of Fordism marked a significant setback for the working class. Fordism refers to upholding the loyalty of he workers by profiting from a high-income economy, by generating mass products through the assembly line techniques. The characteristics of Fordism consist of the following economies of scale, technical control, specialization, repetition and the separation of mental for manual work. The labor of Fordism The Fordist labor market had little to none managerial and professional elite with minimal job training required. Greater productivity is achieved by the development of efficiency in manufacturing. The use of the assembly line is to be able determine the sequences of operations for the creation of each product. The Fordist economy competition and process protects the national markets and creates global competition. It has been known to bring about mass production of standardized products and compete with others forms of production by cutting the cost.
- Toyotaism
- Totyotism refers to the management culture and labor processes that are dominant during the latter part of the twentieth century. Toyotaism depends on the cooperation of labor management, multiple skills and problem solving. Fordism had an external method of putting on pressure to increase production. Through Toyotaism the pressure is no longer from outside, but is exerted from within the work of the team. The Toyotists labor market has diverse career ladders, excellent participation and long lasting job placement. Toyotaism is known for its "just-in-time" production, quality control throughout the entire flow of production and prompt reaction to the market requirements.
- Lean Production
- Lean production is based on doing more with less, meaning less time, inventory, space, labor, and money. The Lean Production model consists of careful selection, job switching, simplifying procedures, speeding up production eliminating waste and surveillance. The lean production concept is a way of improving processes through customer relationships, fast product development and manufacturing, and the collaboration with its suppliers. One main element of lean production is elimination waste elimination, which implies continuous workflow and customer satisfaction. When these elements are focused on it expands in the areas of cost, quality and delivery.
- The Flexibility Paradigm
- The flexible specialization (post-fordism) strategy was to obtain advantages in the market by presenting a product with exceptional quality and technology. This idea demands the constant change of the product with flexible forms of production. In contrast with the mass production, it allows the creation of standard quantities of a variety of non-uniform products that are selected according to the market and its consumers. Flexible production relies on the beliefs that it would not prosper by treating workers like machines and the assembly worker could perform most functions better than the specialists. Flexible specialization significantly reduced the demand for unskilled labor, which requires that you are intelligent and are capable of self-control. The downside to this is the number of unskilled industrial workers that are unable to obtain a job within this field of work. The flexible specialization presents higher costs than manufacture it also involves high levels of technological development. This new form of structuring the market encouraged the development of global markets, which also affected the practices of consumption.
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