American Auto Research Articles

Pesky Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) demand forecasting model for American Auto Parts Retailer

Pesky Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) demand forecasting model for American Auto Parts Retailer

Driving Labor Apart: Climate Policy Backlash in the American Auto Corridor

Driving Labor Apart: Climate Policy Backlash in the American Auto Corridor

Murray, J., & Schwartz, M. (2019). Wrecked: How the American Auto Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete.

Murray, J., &amp; Schwartz, M. (2019). <i>Wrecked: How the American Auto Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete.</i>

Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 by Jeremy Milloy

Afterward, James Johnson Jr. did not remember killing his foreman, Hugh Jones, so others had to reconstruct what had happened. The details came from his co-workers—the confrontation, the gun, the mayhem—their meaning from Johnson’s radical lawyers. Their client had never been a violent man, they argued, until the factory’s brutalities drove him into a murderous rage. In a real sense, Johnson had not killed Jones. Chrysler had.Jeremy Milloy picks up this argument in his compelling new study of workplace violence in the mid-twentieth-century auto industry. Auto factories had long been violent places, a consequence of the industry’s relentlessly coercive production process and the rough, racist, and misogynist culture that dominated the factory floor. But mid-1960s transformations in labor relations intensified the problem, says Milloy. He makes his case through a fascinating comparison of the Chrysler Corporation’s plants in Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. The facilities were component parts of a single industrial complex, separated only by the Detroit River. Yet in the latter half of the 1960s violence suddenly spiked in the Detroit plants, while the Windsor plants’ rates seemed to remain constant. Precise numbers are impossible to come by, as Milloy readily acknowledges. But he has assembled more than enough evidence—from grievance records, union reports, and spectacular incidents like Johnson’s 1970 rampage—to demonstrate the divergence.Conditions outside the plants helped create the violence within, Milloy argues, but even the most troubling external factors—Detroit’s skyrocketing violent crime rate, for instance—mattered less than the factories’ strikingly different trajectories. In the mid-1960s, he says, Chrysler’s management decided to squeeze as much production as it could from its decaying Detroit factories. The speed-up then intersected with the plants’ profound racial tensions, as older white supervisors pushed young African American workers to meet the new standards the corporation had imposed. A militant union could have given the workers the support they needed. But the United Automobile Workers (UAW) had long since traded militancy for bureaucracy, so the workers had to face the pressure on their own. Up and down the line the violence ran, from foreman to worker, worker to foreman, and worker to worker, turning the factories into a battleground.Chrysler also tried to speed up production in its Windsor plants, says Milloy. But the Canadian UAW fought back, its leaders by bargaining for better working conditions, its rank-and-file by confronting the company at the point of production, in the grand tradition of workers’ control. The latter sometimes triggered violent incidents—a worker slugging his foreman, a fistfight at the local bar—but they were far less common than they were on the other side of the river, and far more functional. In Detroit the violence tended to be atomizing. In Windsor, violent means generally served collective ends.That was precisely what James Johnson’s lawyers wanted to do with his case when they went to trial: to transform a single horrific act that Johnson himself could not recall into a condemnation of structural injustice. It was a powerful argument then—powerful enough to get Johnson acquitted—and in Milloy’s telling it is powerful still. It would be even more powerful, though, if it acknowledged that workplace violence is not only structural but also relational and deeply personal. Inside the plant Johnson and Jones stood on opposite sides of a conflict Chrysler had created, just as the lawyers said. From there Johnson’s world stretched out to the little house he shared with his sister on Detroit’s ragged east side, Jones’s to a more substantial home on the west side, where he and wife raised their three children; to the church they attended; and to the aging parents he left behind. To fully understand the meaning of the carnage Johnson unleashed, and of the epidemic of workplace violence since, we need to follow the bloodshed out of the factory, the post office, the military base, the schoolroom, and the office bloc and into the many worlds like Jones’s and Johnson’s. Such a move would not change the urgent analysis Milloy offers. But it would force us to face the terrible reach of even the most explicable moments of rage, to see the many lives they hollow out and the many tragedies they leave behind.

Introduction

Introduction

Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-80 by Jeremy Milloy

Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-80 by Jeremy Milloy

Jeremy Milloy. Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80.

J<scp>eremy</scp> M<scp>illoy</scp>. <i>Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80</i>.

Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80

Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80

Book Review: Jeffrey Rothstein, When Good Jobs Go Bad: Globalization, De-Unionization, and Declining Job Quality in the North American Auto Industry

Book Review: Jeffrey Rothstein, <i>When Good Jobs Go Bad: Globalization, De-Unionization, and Declining Job Quality in the North American Auto Industry</i>

Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 by Jeremy Milloy

Reviewed by: Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 by Jeremy Milloy Daniel Clark Jeremy Milloy, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2017) Why are incidents of workplace violence now seen as the actions of individuals with particular pathologies, so-called "lone wolves"? And why is it that workers once pursued workplace justice collectively, but now most often seek individual solutions? These questions are at the heart of Jeremy Milloy's investigation, in which violence itself is the main focus and Chrysler auto plants in greater Detroit and Windsor provide the case studies. Milloy argues that violent work processes and working conditions in auto plants were primarily responsible for violent acts committed by Chrysler workers, against each other and against supervisors, in the 1960s and 1970s. Chrysler workers toiled in dangerous conditions caused by management decisions to speed up production, reduce the work force, and refuse to invest in plant safety. The result was violence inflicted on those workers in various forms, including deaths, crippling injuries, extreme physical and mental wear and tear, and even tuberculosis. Harassment by supervisors, themselves under intense pressure, contributed to the hostile environment. As a result, at Dodge Main, the principle US example in this study, there was an upsurge after 1965 in punchings, stabbings, shootings, and killings. This is apparent in United Auto Workers (uaw) Local 3 grievance records, on which much of the Dodge Main portion of the argument relies. Milloy explains that this upsurge, to an extent, can be attributed as well to the breakdown in Dodge Main's robust shop steward system in the late 1950s and the gradual transition to a far less effective grievance procedure for resolving crucial [End Page 287] in-plant issues, a system known to historians of labour as "workplace contractualism." The upsurge was also prompted by longstanding racial animosities in Detroit, and in the US more generally, and the hiring of large numbers of young, African-American workers in the mid-1960s. Racism in the plant and in the community were main ingredients in Dodge Main's toxic stew and a new organization, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (drum), struggled against it, often with violent rhetoric or by reserving the right to fight violence with violence. Underlying these developments, however, was the inherent violence of the production process. In contrast with Dodge Main, violence in Chrysler's Windsor plants stayed at roughly constant levels throughout the period under consideration. Few Blacks lived in Windsor, and those who worked in Chrysler factories were not congregated in a single department. They therefore tended to respond as individuals to negative circumstances. Steadier employment and a less hostile racial environment in the community softened the impact of brutalizing production processes, although line speeds in Windsor were also slower than those in Detroit. With a few notable exceptions, especially the killing of a popular local union president, violence in Windsor Chrysler plants was mostly limited to fistfights between angry workers. Without a comparable trove of grievance records for the Windsor part of his study, the author gained access to Local 444 documents that had not previously been available for researchers. Oral interviews with leaders and activists bolstered source bases for both sides of the investigation, but proved especially helpful in Windsor. With the baseline chapters on Dodge Main and Windsor in place, the author delves further into drum, whose members, in his view, accurately diagnosed the source of violence in the plant but did not create the violent conditions. Indeed, the upsurge in in-plant violence preceded drum and lasted well beyond drum's demise in the early 1970s. Local 3 leadership, particularly president Ed Liska, who was white, tended to interpret Dodge Main violence as the product of problematic Black workers, not as an understandable outcome of brutal and racist conditions in the plant. Neither management nor the local union showed interest in improving those conditions, which meant that any measures taken to reduce violence, like improving plant security or harsher discipline for individual offenders, had little positive impact on the climate of fear, anger...

When Good Jobs Go Bad: Globalization, De-Unionization, and Declining Job Quality in the North American Auto Industry

When Good Jobs Go Bad: Globalization, De-Unionization, and Declining Job Quality in the North American Auto Industry

Forced to Concede: Permanent Restructuring and Labour's Place in the North American Auto Industry

Abstract: The stunning decline of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler over the past decade has rendered the once “Big Three” US automakers a vulnerable “Detroit Three”. In their attempts to return to profitability, the Detroit Three have undertaken a series of “turnarounds” aimed at renewing their competitive edge. Through this corporate restructuring agenda, 250,000 assembly jobs in North America have been lost, upwards of 50 auto plants have been closed, wages and benefits for new hires have been cut substantially and once strong, independent auto unions have been thoroughly overwhelmed. Permanent restructuring, then, represents a crisis strategy on the part of the corporate elite to continually intensify the demands placed on labour in the hopes of creating new conditions for capital accumulation. Working within labour geography, this paper documents the “regional race to the bottom” in the North American auto industry while reminding labour geographers that capitalist restructuring is a powerful constraint on labour agency.

NAFTA and labor in North America

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Labor and Global Capitalism in North America, 1850-1970 2. The Politics of Mexican Labor and Economic Development in Crisis 3. Mexican Labor and Workers' Rights under NAFTA and NAALC 4. Labor Mobility and Workers' Rights in North America 5. The Crisis of Union-Management Relations in the United States and Canada 6. The North American Auto Industry: The Apex of Concessionary Bargaining 7. VEBA Las Vegas! Unions Play Casino Capitalism: Autoworkers Lose Conclusion Notes Index

Display Technology at the 2010 North American Auto Show

Modern automobiles contain a great deal of electronics, including a significant number of information displays. At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit last January, a showcase for the latest in autos and automotive electronics, there was no shortage of great examples of display technology at work.

The North American Auto Industry in Crisis

The current financial crisis marks a series of turning points in the history of the North American auto industry.1 First, the iconic "Big Three" have been downsized to "The Detroit Three." Once the global symbol of U.S. productivism and consumerism, they now teeter on the brink of bankruptcy and, in the process, profound questions are being raised about the decline of U.S. manufacturing jobs more generally. Second, the auto unions, themselves once emblematic of what workers could achieve within capitalism, have been reduced to lobbying to save "their" companies, and a decades-long trend in private-sector labor negotiations has now confirmed collective bargaining as having shifted from demands by workers to demands on workers. This highlights the broader crisis of labor: if labor cannot find a way to renew itself it could fade into irrelevancy. And third, the environment—which the industry so rapaciously disregarded and the unions so short-sightedly ignored—seems to have forced itself onto the agenda. In coming to grips with both the threats and opportunities provided by this historic moment, the following points are crucial.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Gasoline Prices and the American Auto Industry: Repeated Environmental Shocks in a Unique Framework

Through a case study on the American automobile industry and the gasoline price shocks during 1973-1974 and 1978-1980, we explore the effects of multiple, external shocks on organizational learning. This paper provides three contributions. First, we bifurcate two components of organizational learning by separating knowledge acquisition from knowledge implementation. Second, although many papers have explored the effect of a single exogenous shock, we are the first to look at the effect of repeated, identical shocks. Third, while numerous studies have used this setting to examine consumer responses, we are the first to analyze the producers' response to gasoline shocks.

Dimitry Anastakis. Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960–1971

Dimitry Anastakis. <i>Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960–1971</i>

Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960-1971 (review)

Reviewed by: Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960–1971 Wayne Lewchuk Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960–1971. Dimitry Anastakis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Pp. 285, illus., b&w, $29.95 paper, $55.00 cloth On the eve of the twenty-first century, one in seven Canadians owed their employment to the automotive sector and one in five vehicles assembled in North America was assembled in Canada. Understanding how Canada became a preferred location for North American automotive production is essential for anyone interested in Canada's post–Second World War economic development. The Auto Pact plays a central role in understanding this story. Given the contrasts between the principles of the Auto Pact and more recent free trade agreements, understanding how and why this policy was adopted is both timely and necessary. Anastakis begins by examining the crisis in the automobile sector in the early 1960s and policy alternatives. One option was to increase protection of Canadian manufacturers, with the likely result of higher prices for cars sold in Canada and reduced choice for consumers. The alternative was free trade, which would almost certainly have led to hardship for Canadian producers. The Auto Pact was an ingenious compromise. Trade would be organized on a continental basis. Automotive production could flow duty free between Canada and the United States, subject to constraints on both sides. Material could be imported into Canada duty free by firms that produced as many vehicles in Canada as they sold. US-based manufacturers could organize production on a continent-wide basis, and Canada would get its 'fair' share of North American production. The author presents in detail the steps leading to the Auto Pact. The earlier failure of the continental free trade deal in agricultural implements was very much in the minds of the Canadian framers of the Auto Pact. The agreement was also influenced by the growing willingness of Canadian policy makers to question our close economic relationship with the United States. This caution led to attempts (largely unsuccessful) to diversify our trade, away from the United States. More successful was the use of trade policy to resolve imbalances with the United States. For example, duty-remission programs encouraged increased exports of Canadian production to the United States through positive economic incentives. The United States was highly critical of these policies. But rather than fold in the face of criticism, Canadian policy makers demanded a fair share of automobile production. The Auto Pact was the result. Before the deal could be finalized, an exemption was necessary from the [End Page 326] General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, as it violated the principle of bestowing preferential treatment. That such an exemption was granted points to how different the 1960s were, compared to trading relationships today. Given the recent experience with softwood lumber and the more intense competition over global market share in the automotive sector, it is hard to imagine such a deal being sanctioned by the international community today. The Auto Pact reflected an emerging sense of economic nationalism. It was one of the lasting legacies of Walter Gordon and the period when Liberal politicians endorsed nationalistic trade policies. Other countries, including Mexico and Australia, pursued different polices in the face of US dominance. They moved to protect their producers and their share of vehicle-production employment through protective tariffs and domestic content regulations. Canada embraced a form of continental free trade with guarantees of a fair share of employment. This approach had the advantage of ensuring Canadian jobs and reasonably priced vehicles, but the disadvantage was that it left the Canadian industry largely in the hands of the original 'Big Three.' Until the 1990s, this looked like a good arrangement. Production exceeded the minimum safeguards, employment expanded, and vehicle costs were kept relatively low. Today the heavy reliance on US-based producers is questioned by some, as they themselves find it difficult to compete in the new global economy. Others have more deeply explored the contribution of labour to this deal. The volume is also relatively silent on the role Canada was asked to play by the United States in supporting its global...

Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960-1971 by Dimitry Anastakis

Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960-1971 by Dimitry Anastakis

Auto pact: creating a borderless North American auto industry, 1960-1971

Tables Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction * The Canadian Auto Industry, 1900-1963 * Canadian State Intervention in the Auto Industry and the Failure of Automotive Free Trade, 1963-1964 * The Big Three and the Creation of a Borderless Auto Industry, 1965 * The Implementation of the Auto Pact, 1965-1966 103 * Managing the Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1965-1968 * Consolidating the Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1968-1971 Conclusion: The Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1971-2001 Appendix A. Text of the Automotive Products Trade Agreement, 1965 AppendixB. Sample Letter of Undertaking, Ford Motor Company of Canada Appendix C. Automotive Statistics, 1960-1999 Notes Bibliography Illustration Credits Index