Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960s until the collapse of communism, the automobile exemplified the tension between the ideological imperatives of political authorities and the aspirations of ...ordinary citizens. For the latter, the automobile was the ticket to personal freedom and a piece of the imagined consumer paradise of the West. For the authorities, the personal car was a private, mobile space that challenged the most basic assumptions of the collectivity. The "socialist car"-and the car culture that built up around it-was the result of an always unstable compromise between official ideology, available resources, and the desires of an increasingly restless citizenry. InThe Socialist Car, eleven scholars from Europe and North America explore in vivid detail the interface between the motorcar and the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the USSR.
In addition to the metal, glass, upholstery, and plastic from which the Ladas, Dacias, Trabants, and other still extant but aging models were fabricated, the socialist car embodied East Europeans' longings and compromises, hopes and disappointments. The socialist car represented both aspirations of overcoming the technological gap between the capitalist first and socialist second worlds and dreams of enhancing personal mobility and status. Certain features of automobility-shortages and privileges, waiting lists and lack of readily available credit, the inadequacy of streets and highways-prevailed across the Soviet Bloc. In this collective history, the authors put aside both ridicule and nostalgia in the interest of trying to understand the socialist car in its own context.
Contributors: Elke Beyer, Swiss Institute of Technology; Valentina Fava, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and University of Helsinki; Luminita Gatejel, European University Institute, Florence; Mariusz Jastrzab, Kozminski University; Corinna Kuhr-Korolev, University of Bochum; Brigitte Le Normand, Indiana University Southeast; Esther Meier, University of the Federal Armed Forces, Hamburg; Kurt Möser, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; György Péteri, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim; Eli Rubin, Western Michigan University; Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Michigan State University
At the time of the U.S.-Japan auto conferences in March 1983, the hoped-for economic recovery as manifested in auto sales had revealed itself quite modestly. Three months later, the indicators were ...more robust and certainly long overdue for those whose livelihood depends on the health of the industry--some of whom are university professors. With Japanese import restrictions in place until March 1984 and drastically reduced break-even points for domestic manufactures, rising consumer demand holds great promise for the industry. The rapidly rising stock prices of the auto-makers captures well the sense of heightened optimism, as do the various forecasts for improved profits. While the news is certainly welcome, it nevertheless should be greeted with caution. As Mr. Perkins noted at the conference, "we have a tendency to forget things very quickly. If we have a boom market this year, there is a good chance that a lot of things we learned will be forgotten." To put the matter differently and more bluntly, with growing prosperity there is the risk that management will fall back into old habits, making impossible the achievement of sustained quality and productivity improvement. Similarly, the commitment to develop cooperative relations with workers and suppliers will weaken. The union will be under membership pressure to retrieve concessions rather than to take the longer-term view. This longer-term view recognizes that "up-front increases" and adherence to existing work rules increasingly come at the sacrifice of future job security. Government policymakers will turn their attention away from the industry. This may not mean a great deal given how weakly focused their attentions has been during the last three years and how mixed and contradictory government auto policies have been for over a decade.
This book addresses two of the most important trends in political economy during the last two decades - globalization and decentralization - in the context of the world's most rapidly growing ...economic power, China. The intent is to provide a better understanding of how local political and economic institutions shape the ability of Chinese state-owned firms to utilize foreign direct investment (FDI) to remake themselves in the transition from inefficient and technologically backward firms into powerful national champions. In a global economy, the author argues, local governments are increasingly the agents of industrial transformation at the level of the firm. Local institutions are durable over time, and they have important economic consequences. Through an analysis of five Chinese regions, the treatment seeks to specify the opportunities and constraints that alternative institutional structures create, how they change over time, and ultimately, how they prepare Chinese firms for the challenge of global competition.
The mood of the first U of M U.S.-Japan Auto conference in January 1981 could only be described as electric. People wanted to know what our problems were and how we could begin to solve them. ...Inherent in the latter issue was the questions, what could we learn from the Japanese? One left the conference with a sense that there was a call for action, a mandate to address the problems facing industry. The mood, about a year later, at the March 1982 U.S.-Japan Auto Conference was far more subdued. While undoubtedly this reflected the stream of statistics confirming the continually depressed state of the industry, another dynamic was possibly operating as well. Whereas the 1981 conference was "electric," a state of mind which flowed from a certain frustration at seemingly overwhelming difficulties and often vague expectations of what we might learn from the Japanese, the 1982 conference was more "workmanlike" in the sense that speakers discussed specifically what progress was being made in addressing problems. This more subdued, pragmatic approach continued throughout wand was reinforced by workshops held the day after the main conference. Instead of discussing the virtues of the Just-In-Time system in Japan, speakers addressed the practical problems of introducing such a system in the U.S. firms. Instead of railing about the benefits or failings of regulation of the industry, they discussed what we could reasonably expect from regulation. Instead of exhorting the industry to adopt Japanese practices willy-nilly, they focused on some of the limitations of the Japanese model in a range of different areas. Instead of trying to identify some magic key to Japanese success in the automotive industry, they discussed the interrelationships among various factors. At the same, they continued to explore the basic issues transforming the auto industry worldwide. In this connection, they sought to unravel some of the complexities associated with the internalization of the auto industry and trade obligations under the GATT.
This study exposes the human side of the decline of the U.S. auto industry, tracing the experiences of two key groups of General Motors workers: those who took a cash buyout and left the factory, and ...those who remained and felt the effects of new technology and other workplace changes. Milkman's extensive interviews and surveys of workers from the Linden, New Jersey, GM plant reveal their profound hatred for the factory regime—a longstanding discontent made worse by the decline of the auto workers' union in the 1980s. One of the leading social historians of the auto industry, Ruth Milkman moves between changes in the wider industry and those in the Linden plant, bringing both a workers' perspective and a historical perspective to the study.
Milkman finds that, contrary to the assumption in much of the literature on deindustrialization, the Linden buyout-takers express no nostalgia for the high-paying manufacturing jobs they left behind. Given the chance to make a new start in the late 1980s, they were eager to leave the plant with its authoritarian, prison-like conditions, and few have any regrets about their decision five years later. Despite the fact that the factory was retooled for robotics and that the management hoped to introduce a new participatory system of industrial relations, workers who remained express much less satisfaction with their lives and jobs.
Milkman is adamant about allowing the workers to speak for themselves, and their hopes, frustrations, and insights add fresh and powerful perspectives to a debate that is often carried out over the heads of those whose lives are most affected by changes in the industry.
China Shifts Gears Gallagher, Kelly Sims
2006, 2006-06-23, 2006-05-19
eBook
Chinese production of automobiles rose from 42,000 cars per year in 1990
to 2.3 million in 2004; the number of passenger vehicles on the road doubled every
two and a half years through the 1990s and ...continues to grow. In China Shifts Gears,
Kelly Sims Gallagher identifies an unprecedented opportunity for China to "shift
gears" and avoid the usual problems associated with the automobile
industry--including urban air pollution caused by tailpipe emissions, greenhouse gas
emissions, and high dependence on oil imports--while spurring economic development.
This transformation will only take place if the Chinese government plays a
leadership role in building domestic technological capacity and pushing foreign
automakers to transfer cleaner and more energy-efficient technologies to China. If
every new car sold in China had the cleanest and most energy-efficient of the
automotive technologies already available, urban air pollution could be minimized,
emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases would be lower than projected, and
the Chinese auto industry would continue to flourish and contribute to China's
steady economic development. But so far, Gallagher finds, the opportunity to shift
gears has been missed.Gallagher looks in detail at three U.S.-Chinese joint
ventures: Beijing Jeep, Shanghai GM, and Chang'An Ford. These case studies are based
on original research, including interviews with 90 government officials, industry
representatives, and experts in both countries. Drawing from the case studies,
Gallagher explores the larger issues of the environmental and economic effects of
technology transfer in the automobile industry and the policy implications of
"leapfrogging" to more advanced technology.
As the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies reflected on the deteriorating position of the domestic auto industry in the fall of 1980, and the strong competitive threat being posed by ...the Japanese automakers, we were struck by the extraordinary low quality of the public discussion of these critical issues. The national importance of the issues seemed only matched by the superficiality of the analyses being offered. The tendency to think in terms of scapegoats was particularly evident. The Japanese as the basic cause of our problems has been a particularly notable theme. To be sure, cooperation with the Japanese in formulating a rational overall trade policy may be an important part of the solution. It has also been fashionable to blame it all on American auto industry management for not concentrating on the production of small cars when "everyone knew" that was the thing to do. Alternatively, government meddling was blamed for all our problems. Clearly, the complex problem we faced required more penetrating analyses. It seemed therefore, that the time was ripe for a public seminar which moved beyond the rhetoric of the moment and probed some of the deeper causes of our problems and possible directions for future policy.
The automotive industry appears close to substantial change engendered by “self-driving” technologies. This technology offers the possibility of significant benefits to social welfare—saving lives; ...reducing crashes, congestion, fuel consumption, and pollution; increasing mobility for the disabled; and ultimately improving land use. This report is intended as a guide for state and federal policymakers on the many issues that this technology raises.
Despite the economic and political importance of the U.S.-Japan relationship and the extensive attention paid to automotive trade, few American scholars or policy makers are familiar with the history ...of Japanese government-business relations, either generally or for specific industries such as passenger cars. This book hopefully helps in a small way to fill that gap in our knowledge and, thus, to help strengthen the foundation from which we make public policy decisions about bilateral trade. ix
From Chinese factories making cheap toys for export, to sweatshops in Bangladesh where name-brand garments are sewn-studies on the impact of globalization on workers have tended to focus on the worst ...jobs and the worst conditions. But inWhen Good Jobs Go Bad, Jeffrey Rothstein looks at the impact of globalization on a major industry-the North American auto industry-to reveal that globalization has had a deleterious effect on even the most valued of blue-collar jobs.
Rothstein argues that the consolidation of the Mexican and U.S.-Canadian auto industries, the expanding number of foreign automakers in North America, and the spread of lean production have all undermined organized labor and harmed workers. Focusing on three General Motors plants assembling SUVs-an older plant in Janesville, Wisconsin; a newer and more viable plant in Arlington, Texas; and a "greenfield site" (a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility) in Silao, Mexico-When Good Jobs Go Badshows how global competition has made nonstop, monotonous, standardized routines crucial for the survival of a plant, and it explains why workers and their local unions struggle to resist. For instance, in the United States, General Motors forced workers to accept intensified labor by threatening to close plants, which led local unions to adopt "keep the plant open" as their main goal. At its new factory in Silao, GM had hand-picked the union-one opposed to strikes and committed to labor-management cooperation-before it hired the first worker.
Rothstein's engaging comparative analysis, which incorporates the viewpoints of workers, union officials, and management, sheds new light on labor's loss of bargaining power in recent decades, and highlights the negative impact of globalization on all jobs, both good and bad, from the sweatshop to the assembly line.
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