Workers and Revolutionaries at the Twilight of Fordism: The Breakdown of Industrial Relations in the Automobile Plants of Detroit and Turin, 1967–1973

Abstract

In their respective countries, and worldwide, Detroit and Turin are known as the `Motor City' and la cittaA dell'autoÐtwo metropolises that have grown around the manufactured product that best symbolized modernity: the automobile. Because an extraordinary proportion of car production during most of the twentieth century was centred in these two cities, they have retained this reputation well after the bulk of the automotive industry had actually abandoned them. As I write, Detroit is struggling to entice automobile manufacturers back into town after they moved operations away in the 1970s (as part of a process that started much earlier). Likewise in Turin, most automobile plants have shut down or undergone conversion for the service economy. The agship of FIAT, Mira®ori, is now undergoing a process of rapid downsizing. In both cities, the automobile industry informed the economic, social, and spatial dimensions of the urban space. It was each city's largest single employer, and the fortunes of a subcontracting network of small and medium supplying companies were strongly intertwined with the city's prosperity. The extent of the hegemony of automobile manufactures over Detroit and Turin was unparalleled in the US or Europe. However, the concentration of manufacturing employment led to dependence, and the destiny of these metropolises became bound to the fortunes and whims of a handful of corporations. For a few years now the cliche that the decline of metropolises in the American industrial heartland initiated only in the 1970s with increased international