Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler

Abstract

This book explores the relationship between management and employees under changing economic and political circumstances through a focus on the Chrysler corporation over the last fifty years. For the first time it shows how changes in chief executive, from Walter Chrysler to Lee Iacocca, in business organisation and in company performance were reflected on the shopfloor. These changes took place against the background of major swings in American politics, from the New Deal to wartime nationalism, from anti-Communism to anti-Vietnam war radicalism, from Black Power to the Reagan administration. It was these political swings that led Chrysler workers to seize the opportunities management gave them to build a shopfloor union tradition not present in Ford or General Motors. The author challenges the view of post-war America as a period of 'labour truce' in which big business consistently implemented a strategy of incorporating previously strong labour unions. He argues that workers did put up widespread shopfloor resistance to management prerogatives but that American union organisation was structurally weaker than American management.