The US auto industry had massive drug use and absenteeism in their assembly plants in the 1960s and ’70s (at least). Working conditions were brutal and the workplace environment was toxic; companies treated the workers like dogѕhіt at every turn. This first film is a fascinatingly cynical, arrogant, willfully blind, deaf, and ignorant piece of propaganda from General Motors.
American goods were tops for a lot of years; everyone in the world wanted an American car, but this is the 1970s and the automakers have thoroughly piѕѕed that away. Now the opposite is occurring: Datsuns and Toyotas and VWs are making fast (and loyal) American friends, home electronics are no longer made in America, motorcycles and shoes and clothes are rapidly heading offshore. And GM’s message on that backdrop is, “Okeh, yeah, fine, maybe we should design and engineer better cars, but the real reason we’re not building cars at least as good as Japanese or German ones—real American cars for real Americans—is because you slackaѕѕed losers don’t show up to work!”. Can’t resist throwing in some crowing—”We’re making cars with less pollution every year!”—as if they weren’t (they were) fighting tooth lawyer and claw lobbyist against every effort to regulate the design, construction, and equipment of motor vehicles to make them less injurious, deadly, and toxic. There’s another laughable moment when the narrator all but declares American cars are safest, over a scene of a driver fastening an all but useless lap belt (Volvo had 3-point belts in ’59; Australia mandated them in the ’60s, Switzerland-spec Valiants and Darts had unitised 3-point belts by ’70 versus the difficult and uncomfortable separate lap/shoulder belts Detroit faffed around with til ’74). Meanwhile, self-righteous entitlement: “Those are new VWs…headed for our customers!” All of this as scenes flash past of what’s that being built? Why, it’s the Chevrolet Vega, a pathetic excrescence of a car which was at least as much worse as VWs and Datsun and Toyota “Japanese beetles” (aHyuck!) were better.
The first step toward fixing a problem is acknowledging it. That’s very difficult even for the humble, perceptive individual; it’s nigh on impossible for whoever lacks those traits. Upton Sinclair nailed this: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. American automaker executives were blinkered by their lavish salaries and the funhouse-mirror view from their offices on the 14th Floor™ and its equivalents at Ford and Chrysler: a sea of their own products. Clearly to them, the problem wasn’t on their end. Not only lazy, shiftless, goodfernothing line workers (going on strike! The nerve!), but also…um…currency manipulation and unfair trade by those evil, scheming Jap[ane]s[e]! Also onerous, burdensome big-government regulations—the same regs German, Japanese, and Swedish automakers didn’t seem to have nearly such difficulty with, perhaps because they put their effort and money toward complying with them rather than toward fighting them.
This film’s got Lee Iacocca, famed for the padded vinyl half-roof, the opera window, the waterfall grill, the phake wire wheelcover, the stolen slogan, expensively implementing an incredibly, remarkably bad idea he got in the throes of a fever dream after eating bad lobster or something, and making his company’s cars out of Japanese steel with one side of his mouth while Japan-bashing to beat the band out the other. Here we’re treated at about 4:00 to Lido admitting that American automakers “shipped some crap”, then at about 6:04 (as in “UltraDrive”) claiming for the I’ve-lost-count-of-how-manyth time that now in 1995 or so, all that unpleasantness is behind us and American cars are “world class”. Oh, sure, Lee; surely. Watch the beginning of this film carefully and you’ll see written reference to Eddie Campos, who merits further reading if you’re not familiar with how he handled his lemon of a 1970 Lincoln.
So yeah…y’know that kid at school and summer camp, the one who got so many time-outs and referrals to the principal’s office that they set out an extra chair for when other kids would occasionally also get banished? The one who was always insisting that every fight, every classroom disruption, every specimen afire in the science lab, every deliberately flooded toilet was anybody and everybody else’s fault, never his own? Yeah.
This article reads as a bit of a rant, but if you were there at the time, and I was, Big-Three management really was that bad. Robert S. McNamara can take a lot of blame for the mess Detroit got itself into. Working at Ford in the early 60’s he shifted the emphasis for engineers from “how can I make this better?” to “how can I make this cheaper?” Even little things like making door handles thinner to save materials; it all adds up. So, every year the engineers tried to save another penny on the door handles and every other part too. And it works, at first, as it takes several years for the problems to show up. All Detroit followed this theory, and the good quality cars of 1965 were hollow tin shells of themselves by 1975. The Big Three had choked the goose to death, squeezing every penny possible from design, testing, materials and build. As Daniel also points out, they squeezed labor too, squeezed them to the point of revolt. See The Lordstown Strike of 1972:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/03/this-day-in-labor-history-march-5-1972
Triggered by GM speeding up the assembly line from 60 cars per hour to 100 cars per hour.
Yet as Daniel points out, management blamed everybody but themselves, and fixed all the wrong problems. They switched from RWD to FWD but didn’t make decent running engines. They added more and more gimmicks to car interiors but used cheap plastics and cheaper cloth. They put 5 MPH bumpers on cars that started rusting out the first winter.
It’s always fascinated me that during the 80’s and 90’s I would still see a lot of old 1960’s beaters running around, but almost nothing from the 1970’s. I’m not talking about collector cars here, just the cars in the laundromat parking lot kind of cars.
Something that hasn’t changed in much business and industry: Management always blames everybody but themselves.
Only “a bit”…? Damn. Sorry, I’ll try harder next time. 😉
I saw the same as you, BTW: ’60s cars still in workaday beater service long after their ’70s counterparts had fallen apart and left the road forever.
Ha, I’ve seen both of these before. Gotta love the “if you see something, say something!” line from the first clip. Sure, because if we don’t fire you for stopping the line, we know your union pals will crack your skull in for us for being a snitch… The second clip is from a four part documentary the History Channel did in the 90’s that I owned on VHS at one point. I actually referenced Eddie Campos and linked a similar Chicago Tribune article maybe 3 months ago in the 1970? Lincoln Mark III post. That act of “arson” he did essentially gave birth to the Ross-Magnusun Warranty Act.
Couldn’t edit in time; *Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act*
The main problem with the first video is that they see Volkswagen as their primary threat and not the Japanese. Volkswagen today does not have any vehicle that sells in the top ten in the United States. Volkswagen has ranked near the bottom in JD Power quality surveys. Nissan faced bankruptcy in the 90’s but was bailed out by Renault, who now owns a controlling share. Toyota and Honda was the real threat.
As for the drug and absenteeism claim being bad in the 60’s and 70’s, I’m not sure if it was much worse than today. The source below claims it is so bad today that companies cannot fill positions due to employees flunking drug tests. Because of drugs gangs have taken over entire neighborhoods. Compared to today, the 60’s and 70’s weren’t that bad.
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20170721/news/634501/michigan-companies-cant-fill-jobs-because-too-many-people-cant-pass-a
http://www.startribune.com/worker-drug-use-hits-small-factories-hard/272345531/
To be fair, at that time seeing VW as their primary threat was completely justifiable. VW had been selling cars in America since what, the late 1940s or so; the Japanese were Johnny-come-latelies.
To most in the US, until the mid-late 1970’s, Volkswagen was the standard by which small cars were measured. The Japanese said that they never intended to take on Detroit (world events made that happen) their target in the USA was Volkswagen. The Beetle opened the doors for it’s competition.
In an alternative reality, things go up hill. But in the real world, they roll down hill. Management was too slow to react to safety, regulations & quality, etc. Management use to think “out of the box”. But big companies have a way of throwing water on that fire. Absenteeism has always been a problem but it certainly wasn’t/isn’t the only one. Quality of any product starts on the drawing board. It can’t be fixed after it has been assembled. My problem is that I’m a perfectionist. But I also know that nothing is perfect. Even with that in mind I still try to achieve it. We need more people in the workforce with my problem.
Compare a Sterling 825 to an Acura Legend and you’ll see that militantly bad labor can ruin anything.
Acura Legends and Sterlings are not the same car. They have any number of different parts, different engineering. Blaming production line workers entirely is just intellectually lazy.
By the 1980s, the idea of “militancy” at Austin-Rover was gone, and competent managers and directors are rarely if ever faced with a truly militant workforce.
Conversely, compare a Fremont CA Union built Chevy Nova/Geo Prizm/Pontiac Vibe/Toyota Tacoma to a non-Union built Toyota. There was not a whole lot of difference. According to the post by Jose Delgadillo, Fremont had a very “militant” workforce. Maybe management plays a factor?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
Well, bad management sure can stir up a workforce…..
I owned 4 Japanese cars in the 70’s and early 80’s each for less than 2 years and haven’t owned another one since ’84. Have owned American every since but wish they still produced ’63-’66 Ramblers, ’67-’72 Valiants & Darts, ’65-’67 Belvederes & Coronets and ’64-’69 Rambler Americans. These were well built, economical(for the times), had good space utilization, comfortable, had good handling.Went through 6 accidents in them(only 1 my fault)with lap belts and never got a scratch. I hate 3 point belts but would wear lap belts religiously. I only wear them because of the laws(don’t get me started on the neutered nation that we have become). I will admit that a lot of ’70’s cars are crap, excepting the ’77 and later full size Chevrolet’s and the other like bodied GM cars. Have owned 3 of these and Iiked them but not as well as the other cars listed above. They all had good gas mileage with one approaching 26-28mpg highway with the 4 speed OD automatic.
Call your accident experience random chance or call it “luck”, but it is not representative of reality, which actually looks like this.
I’m not exactly sure what a ‘3-point seat belt’ is? When I have an occasion to ride in my mother’s 2012 BMW I reach for the shoulder belt to my right in the passenger seat and pull it across myself and fasten it into its holster (or whatever it’s officially called). I just don’t understand what the ‘points’ thing means?
A 3-point belt has three end points: one outboard of you low (lap belt), one outboard of you high (shoulder belt) and one inboard of you (single fastening point). A 2-point belt has only two end points: outboard and inboard; it’s a lap belt.
There have been variants wherein the shoulder strap is separate from the lap belt (pre-1974 American cars, some US-spec cars of the late ’80s to mid ’90s with motorised shoulder straps and manual lap belts, some ’75-’92ish VWs with shoulder strap attached to the top rear corner of the door and manual lap belts).
There are also 4- and 5-point belts/harnesses, but they are race-only items very dangerous to use in regular road vehicles (the article is correct in its facts and physics, and everything said about 5-point harnesses is equally true of the 4-point variety, except the additional injuries that a 5-point can do to your ‘nads as applicable).
Here in Australia, they’re often called lap-sash belts. Because, well, they look like a sash.
I can honestly say that the separate lap and shoulder belts do work. In 1978 I became the proud owner of my grandfather’s 69 mark iii when I turned 16. My dad and grandfather thought it was a good idea to put a 16 year old in a 2 door army tank. At 16 I had a lead foot and with that 460 engine and slick leather seats I started wearing the lap belts. One night I was pranking around and put on the separate shoulder belt which had never been taken off of the head liner- to be honest, the lap belt probably hadn’t ever been used either. I got in the habit of wearing both belts. A couple of years later I was coming home from college one weekend and was hit head-on by a drunk driver in a 81 Chevy Suburban. The front of the mark iii was crushed and I only had bruises from the belts. The other un-belted driver creamed the steering wheel and then the windshield- a lot of facial and spinal injuries. Made a true believer out of me about seat belts .
Fascinating chart! Thank, Daniel.
FWIW, I posted Comment #7 in the linked thread a few months ago, unaware of the data presented in the Wiki article:
https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/cycling-health.296849/#post-6048333
I’m pleased that my guesstimates weren’t out by an order of magnitude (at least as far as automobile fatalities).
The article and the ensuing comments are fascinating; I hope to add a longer comment w.r.t. unions and quality, et al.
Hoo boy! Ramblers! Valiants! and Belvederes!. Can’t we have a 67 Econoline in there too? Yes, the thrill of single circuit drum brakes and wondering if the lurching and bouncing will ever stop. Speaking of Ford products, don’t forget the wheel chocks when running it in the shop. Will it dump itself into reverse? Feel lucky?
People got tired of big, overweight barges and were tired of playing roulette every morning when they needed to get to work. Dozens and dozens of my customers bought Toyotas and Datsuns and never looked back. They just wanted a reasonable car that was reliable and got good mileage, things Detroit just wouldn’t build except for very half hearted, reluctant efforts. Gremlin, Vega, Pinto. All crap.
I would much rather drive a Rambler or a Valiant than anything made recently, but at this late date I would hate the idea of subjecting the survivors to the rigors of daily use, especially on winter salted roads. So for regular use I drive vehicles that are “only” 20-25 years old. (BTW, Rambler had dual-circuit brakes starting in 1962, and front discs were available on the larger models starting in 1965 – and were standard on the ’65 Marlin. Studebaker had front discs a couple of years earlier.)
So cars designed to crumple (dissipating the energy and momentum) and protect you in an accident is shite and just plastic crap and the nightmare monsters from the pre-computer-designed car era are what we all should still be driving? I guess cigarette smoke still does not cause cancer. Lead in gas and paint doesn’t cause your kid’s development issues. Antibiotics never saved a life and are poison.
You are incredibly lucky to still be alive and ironically using a computer to view this website. The real world actually has a chuckle about Americans and their dislike of anything modern which was usually invented by an American.
Way to twist what I.G. said travis .
It’s each individuals choice not yours .
He didn’t say any of your wild and silly accusations true they may be .
-Nate
I agree with the term “luck.” My 1986 Mazda 626 5 speed went 350,000 trouble free miles while I have a 1978 Celica GT Liftback with the bullet proof 20R engine and 5 speed still running fine.
First video at 7:19 “We cannot hope for the government to save us”
Same video at 6:18 “19 out of 20 motorcycles …”
US motorcycle industry has actually regained much lost ground since then. Harley-Davidson is #1 within the segment it competes in (large motorcycles, the most lucrative), and revived Indian is doing quite well.
Almost as if…I donno…must be…gosh, something about…building good quality products that people want to…I donno, buy or something?
Yup. And H-D isn’t complacent (esp. with Indian gaining market share). H-D just completely revamped its best selling cruiser lines for 2018, after introducing new engines for 2017.
Lovely brand-new 240Zs in the first video 🙂
Nah, its because motorcycles are too dangerous to be basic transportation, the cost/benefit is all wrong vs a used car. So they turned into a weekend leisure product and status symbol.
Not that a Harley isn’t “a good product that people want”, but if we needed motorcycles to get to work, we’d be buying them from China.
Harley-Davidson is making them in India now, and who knows what percentage of the ones ‘assembled’ in the US are made up of components from their plants in India.
I’m not so sure HOG is a good example. They have an enormous sub-prime exposure and sales aren’t that hot. That isn’t a reflection on wether they are good quality or not but the market they are in.
Harley’s problem is that they’re reliving a version of the Detroit nightmare. Only here, it’s not quality, it’s product.
After twenty years of rampant success starting in the mid-80’s (for a long time you had to sign on to a year long waiting list to buy a new Harley), that they hadn’t expected, Harley got too deep into marketing to the Boomers. And only the Boomers.
The result of which is that Millennials won’t be caught dead on a Harley. That’s dad’s bike. Or granddad’s. Their new Street 500’s and 750’s aren’t selling because: 1. They’re Harleys. 2. They’re inferior to the Japanese competition. Way inferior. Just look at review of a Street 750 vs. a Yamaha FZ-7. The reviewer is virtually killing himself to say enough nice things about the Harley to make it look like the bike competes.
And the one line of bikes they had that was sloooooowly gaining credence with the younger market, Buell, was dropped in a panic after the 2008 financial reverses, which were the result of Harley financing to a lot of people who they should have never given credit (like the president and vice president of my last M/C).
So they immediately doubled down on their main market. Which worked for a few years, but was a dead end. Because guys like me are buying their last new motorcycle around this time. Like I just did.
A Honda Gold Wing.
Yup, my Harley guy friend is always trying to sell me on it, but it’s all recreational riding and lifestyle. I do most of my riding getting to work, my $3k Concours does everything I need and I can leave it anywhere including outdoors in the rain. Harley really seems to intentionally have turned into a dead end, but we’ve counted them done before and they keep going so we’ll see.
Anyway, lots of blame all around & the first video is rather funny, just show up to work and we’ll eliminate the imports, sure.
That being said I’ve been in enough auto plants to know I don’t have the physical stamina to do most of those jobs and glad I didn’t have to.
Yes. Most of H-D’s “New Coke” products have failed (V-Rod is gone for 2018, and the “Street” bikes are not competitive), but their core “Coke Classic” products are still very good.
My whole family worked for GM from the 1950’s to the 1990s. My Dad , uncles, cousins. Myself and my brother, for awhile. My time at the Fremont plant was ’75-’78 on the line, then about six months of supervisor training before I left in 1981. There were definitely problems problems with substance abuse, mostly alcohol in my experience and a high level of absenteeism. A poor attitude towards quality and towards the employer in general. Remember, this was following the “screw the man” attitude that developed during the later ’60s. Morale was kind of low among some workers. In general the social climate was turning in the direction that the worker deserved some respect and some voice in how the workplace was run. There was also problems with race relations that reflected society in general and specific problems in the workplace. All in all a real stew of many of the problems and tensions that were afflicting society outside the plant. Have you ever seen the Richard Prior movie entitled “Blue Collar?”
Looking at the GM film, notice how many VW bugs, Toyotas, and Datsuns are shown. Obviously the public was choosing smaller, more efficient, more economical and better built vehicles. What did GM plan to compete against these cars with? An Impala, a Nova, or a problematic Vega? The Domestic manufacturers really didn’t have what the competitive market demanded. How long did it take for top management to see what was happening? Too long.
Back then, we as workers didn’t think that our actions could really hurt GM. We thought it was a unassailable monolith that was so powerful, As powerful as the US govt. Absenteeism really did hurt the quality of the product and the bottom line of the company. A poor attitude towards doing the job didn’t help either. Some of the poor design of the cars and assembly methods made for some really shoddy product. Yes the corporation could have dealt with the workforce in a more productive manner. Lordstown, Yes. Among other issues.
Still the auto industry provided a base of employment that lifted many thousands of working families into the ranks of home owners, paid for many employee’s children to be the first of the family to attend college, provided health care and a secure retirement pension. Let me be emphatic, nothing was ever just “given” to the employees, it was always a negotiated benefit as part of a combined wage and benefit contract agreement. The employees worked for what they got.
Despite all the failings and problems of the Industry, I still remain UAW proud, and even GM proud. Just my two cents.
Very well put Jose. Although I spent many years working on the final product rather than being involved in building cars I always thought that the way you put it here was a more accurate portrayal of life “on the line”.
I don’t know how many times I and my co-workers would marvel at the typical domestic car engineering that was stuck in 1964. A Honda engine block was a thing of beauty compared to anything from the big three. Why couldn’t we do that?
Poor engineering was combined with an adversarial relationship with workers led to a poisonous mixture These are management problems.
Honda built a set of CVCC cylinder heads for a 350 in a ’73 Chev Impala. Tables III and V of the report tell just about the whole story.
Ultimately, though, the Honda approach has less than meets the eye. And I write that as a Honda fan.
GM was already working on the catalytic converter, which would be installed on its cars for the 1975 model year, and allow the engines to be retuned for better fuel economy and performance. Today every passenger car and light truck has a catalytic converter. So GM wasn’t quite as clueless on this issue as it first appears.
The widespread use of the catalytic converter required the large-scale phase-in of unleaded gasoline, which began a long decline in airborne lead pollution. I had a 1977 Honda CVCC hatchback – a great car – and it could use leaded or unleaded gasoline. Honda even advertised in the mid-1970s that its cars did not necessarily require unleaded gasoline. In retrospect, that was a dubious benefit.
I don’t think it’s reasonable or realistic to say the Honda CVCC was less than meets the eye because the catalytic converter became the all-but-universal centre chunk of emission control systems. I refer you again to those tables in that document. Look what Honda made a ’73 Chev 350 do without a catalyst; the logical progression from there is that Honda’s method would have made for much cleaner exhaust much sooner than we got it, with or without catalysts on new cars through the ’70s and ’80s. Old cars, too; have a think about what adopting Honda’s tech would’ve meant for the effective lifespan of catalytic converters on pre-1981 vehicles without feedback mixture control. As it happened, even when those cars were running properly, their exhaust was very dirty, which made the catalysts run very hot all the time, right on the ragged edge of meltdown, with scanty margin for anything to be out of adjustment. The much cleaner exhaust from the CVCC-head-equipped Chev 350 (and other engines similarly equipped) would’ve helped out quite a lot.
Also, it’s a popular myth, not a fact, that GM did the lion’s share of work to make the catalytic converter practical. The real story will be the subject of a piece here at CC; I’ve been working on it for some time.
As for the advantage of using leaded gasoline in the ’70s: it cost less to buy, which was an error, but that’s the way it was. Chrysler Canada trumpeted the ability of their new K-cars to run on “cheaper leaded regular gasoline”, too.
One question – do 21st century Hondas use catalytic converters?
That effectively puts the entire issue into perspective.
And whether GM did the lion’s share of development on catalytic converters is not important. What is important is that Ed Cole’s decision to have GM take this route helped make the switch to unleaded fuel more feasible. Ford, Chrysler and AMC all were forced to follow suit.
Even Ralph Nader told Cole that it was great he was getting the lead out of gasoline (and he then told him that he needed to “get the lead out of GM management”).
This sped up the elimination of lead pollution (which was just as deleterious to public health as the pollutants that the Honda approach would have allegedly eliminated faster).
As for leaded gasoline costing less to buy – the important thing is that its use still resulted in lead pollution, which the use of the catalytic converter played a big role in eliminating.
Increased cost wasn’t a justification to avoid the imposition of emissions standards on new vehicles; it really wasn’t a good argument to keep using leaded gasoline.
Just to be clear: I am fully onside with you that leaded gasoline itself was a collossal error with grievous consequences—it’s been called the biggest mistake of the 20th century, and that’s probably correct—and that it should have been banned much sooner and faster than it was. Also, when I refer to leaded gasoline having been cheaper in the ’70s and ’80s, I meant it cost less to buy at the pump—without regard to whether it cost more to manufacture. That drove demand for non-catalyst cars, and it spurred people to misfuel their catalyst-equipped cars with leaded. There ought to have been a tax abatement for unleaded or an excise tax on leaded or both; it wouldn’t have taken a major one, just enough to make unleaded a couple cents cheaper per gallon.
> Back then, we as workers didn’t think that our actions could really hurt GM. We thought it was a unassailable monolith that was so powerful, As powerful as the US govt.
Great to see your viewpoint here, Jose.
At the same time, the first video is rather pathetic. ALL POWERFUL GM has been reduced to begging its workers to actually show and work. Not following quality control procedures or meeting assembly targets. It’s just “please show up for work, pretty please”.
Modern day Walmart or McDonalds, how many shifts can you miss until you’re history? Back then, Chevrolet was reduced to begging.
That wasn’t begging in the slightest. It was what I’d call blackmail. Paraphrasing here, but “If you can’t work harder and build “our” better products for us, don’t be surprised if we have to lay you off because our inferior shit won’t sell at a competitive cost. It happened to the electronic industry; your job could be next”.
It starts off fairly vague. Then it becomes a blame game. Like who really thought that film would be effective in the slightest to booost anyone’s morale?
” Back then, we as workers didn’t think that our actions could really hurt GM. ”
Well that certainly turned out to be a double edged sword, did it not? That alone encapsulates how the Japanese leapfrogged GM (and the other USA then 3) to become the largest producers of automobiles in all of the world by 1980.
It’s ridiculous in my eyes to act or think like this, because simply put, the new generation of our kids aren’t buying houses, cars, affording college, etc. Is it not a large part because companies like GM and the like completely lost the plot? They don’t have the ability to sustain the lifestyle that generation enjoyed, and sure won’t offer it any further. Don’t forget:
“ Back then, we as workers didn’t think that our actions could really hurt GM. “
College costs, as well as housing prices in many areas, have escalated well beyond the rate of inflation over the past few decades. That doesn’t have much to do with the failure of the Big Three to stop the Japanese (who have been building vehicles in the U.S. for years).
Without fanning the flames or adding fuel to the fire, I wonder if it’s mostly American business mentality that focused so much on profit above anything else.
My father worked as an executive for a very large German conglomerate in Germany during the 1960s. When he was on loan to the American branch of the same company in the 1970s and 1980s, he had numerous quarrels with the American executives who viewed the business principles so differently from German.
If the project or plan didn’t yield any profit within SIX months, the whole thing was scruppered and new one in place. My father being German was thinking in a very long term such as two- to five-year period and tried to stick with it much longer. Lot of botched launches and ill-conceived marketing plans, etc. The worst thing was my father being forced to clean up the mess caused by his American bosses and getting blamed for that.
My father saw the writing on the wall for the American branch at the end of 1980s. He demanded to be transferred back to Germany because he had enough. After he transferred back to Germany in 1991, the American branch ran into serious cash flow problem and collapsed market share. Obviously, they didn’t heed my father’s warning…
It’s absolutely the American business mentality, or culture. I was in upper middle management for a multi-family housing conglomerate based in Chicago, it was flat out toxic there. The VP of the company stood in front of a group of us once and said, “We sell boxes. Boxes people get to live in. If they don’t like what we’re charging they can leave. We will find more people for our boxes at our terms.”
Any Cap projects had to show a full return in 3 years tops. If the project went over budget or over the projected ROI? The lead/manager was replaced and changes were made.
It was brutal. And that toxicity absolutely infected everyone all the way down to the groundskeepers and custodians.
In the summer of 1967 I worked for three months at the Fisher Body assembly plant in Leeds, Missouri-it was definitely an interesting experience. The attitude between the hourly workers and salaried workers was “them vs. us”; to say alcohol abuse was a problem would be an understatement-the parking lot for the hourly workers was absolutely littered with beer cans, and on several occasions while working on the assembly line I saw half-pint whiskey bottles in the cars as the came down the line.
Some of the workers played all kinds of tricks-one was to slide a cigarette over the fuse of a cherry bomb, and toss it in a car body, naturally the perpetrator was never found. One night I was subbing for another worker and one of these went off-fortunately it was a distance away-I would have hated to have that go off in my face.
One night there occurred a lot of sabotage-a number of cars came down the line with extensive body damage-they shut the line down early and sent everyone home.
I think a lot of these workers didn’t think their actions would hurt GM-or didn’t care, and obviously management was as much to blame as the hourly workers.
The blame game is fun, but the workers who claimed to confuse asserting their dignity with sloth and vice spent many of what could have been their most productive years half-heartedly looking for work. I don’t like unions because they strip people of their initiative. Complaints about not having control over one’s career and carrying a union card should be mutually exclusive. Unions are about accepting the lowest common denominator. If you have any faith in your own exceptionalism, why embrace seniority-based decisions? Unions are just a milestone on the road back to serfdom. Some point to other countries as places where unions work, but those people are subjects instead of citizens. They aren’t individuals with inalienable rights. Their leaders don’t respect or fear them. As bad as adversarial labor is for employment, it is worse for the people who sacrifice a key piece of their humanity to ride along.
Every little bit of this is ludicrous and actually pretty offensive. You need to step out of the fog of propaganda.
Your comments about other countries, and even about your own, are embarrassingly ignorant.
When in college, I unloaded trucks for UPS before class as a card-carrying Teamster. For British Airways, I helped manage a project to break their call center union. For Bear Stearns, I managed union electricians who were supposed to be part of ‘one of the good unions.’ I’ve also lived in Europe, the Caribbean, and Canada. You’re confusing me actually knowing what I’m talking about with your own ideologically addled view of the world.
Management gets the union it deserves.
tonito: Just ignore him. He rants like this every time he sees the the word “union”. He obviously read too much Ayn Rand and has come to confuse fiction with reality.
Ahh, good ol’ Ayn Rand, providing wankmittel for 7th-grade intellectuals of all ages since 1957.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
– John Rogers
As a Canadian, I do find it alarming when I see so much anti-union fervor in the United States. When 50% of your population earns less than $30,000 a year in the richest country in the world.
Something isn’t right.
No wonder our country is approaching the upcoming NAFTA talks with protecting our labour laws in mind.
There is plenty of blame to go around here. The UAW leadership was as ultimately wedded to the status quo as management was.
I had the privilege, in the mid-1990s, of speaking to the man who was the UAW leader for the Saturn labor agreement. He was pro-union, but had no illusions about the long-term vision of UAW leadership.
He told me point blank, “Both GM management and UAW leadership hate what we are doing at Saturn.”
Turns out he was right. Books written in the mid-2000s detail how UAW leadership, led by Stephen Yokich, led the effort to dismantle the Saturn labor agreement, while GM management did nothing to save it. (GM management was busy destroying Saturn on the product end.)
People tend to forget the long, bitter strike against GM by the UAW in the fall of 1970s. It was a two-month strike that marked a change in worker attitudes. The resolution allowed older workers to retire (30-and-out for union members was on of the main issues), and their place was taken by younger, more militant workers who hadn’t lived through the threadbare 1930s. They didn’t like management, but they also viewed union leadership with a jaundiced eye, too.
So, yes, we may roll our eyes at the simplistic message of this video, but the bottom line is that both management and the UAW were faced with a new generation of workers that neither really had any idea of how to manage.
What’s really interesting about this era is the total lack of regard that both sides have for the most important person in the equation – the customer. Both sides seem to think that, no matter what they do, millions of Americans will still line up and faithfully buy whatever they manage to push out the door.
If you want to see how drastically things have changed in the domestic auto industry, read a 2009 article on the website-that-shall-not-be-named by Robert Dewar. He worked at the Ford Motor Company Sharonville Transmission plant in the 1970s as a supervisor.
In his book, A Savage Factory: An Eyewitness Account of the Auto Industry’s Self Destruction, he paints a picture of management and labor at constant war with each other. Drug use and alcoholism are rampant in the plant, and women on the line face outright sexual assault (with the union covering for the perpetrators.)
Product quality was ignored in favor of production quotas. Both sides came together one time while he was there – to rabidly denounce Japanese companies, and the people who bought their cars, during the first fuel crunch.
In 2009, he went back to the same plant, and was amazed at the transformation. (He was also amazed it was still in operation.) The plant was clean and much quieter. (During his tenure there, an oily film was always in the air inside the plant.)
A woman was head of the union local. Workers and management had differences, but the naked antagonism was gone. Workers really were interested in making a quality product. They did take pride in their work.
He asked both union leadership and management what had driven this change. Both responded with one word – “Fear.” Fear of the company collapsing in the face of the Japanese onslaught. Fear of not being able to obtain a job with comparable pay and benefits if the Ford Motor Company went under.
It was also explained that Ford had worked to pension off old-school, hard-line plant managers and supervisors, while the UAW had done the same with hardliners in its ranks.
Once again, the good old days weren’t so good after all.
As always, excellent comment. Sums up a complex situation well.
Thank you, Paul. I really believe that the Japanese coming to this country was one of the best things that happened to the auto industry. It’s now better for customers and workers.
DweezilAZ and J P Cavanuagh – We haven’t given up entirely on the domestics.
Last year we traded a 2005 Ford Focus SE sedan with over 235,000 miles on the odometer. It never had a major problem until 193,000 miles (alternator failure). It was actually more reliable than our 2003 Honda Accord EX four-cylinder sedan, which we just traded with 269,000 miles. My wife was the primary driver of the Focus, and she didn’t baby it (if anything, I always had to remind her that the service was overdue!).
She traded it in July 2016 for an off-lease 2014 Escape SE with only 2,000 miles on the odometer. So far, we are happy. She regards cars primarily as appliances, but the other day she told me, “I really do love this vehicle.”
I traded my Accord in May for a 2017 Civic EX-T sedan. So far, I’m happy, too. I was looking at a Focus ST hatchback (dark metallic blue), but the back seat was too small for our children.
Excellent, Geeber. I always believed that the Big Three chewed themselves up from the executive suite to the shop floor and back, always seeking the short term benefit.
Most repulsive was pulling out the “patriotism” angle to sell more domestic cars.
Ironic when one remembers the junk designed, analyzed and pumped out by our own “fellow Americans” to the consumer. Seems that loyalty was only supposed to work one way, buyer be damned. Next.
Thanks for rewarding the poor slob end user who was trying to support the domestic industry with an expensive fungu .
I’ve never owned a foreign branded car, but I won’t rule it out any longer.
It’s taken 50 years of observing the industry to finally say that. Problem is I have no affinity for the foreign brands. No connection, no sentimental affection.
But next time, I’ll shop all the brands, be they Korean, Japanese or domestic.
And BTW: it was still the same in retail as recently as 3 years ago when I was still working. The bar is far lower, yes, but if you just pass a drug test, show up and don’t steal, you can be a lifer
Agreed here too. It is pretty sad when someone who loves the Domestics as much as I do has 5 cars in the family. The only one from a US company (the 06 Lacrosse driven by a kid) was given to my mother in a contest.
I place more blame on CAFE and other changes in the regulatory environment (because CAFE in particular hurt the kind of vehicles that the Domestic manufacturers were uniquely good at) than some others do but agree that there remains blame to go around. The folks on the shop floors don’t have their attitudes go completely to hell without some cause, and many assembly problems come from bad engineering or bad processes which are not the fault of the line workers. But intoxication/drug use and outright sabotage were a serious problem too.
Dweezil, I’m not quite in your same boat, but I’m in a similar one. With a couple of short-term exceptions (Volvo 240 for a year or so, Toyota Camry for 3 weeks, Chev Caprice for a year or so) I drove only Chrysler products.
Took me awhile, but it finally dawned on me that brand loyalty is kind of creepy in that abused-spouse kind of way, and I’m glad to have made substantial progress in cutting it out. Brands/companies sure as hell aren’t loyal to me, and the real patriotic American buys from whoever’s making the best product for his hard-earned dollar. Now I have an Accord, a 2007 model. It’s not a perfect car, but it’s markedly better than I’d’ve done with an ’07 Malibu, Impala, Taurus (or was it the Five Hundred that year?), or any of the ridiculously uncompetitive offerings from whatever Chrysler were officially called in 2007.
That said, it’s been strange adapting to the car being akin to the refrigerator (no emotional attachment, no sentimental affection, no personality to be projected on it, etc).
What’s a fungu?
Geeber, your thoughtful, informed, productive comment here stands in stark positive contrast to nearby thoughtless, ignorant, reactionary blather that amounts to “Uhhhhh…unions suck…uhuhuhuhuhuh”. Thank you for it.
It didn’t take me much effort to find the Robert Dewar piece you mention. It reminds me of my own visit to Chrysler’s Windsor Assembly Plant, also in 2009.
The “good old days” are a retrohallucination.
It goes well beyond the auto industry. It’s necessary to review what mega-corporations like Wal Mart have done to local economies and industries with their business practices.
Thank you, Daniel Stern.
“Retrohallucination” – I’m going to remember that word. It will no doubt come in handy for future discussions.
I checked “A Savage Factory” out of the library and read it on a 9-hour flight the other day. WOW! Highly recommended reading.
A few clips from the movie Gung Ho relevant to this post.
Wow. I’d completely forgot about that movie. Maybe time for a rewatch.
Good article and mostly good knowledgeable comments too .
I was a 30 year Union man and saw both good and bad in my Union and other members, very sad .
Thanx everyone .
-Nate
Can go on and on about the 70’s, but to many under 50 or 40, it’s ancient history. And look at the highways with all the “non small cars”.
Japan gave US what they wanted, “Newer, better, bigger”, cars/CUV’s with each restyle. Where did they get that idea?
VW Bug was supposed to “save us from planned obsolescence”, but practice is still used today, in all consumer goods. Just look at all the people lined up to get new smart phones every year.
History does have the tendency of repeating itself.
Chinese cars are coming. I wonder how the industry will react to them.
History does NOT repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
— often attributed to Mark Twain, but the earliest published source yet located is by Joseph Anthony Wittreich
Film #1 at 1:05, when they’re counting the foreign cars for us? Number 5 is an Opel. Which GM itself was selling. Totally tone-deaf.
Yeah, and I noticed they didn’t seem to be able to count correctly; between “Nine!” and “Ten!” they missed two or three Japanese pickup trucks in the rightmost (from our perspective) lane.
Also, the narrator switches randomly between East Coast (“FAR-in”) and West Coast (“FOR-in”) pronunciation of “foreign”.
First one reaches maximum irony at 11:15; “We must build better cars at reasonable cost” as a Vega shell is lowered into the, ahem, rustproofing tank, followed immediately by “the foreign cars have quality, they are well built…” as the camera pans past a BMC 1100!
So cars designed to crumple (dissipating the energy and momentum) and protect you in an accident is shite and just plastic crap and the nightmare monsters from the pre-computer-designed car era are what we all should still be driving? I guess cigarette smoke still does not cause cancer. Lead in gas and paint doesn’t cause your kid’s development issues. Antibiotics never saved a life and are poison.
You are incredibly lucky to still be alive and ironically using a computer to view this website. The real world actually has a chuckle about Americans and their dislike of anything modern which was usually invented by an American.