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INTRODUCTION

The thesis of this paper is that the world automobile
industry has been characterized by a half-century-long
trajectory of labor militancy and capital relocation during
which automobile production (in its "Fordist" incarnation)
together with a characteristic corresponding form of labor
militancy, have spread across the globe. This trajectory has been
propelled by three major waves of militancy among the world's
autoworkers: (1) the CIO struggles of the 1930s, (2) the
"resurgence of class conflict" in Western Europe in the late
1960s, and (3) the emergence of "new union movements" in
Brazil, South Korea and South Africa in the 1980s. Each of
these rounds of labor struggles have prompted managerial
responses, including the restructuring of production and the
relocation of capital. And each round of restructuring and
relocation has undermined workers' bargaining power in the
sites of disinvestment/restructuring at the same time that it has
created and strengthened new working classes in the sites of
new investment.
The first section of this essay will trace the twentieth-
century trajectory of global Fordism in the automobile industry
from the CIO struggles of the 1930s to the recent labor
upheavals in South Korea, South Africa and Brazil. It will be
argued that this trajectory was driven forward by fundamental
contradictions in the social relations of Fordist production.
These contradictions reached crisis proportions in the 1980s as
global Fordism found itself continuously reproducing militant
and effective workers' movements in successively more
peripheral geographical locations.
The greater success of Japanese-based corporations in
containing the militancy and disruptive power of labor has
allowed "Toyotism" to overtake Fordism in the global
competition. While Fordism has been collapsing under the
weight of its own contradictions, the competition from
Toyotism delivered the coup de grace. Yet Toyotism itself is
not a system without its own social contradictions--and its very
success is likely to bring those contradictions to the fore. The
final section of this essay will offer some speculations on the
nature of those contradictions and their implications for the
future of labor-capital relations in the world automobile
industry.


I. THE FORDIST TRAJECTORY OF LABOR UNREST
AND GEOGRAPHICAL RELOCATION: DEJA-VU IN
MAJOR STRIKE WAVES FROM FLINT TO ULSAN

The complex division of labor characteristic of mass
production in the automobile industry, beginning with Ford's
introduction of the Model T, has produced a characteristic
form of labor militancy. The strategic strike (especially the sit-
down) targeted at a sensitive point within the automotive
corporation's overall technical division of labor, has been the
successful weapon of choice from Flint in 1936-37 to Turin in
1969-70 to Sao Paulo and Ulsan in the 1980s. In each case,
workers quickly were able to force the acceptance of mass
production unionism, major wage increases, and a degree of
workers' control on to antagonistic employers.
The central characteristics of mass production in
general, and the Fordist organization of production in the
automobile industry in particular, has contradictory effects on
the bargaining power of workers. On the one hand, continuous
flow production and the assembly line increase labor-market
competition through the homogenization/deskilling of industrial
work roles and eliminate the market-based bargaining power
of craftworkers. On the other hand, continuous flow
production and the assembly line increase the vulnerability of
capital to workers' direct action at the point of production.
Likewise, although the concentration, centralization, and
integration of capital give corporations formidable material
resources with which to confront and oppose workers' struggles,
these processes also increase the damage that can be done to
an entire corporation by a strike in one of its key plants and
the disruption that can be caused in the national economy by
a strike in a key corporation or industry. This ability to cause
costly disruptions as a result of one's location within a complex
division of labor, we have called "workplace bargaining power"
(Arrighi and Silver 1984: 193-5).
Automobile corporations have sought means to inhibit
the use of this workplace bargaining power--through the
promotion of "responsible unionism," through automation and
through the relocation of production to regions with large
supplies of semi- or newly-proletarianized cheap and/or
repressed labor. However, these efforts have generally only
succeeded in shifting the geographical location of this power
over time.

A. Flint, Michigan:
On December 30, 1936, workers occupied General
Motors' Fisher Body Plants No.1 and No.2 in Flint, Michigan.
By March 12, 1937, General Motors (the US's largest industrial
corporation with vast financial resources and a network of anti-
union spies) was forced to capitulate and sign a contract with
the United Auto Workers. This was the beginning of a flood
of strikes which brought unionization to the mass production
industries of the US.
A key to the UAW's success was the ability of the
workers to exploit their position within the complex division of
labor characteristic of mass production. The Flint sit-down
strike that paralyzed GM's Fischer Body plant was planned and
executed by a 'militant minority' of autoworkers who by
'unexpectedly stopping the assembly line and sitting down
inside the plant . . . catalyzed pro-union sentiment among the
vast majority of apathetic workers" (Dubofsky and Van Tine,
1977: 255). The strike wave demonstrated the limits of the
assembly lines' technical control of the workforce: a relatively
small number of activists could bring an entire plant's
production to a halt. As Edwards (1979: 128) puts it,
"[technical] control linked the entire plant's workforce, and
when the line stopped, every worker necessarily joined the
strike."
Moreover, just as a militant minority could stop
production in an entire plant, so if the plant was a key link in
an integrated corporate empire, its occupation could paralyze
the corporation. Such was the case when a group of union
members stopped production and occupied one of the most
critical plants in GM's entire empire: the Flint plant which
produced the bulk of Chevrolet's engines. With the Fischer
Body and Chevrolet engine factory occupations autoworkers
succeeded in crippling General Motors' car production and the
corporation's rate of output decreased from 50,000 cars per
month in December to only 125 for the first week of February.
GM was forced to abandon its uncompromisingly anti-union
stance and negotiate a contract with the UAW covering
workers in 20 plants in order to end the strike and resume
production (see Arrighi and Silver 1984: 184-85, 194-95;
Dubofsky and Van Tine 1977: 268-69; Rubenstein 1992: 235-7).
According to Rubenstein (1992: 234), "avoiding
concentrations of militant workers influenced locational
decisions even in the early days of the automotive industry."
Among the many reasons why the automobile industry had
centralized in the Detroit area in the early twentieth century
was the anti-union environment successfully imposed through
an 'open shop' campaign carried out by the Employers'
Association of Detroit. "By 1914, when Ford's moving
assembly line transformed automotive production from a skilled
to an unskilled occupation, the open shop concept . . . had
become strongly entrenched in Detroit and the automotive
industry in particular" (Rubenstein 1992: 234-5).
With the success of the UAW, relocation of production
away from UAW strongholds became one of the consistent
strategies followed by the auto companies over the next half-
century. Immediately in 1937, GM acquired an engine plant
in Buffalo to reduce its dependence on Flint, and shortly
thereafter began to diffuse production sites to rural areas and
the US South (Rubenstein 1992: 119, 240-1).
But the geographical relocation of the automobile
industry was not, in the post-world war period, primarily an
intra-US phenomenon. The breakup of the world market from
the crash of 1929 until the return to currency convertibility in
Europe in 1958, had closed off capital's international escape
route. But as soon as post-war Europe stabilized, and in
particular, with the establishment of the Common Market and
the restoration of currency convertibility, US multinationals
(including US automakers) flooded Europe with investments.

For several decades following the CIO victories, three
employer responses--disinvestment in union strongholds,
automation and the promotion of "responsible unionism"--
progressively undermined the structural strength of US labor in
general, and autoworkers in particular. When a new upsurge
in rank-and-file unrest at the end of the 1960s (symbolized by
the 'Lordstown Blues') pushed the UAW back toward
confrontationist tactics (with 'Operation Apache'), the
automakers abandoned the promotion of "responsible
unionism" and pursued geographical relocation and automation
of production with a new-found zeal. The bargaining power of
US autoworkers, already weakened by decades of restructuring,
collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s.
The other side of the coin, however, was the creation
(and over time strengthening) of autoworkers' movements in
the new sites of industrial expansion. This process was first felt
in Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s.

B. Western Europe:
In the interwar period, Western Europe lagged far
behind the US in the extension of Fordist mass production
techniques to automobile production. In the 1920s, the
European industry was characterized by many small firms
involved in the custom-manufacture of cars; none had the
resources or sufficient market-share to make the huge
investments in fixed plant and special-purpose machinery
necessary to "catch up" with the US. In the 1930s,
centralization of capital proceeded quickly with the support of
governments, but the ability to take advantage of the
economies of scale inherent in Fordist methods simply was
lacking. The barriers to intra-European trade combined with
generally low wages for workers meant than no true mass
market existed. US autoworkers could afford to buy the
product they were making (even in the 1920s), European
workers could not (Landes 1969: 445-51; see also Tolliday
1987: 32-37).
But the center of growth in the world automobile
industry shifted to Western Europe following the 1930s and
1940s upsurge of labor militancy among US autoworkers. For
Altshuler et al. (1984: ch. 2) the first major wave of expansion
of the auto industry lasted from 1910 to 1950 and was centered
in the US. The second major wave of expansion occurred in
the 1950s and 1960s and was centered in Western Europe.
The production of automobiles in Western Europe increased
fivefold during the 1950s, from 1.1 million in 1950 to 5.1
million in 1960; and it doubled in the 1960s to reach 10.4
million in 1970 (Altshuler et al. 1984: 19).
The dynamic behind this expansion was a combined
"American challenge" and European response. US direct
investment in the European automobile industry had begun in
the 1920s as a way to avoid tariff barriers and save on
transport and labor costs. But investment took-off in the 1950s
and 1960s. GM invested over DM 100 million in a major
expansion of Opel (Germany) between 1950 and 1955 and
afterwards continued adding to its facilities every year. GM
also invested 36 million pounds in Vauxhall between 1952 and
1956 to enlarge its Luton plant and build a new factory at
Dunstable. Likewise, in the 1950s, Ford rapidly expanded its
Dagenham facility in the UK and its Cologne factory in
Germany (Dassbach 1988: 254-55; 296-300). A combined
corporate-government response in Europe resulted in the rapid
growth of European automobile corporations through
consolidation and the introduction of the latest mass
production techniques. Thus, for example, the automobile
industry in Italy (which experienced little direct investment by
foreign car manufacturers) more than tripled its output during
the 1950s and then doubled it in the 1960s. By 1970 motor-
vehicle production in Italy had reached almost 2 million with
Fiat accounting for the vast majority of the output (Laux 1992:
178, 200).
The rapid extension of mass production techniques in
Western Europe had contradictory effects on the labor force,
similar to those experienced by US autoworkers in the early
twentieth century. On the one hand, craft workers (and their
unions) were marginalized from production. On the other
hand, the expansion and transformation of the industry created
a semi-skilled working class composed of newly proletarianized
migrant workers. In the case of the early twentieth century
US, the immigrants had been from Eastern and Southern
Europe. In the case of Western Europe in the 1950s and
1960s the immigrants came from the peripheral regions of
Europe (southern Italy, Spain, Portugal, Turkey and
Yugoslavia). In both cases the first generation of migrant
workers generally did not protest against the harsh conditions
of work and life. Unions were weak and the arbitrary power
of management over issues such as hiring, firing, promotion,
and job assignments, was unchallenged in the automobile
factories. But in both cases, the second generation became the
backbone of militant struggles that succeeded in radically
transforming relationships within the factory and within society.
The strike wave which spread across Western Europe
from the late sixties through the early 1970s caught unions,
management, and states by surprise. In these strikes, mass
production workers, like their US counterparts in the 1930s,
were able to exploit the bargaining power that accrued to them
as a result of their location within a complex division of labor.
Autoworkers in plants across Western Europe came to realize
that strategically located and timed strikes could do great
damage to a corporation, while minimizing the sacrifice made
by the workers themselves. Perhaps the most dramatic
example was the "hot autumn" of 1969 at Fiat:
"For Italian strikers, coordinated dispute activity within
a large-scale production unit [was] undertaken with a
view to paralysing production at the least cost to the
workers. A judicious application of strike action a
singhiozzo (shop-floor strikes) and a scacchiera
(coordinated in-plant stoppages) soon leads to
production chaos." (Dubois 1978:9)

Spot strikes, rolling strikes, and lightening strikes were designed
to create the maximum disruption to the flow of production by
targeting the most sensitive links in the productive chain.
Similar tactics were employed by autoworkers throughout
Europe in the late-1960s and early 1970s (see, e.g., Crouch and
Pizzorno, eds., 1978).
The successful exploitation of such tactics resulted in a
rapid expansion of the role of unions and workers' control on
the shopfloor and an unprecedented explosion of wages in the
1970s. Major limits on managements' prerogatives were
imposed. For example, at Fiat "consigli dei delegati" (workers'
delegates committees) were set up at the factory-level, with the
goal of providing workers (through their delegates) with some
direct control over the organization of production and with a
say in the day-to-day exercise of what had heretofore been
fundamental managerial prerogatives: e.g., assigning work tasks,
loads and speed, changes in the organization of production and
the introduction of new technology. Management was required
to inform, consult and negotiate with workers' delegates on all
decisions relating to the organization of the shop floor (Silver
1992: 29-30; Rollier 1986).
The response of automakers producing in Western Europe
to the startling successes of the workers' movements was
analogous to the US corporate response to the CIO victories
of the 1930s and 1940s: intensive restructuring of production
(including the rapid robotization of labor-intensive tasks),
attempts to promote "responsible unionism," and the relocation
of production. For Volkswagen a strategy of shifting
investments to more peripheral locations in Southern Europe
(especially Spain) and South America (especially Brazil and
Mexico) took precedence. Overall, foreign direct investment
from Germany increased fivefold between 1967 and 1975
(OECD 1981, Ross 1982, Silver 1992: 80). At Fiat, on the
other hand, massive robotization projects were pursued,
including the complete automation of engine assembly
(Volpato 1987: 218).
The effect on the bargaining power of workers was also
analogous to the US case. By the early 1980s labor movements
in Western Europe (including auto workers) were generally on
the defensive and the promotion of "responsible unionism" was
abandoned. By 1980, Fiat was able to bypass the workers'
councils and unilaterally implement a policy of aggressive
automation and rationalization that reduced the number of
employees from 140,000 to 90,000 (Rollier 1986: 117, 129).
The gains of the late 1960s had been largely overturned.
The other side of the coin, however, was the creation
(and strengthening) of new automobile proletariats in the
favored sites for industry expansion in the 1970s and 1980s.
Production expanded in low-wage semiperipheral locations with
authoritarian regimes, as the auto corporations sought to
escape militant workers at home, and as semiperipheral
governments "seized the chance" afforded by the global
competitive conjuncture to lure capital investment and promote
export-oriented industrialization. Large mass production
sectors were created and successive semiperipheral "economic
miracles" were heralded in the 1970s.

C. Sao Paulo, Brazil:
The Brazilian economic miracle from 1968-1974
corresponded precisely to the period in which core capitalists
increasingly sought to escape militant workers' struggles at
home. Brazil provided a seemingly perfect site for investment:
the 1964 military coup installed an extremely repressive regime
which succeeded in smashing the old corporatist trade union
movement and in effectively eliminating any working class
opposition at both the plant-level and national political level.
The Brazilian automobile industry experienced very
rapid expansion in the 1970s. By 1974 Brazil was among the
world's top ten vehicle producers. From 1969-1974 vehicle
output increased by an average annual rate of 20.7 percent;
and from 1974-1979 (while vehicle output collapsed throughout
the core in response to the oil crisis and labor militancy) the
Brazilian industry continued to grow at 4.5% per year
(Humphrey 1982: 48-50). While retrenching their operations
in core countries, multinationals invested heavily in Brazil in
the 1970s: Ford, for example, invested over US$ 300 million
and increased plant capacity by 100 per cent (Humphrey 1987:
129).
The rapid expansion of manufacturing in general, and
the automobile industry in particular, created a new working
class: new in size and in experience. From 1970 to 1980
employment in manufacturing doubled (Humphrey 1987: 120).
In the industrial suburb of Sao Bernardo do Campo where the
automobile industry concentrated, the number of workers
employed in manufacturing increased from 4,030 in 1950 to
20,039 in 1960 to 75,118 in 1970 (Humphrey 1982: 128-9). This
new working class tended to be concentrated in plants of
enormous size. The Volkswagen, Mercedes and Ford plants in
Sao Bernardo each employed over 60,000 people (Humphrey
1982: 137).
Like the protagonists of the CIO struggles of the 1930s
and the strike waves in the core of the late 1960s, Brazil's auto
workers were strategically located within a complex technical
division of labor within the Brazilian factories. But this new
working class was also strategically situated in what was now
the key export sector of the Brazilian economy: in 1988
transport equipment was Brazil's largest export, worth $3.9
billion (Economist Intelligence Unit, No.1, 1990, p.3). Strikes
and militancy in the automobile industry would affect not only
the profitability of the specific firms involved, but also the
ability of the Brazilian government to service its enormous debt
to private multinational banks.
In the closing years of the 1970s, as labor movements
were experiencing decisive defeats throughout the core, a new
trade union movement burst onto the scene in Brazil, bringing
to an end almost one and a half decades of worker quiescence.
Brazil's auto workers formed the central core of this new labor
movement. An intense strike wave in 1978 inaugurated a
period of activism which survived (even flourished) through a
decade of repression and recession in the 1980s.
On May 12, 1978, the day shift workers entered the
Saab-Scania plant's tool room in Sao Bernardo, but refused to
start up their machines. The strike quickly spread to the whole
plant with thousands of workers standing by their machines in
silence with their arms crossed. From Scania, the stoppages
spread to other auto plants--Mercedes, Ford, Volkswagen, and
Chrysler. Within a few days, workers were crossing their arms
and refusing to work in all the major plants. Reminiscent of
the US strikes of the 1930s and the Western European strike
waves of the late 1960s, these were mainly conducted as sit-
down strikes, with workers reporting to work each day, eating
in the canteen, but refusing to work (Moreira Alves 1989: 51-2;
Humphrey 1982: 166). The strikes resulted in major worker
victories, including substantial wage increases and the
recognition of new, independent trade unions (not linked to the
official state-sponsored trade unions). Implacably anti-union
employers had been forced to negotiate with new independent
unions and to sign collective contracts.
The automobile multinationals did not accept this defeat
and carried on a battle to repress strikes and eliminate the
unions from the plants. They believed that the victory of the
workers in 1978 resulted from their own lack of preparation,
rather than from any inherent strength of the workers. But
repression only resulted in a change of tactics from large-scale
confrontations to smaller-scale (but very disruptive) protests on
the shopfloor (slowdowns, spot strikes, and general non-
cooperation with management) reminiscent of the tactics used
in the Western European strike wave of the late 1960s and
early 1970s to maximize the disruption while minimizing the
costs to the workforce.
By 1982 the major employers had accepted the
inevitability of unionization, union involvement in shopfloor
management, and rising wages. Ford was the first to come to
believe that the maintenance of discipline on the shopfloor
required the promotion of "responsible unionism." In 1981,
Ford recognized plant-level committees made up of workers
elected at the shop floor level, and linked to the independent
unions, as having the right to negotiate with management over
workers' concerns and grievances (Humphrey 1987: 125). VW
held out longer, but by 1982 VW was forced to recognize the
independent unions, and accept factory committees similar to
those that had been introduced at Ford. Unrest continued at
the plant-level and in the nation as a whole. Strike activity in
Brazil reached a peak of nine million workers involved in 1987
(Moreira Alves 1989: 67). During the four years from 1985 to
1988, real industrial wages in Greater Sao Paulo grew by an
average of 10% per year (Economist Intelligence Unit Country
Profile, Brazil, 1989-90).
By the late 1980s, Brazil was no longer a favored site
for investment by the automobile multinational corporations.
New investments promised by the auto multinationals in the
late 1980s never materialized, and the Brazilian auto industry
is becoming technologically obsolete (Gwynne 1991: 75-78).

D. Port Elizabeth:
Like Brazil, although on a less spectacular scale, South
Africa became a favored site for investment by the automobile
multinational corporations as they fled militant labor
movements at home. During the late 1950s and early 1960s,
foreign capital had shied away from South Africa. The
strength of the national liberation movements was peaking
across the continent, and massive protests against the
implementation of apartheid laws within South Africa were
spreading--including nationwide stayaways organized in 1957,
1958, 1960 and 1961 by the South African Congress of Trade
Unions (SACTU). However, foreign investment boomed in the
late sixties, once the Nationalist government showed that it
could successfully smash the opposition, and moreover, institute
repressive and racist legislation which ensured a steady flow of
cheap labor.
From 1965 to 1969, the average annual net inflow of
foreign capital was $308 million per year; and between 1970
and 1976, the inflow mushroomed to an average of $1 billion
per year (Litvak et al., 1978: 40). The motor vehicle industry
was one of the main targets of these inflows of capital. From
1967 to 1975 the motor vehicle industry grew by 10.3 percent
annually (Litvak 1978: 24, Myers 1980: 256).
A large, urban, Black proletariat was formed,
concentrated in semiskilled positions in mass production
industries. And as in Brazil, this new proletariat became the
backbone of a wave of labor militancy in the late 1970s and
early 1980s. And as in Brazil, the wave of militancy was
successful in gaining recognition for independent unions and
advances in both wages and working conditions.
Autoworkers formed the frontline of the industrial class
battle in the early 1980s. As in the other cases described
above, they were able to effectively exploit their position within
a complex technical division of labor. Mass militancy took a
variety of forms: some were large-scale conflicts involving
thousands of striking workers (e.g., in 1980 at Ford, VW,
Datsun and BMW; in 1981 at Leyland; and in 1982 at Ford
and GM); others involved the use of disruptive but low-key
tactics such as slow-downs and small strikes limited to key
departments within plants. For example, in an August 1984
strike at Volkswagen, the workers limited their stoppage to the
paint shop, but because of the latter's strategic location within
the factory's division of labor, the entire plant was forced to
shut down for five days. The plant reopened when
management agreed to union demands (Southall 1985: 321,
329).
By the end of the 1980s automobile multinationals had
largely divested from South Africa. As Gwynne (1991:50)
noted: "While political factors [anti-apartheid campaign] have
been emphasized, the recent withdrawal of Ford and General
Motors from South Africa has a significant economic basis."

E. Seoul/Ulsan:
The fading of the Brazilian and South African
"economic miracles" overlapped with the emergence of the
South Korean "economic miracle." In 1973 the South Korean
government targeted automobiles as one of the priority
industries for development. But the take-off of the South
Korean automobile industry only took place in the early 1980s--
that is, during the years in which labor militancy, unionization
and rising wages had come to characterize the Brazilian and
South African industries. Like Brazil and South Africa at the
time of their big spurts in automobile production, a labor-
repressive regime in South Korea banned independent trade
unions and strike activity, and helped keep wages abysmally
low. The environment proved attractive for the three domestic
conglomerates that had been given governmental permission to
produce automobiles (Hyundai, Kia and Daewoo), as well as
for their multinational corporate partners (Mitsubishi,
Ford/Mazda, and GM/Isuzu, respectively) (Wade 1990: 309-
312; Deyo 1987).
South Korean vehicle output increased almost twelve-
fold between 1977 and 1987 from 83,000 units to 980,000 units
(Bloomfield 1991:29). Both US and Japanese multinationals
moved into Korea through joint ventures. In 1981 GM
obtained a 50 percent stake in Daewoo. Through this joint
venture, GM began selling a cheap Korean-made car in North
America as the Pontiac Le Mans. A 1985 agreement between
GM and Daewoo calls for the latter to supply starter motors
and alternators for GM's worldwide operations. In 1986, Ford
paid US $30 million for a 10 percent shareholding in Kia and
opened a Korean branch office of Ford International Business
Development in order to develop sources of automotive
components in South Korea (Gwynne 1991: 73-4).
As South Korean production reached one million
automobiles annually (and surpassed Brazilian output), The
New York Times filed the following report on August 12, 1987:
"A wave of labor unrest is sweeping through this country . . .
The unrest has shut plants in the nation's largest
conglomerates, including Hyundai, Daewoo, Samsung, Lucky-
Goldstar. Hyundai Motors, which manufactures the popular
Excel, settled a dispute that had shut its factory but said labor
troubles at its suppliers had forced the company to suspend car
exports for now."
On August 18, 1987 the New York Times headline read
"Workers Seize Hyundai plants in South Korea." And it was
reported that: "More than 20,000 workers climbed over a
barricade and occupied factory buildings and a shipyard
operated by the Hyundai Group . . . Hyundai has been the
most badly hit of the large conglomerates. At the heart of the
struggle is the demand by Hyundai's workers to form their own
unions. Hyundai has long taken a tough anti-union stance, and
until the recent turmoil, Hyundai employees had no union."
Then, on August 20, 1987, only eight days after the
initial report, the Times carried a photograph with the caption:
"Chung Ju Yung, in white suit, founder and honorary chairman
of the Hyundai Group, toasting the agreement with leaders of
the newly formed labor union in Seoul yesterday." The
accompanying article was entitled "South Korean Company
Agrees to Recognize Union."
Additional strikes in 1988 and 1990 confirmed the
transition of the South Korean automobile industry to a new
stage. With real wages rising at an average annual rate of 20%
since 1987, and given the small size of the domestic market, it
is not at all clear that the US and Japanese corporations on
whom Korea depends for technology and investment, will
continue to choose South Korea as a favored site for
expansion. Recent moves (especially by Japan) into the
ASEAN countries and China may be taken as further evidence
for doubts about the South Korean industry's future.

F. The Trajectory of Global Fordism-- A Summary:
The global automobile industry has been characterized
by a half-century-long trajectory in which mass production
techniques and a characteristic form of mass production labor
militancy has spread across the globe, from the US, to Western
Europe, to rapidly industrializing semiperipheral states.
This trajectory has been characterized by successive
cycles during which: (1) production concentrates in areas that
are both close to large consumer markets for the industry's
final product and that offer large supplies of relatively cheap
and disciplined labor; (2) large, new working classes with
extensive bargaining power form in these areas; (3) the workers
use their disruptive power in an explosion of militancy that
successfully gains union representation, rising wages and a
degree of worker control on the shopfloor; and (4)
management responds, in part, by reorienting investments
toward new sites presumed to offer cheap and disciplined
labor. This relocation weakens the labor movement in the
sites of disinvestment, but strengthens labor movements in the
new favored sites of investment, preparing the ground for a
new wave of militancy, followed by another round of
restructuring and geographical relocation.
US- and West-European-based automobile
multinationals have been chasing the specter of cheap and
disciplined labor around the world, only to find themselves
continuously recreating militant labor movements in the new
locations. And while following this strategy, they have been
dramatically losing market shares to Japanese automakers.
Have we reached, then, the historical limits of the
trajectory of global Fordism?
On the one hand, the recent rapid expansion of
automobile production in northern Mexico--where independent
unions are not recognized and wage levels are far below those
now paid in South Korea--could be interpreted as evidence
suggesting a continuation of the dynamic of militancy and
relocation. The approach followed here would lead us to
expect a strengthening of independent workers' movements in
Mexico, with a strong base in the auto industry in the north
during the coming decade. (The first visible signs in support of
this conjecture were the Ford strike at Hermosillo in 1990 and
the VW strike at Puebla in 1992.)
On the other hand, a second trend has emerged in the
late 1980s and 1990s that appears to be stronger and to point
toward an exhaustion of the trajectory. That is, the automobile
multinationals have begun to recentralize production in the
core regions from which they had fled in the 1950s, 1960s (US)
and 1970s (US and Western Europe.) In the case of the US,
the southern Great Lakes states are once again a site of
concentration of production for both the automotive assembly
and automotive components industries--although former union
strongholds are avoided and small towns with no automotive
production history are preferred (Rubenstein 1992: 171-182).
This trend toward a recentralization of production has
been associated with the rise of "global Toyotism." Japanese
automobile firms have been the leading agency in this
transformation through a major wave of direct investment in
the US in the 1980s (and to a lesser extent, in Western
Europe.) This recentralization in the core has also been
accompanied by transformations in labor-capital relations
associated with "Toyotism," including the introduction of
flexible work rules, just-in-time delivery systems and multi-
layered subcontracting. And in both the US and Western
Europe, these major changes in work rules and productive
organization have been possible to implement thanks to the
weakening of formerly militant auto worker unions through the
relocation of capital and restructuring processes of the 1970s
and 1980s.
This reconcentration in the core could be interpreted as
the beginnings of a second long trajectory of militancy and
relocation: that is, as mass production unions have been
undermined in the core by the disinvestment of the previous
decades, producers are once again choosing to relocate in an
area of weak labor movements (e.g., small towns in the
southern Great Lakes region.) However, the fact that this
recentralization in the core has been accompanied by the
introduction of new "post-Fordist" techniques of production
raises doubts about whether we are witnessing the reinitiation
of a similar long cycle, or a process of fundamental
transformation--that is, a transition from global Fordism to
global Toyotism.


II. LABOR UNREST UNDER GLOBAL TOYOTISM

The question is, how different are the dynamics of
global Fordism and global Toyotism?
The fledgling Japanese automobile industry in the 1930s
attempted to follow the essential principles laid out by the
United States example: mass production techniques were
introduced and a strategy of vertical integration of operations
within the major automotive assembly firms was pursued.
Toyota, Nissan and Isuzu made their own brakes, castings, and
other subassemblies and critical components, as well as many
simple parts; while Toyota and Nissan both set up captive
suppliers of specialty steel (Smitka 1991: 6-7).
In the aftermath of the Japanese defeat in the Second
World War, a continued strategy of vertical integration proved
impossible. The automobile assemblers faced financial
constraints that limited their ability to enlarge and expand their
facilities. Equally, if not more important, the automobile
assemblers faced militant workers' movements. In the late
1940s and early 1950s, layoffs of workers were frequent
triggers for bitter strikes and other forms of unrest, while
employment security and wage equality became central
workers' demands (Okayama 1987).
Thus, when output began to expand in the 1950s, the
assemblers avoided hiring new permanent workers, and instead
adopted a policy of shifting work out to suppliers. "The
primary reason for [this shift to] subcontracting," according to
Smitka (1991:7), was "to avoid renewed conflict with militant
labor unions . . ." By following a strategy of expanding output,
not through vertical integration, but through a widening
reliance on subcontracting, Toyota increased output fivefold
during 1952-57 while its workforce rose only 15%. (Smitka
1991: 2). This reliance on outside suppliers allowed the
automobile assemblers to guarantee permanent employment to
their own workers.
At first, the workers (and profits) at subcontracting firms
provided the buffer that protected workers (and profits) at the
main assembly firms. However, by the 1960s, the contracting
system had grown into a multilayered pyramid in which the
primary subcontractors (those who sold directly to the
assemblers) resembled the assemblers themselves, in terms of
the use of advanced technology and the wage levels and
employment security offered to their workers. The role of
"buffer" in recession fell to a larger group of secondary
suppliers (who sold to the primary suppliers) and tertiary
suppliers (who sold to the secondary suppliers) (Smitka 1991).

This multilayered subcontracting system has allowed the
Japanese automobile assemblers and their primary suppliers to
develop relatively cooperative relationships with their
employees, based on a commitment to lifetime employment
and rising wages with age and tenure. They have therefore
been able to minimize the costs associated with labor unrest
since the upheavals of the early 1950s. This, in turn, has been
a central component explaining the competitive success of the
Japanese automobile industry on a world-scale since the late-
1960s.
In response to the competitive success of the Japanese,
US-based and Western-European based automotive firms have
attempted to selectively imitate Japanese methods--for example,
by adopting the just-in-time system and flexible work rules but
without employment guarantees at the assembly firms or
primary suppliers. The results of these efforts to date show
that the lower levels of labor militancy in Japan cannot be
explained by lower levels of workplace bargaining power. In
fact, the just-in-time system puts enormous, and perhaps even
greater disruptive power in the hands of the workforce, as
production becomes extremely vulnerable to strikes at suppliers
as well as in transportation.
Indeed, where just-in-time methods have been adopted,
without the adoption of employment guarantees and other
concessions, the vulnerabilities of the system have been well
demonstrated. As an October 8, 1992 (page 5) New York
Times article noted: "Because the [US] automobile industry
has largely adopted the Japanese system of keeping production
inventories low, strikes at part plants have a much broader
impact than in the past . . . The ability of the union to cripple
production by putting only a few thousand workers on strike is
a way of imposing costs on the company that may outweigh the
savings from job cuts [through automation, outsourcing, etc.]"
There are already numerous cases where transport
strikes and supplier strikes have led to widespread assembly
plant closings in the southern Great Lakes states under the
just-in-time system. For example, "on the first day of a
nationwide walkout by rail engineers in September 1982, GM
was forced to close its St. Louis assembly plant because of lack
of parts. By the third day, Janesville, Leeds, Lordstown, and
Wilmington were operating on half days, and Chrysler
president Iacocca wired the White House to urge intervention.
On the fourth day, the US Congress [intervened and] ended
the strike . . . " (Rubenstein 1992: 198).
Strikes at suppliers can lead to equally rapid disruption
of production. For example: "When workers at Delco
Electronics plant in Kokomo, Indiana, went on strike in
November 1986, GM assembly plants around the country were
closed. Because radios from the plant were being shipped on
a just-in-time basis, assembly plants had little inventory on
hand with which to work once the strike began. The strike was
called to protest Delco's sourcing of some work to a plant in
Mexico. GM felt compelled to return the work to Kokomo in
order to get a supply of radios flowing into the assembly line
plants again." (Rubenstein 1992: 198)
In sum, the just-in-time system continues to put as
much--or more--disruptive power in the hands of workers as
the more traditional Fordist organization of production. On
the other hand, in Japan, where these methods were pioneered
and have been developed to their fullest, workers have not
routinely exercised these powers. The key seems to be the
guarantee of lifetime employment to the upper rungs of the
workforce (those with the most disruptive power) and a
concentration of the pressures of low wages and insecure
employment on the lower rungs of the workforce (those
without significant disruptive power). However, can this
process be maintained in the coming decades?
The success of the Japanese automobile industry has
been founded on a Japan-based (rather than transnational)
system of production. But as "Toyotism" achieved phenomenal
success on a world-scale, it has been forced to convert itself
into "global Toyotism." In response to protectionist measures
in the US, as well as rising costs in Japan, the leading
automobile assemblers and their suppliers have begun
production in the US in the 1980s (Rubenstein 1992). At the
same time, many of the firms (and/or functions) being
performed by the lowest rungs of the Japanese subcontracting
pyramid were moved off shore to low-wage countries in South
East Asia (Machado 1992).
As production has moved off-shore, the post-war
employment and wage system in Japan is coming under attack.
Major corporations are attempting to reduce costs and increase
efficiency in Japan by making merit pay a major component of
total income. This will have several important consequences
including, undermining the relatively egalitarian internal pay
structure of the firms, eliminating the guarantee of upward
movement in wages with increasing length of tenure, and
introducing a divisive issue over which management exercises
a subjective judgment (whose work merits more/less pay). At
the same time, "Japan's most famous labor institution, lifetime
employment," is also coming under attack.
"Companies are finding it hard to continue to keep
'window sitters', people who are given no useful work to
do but collect a salary . . . More people are being
asked to retire early, and some analysts expect that if
the current slump continues large companies will
announce sweeping layoffs, as in the United States"
(New York Times, "Japanese Starting to Link Pay to
Performance, Not Tenure," October 2, 1993, A1).

In sum, Japanese corporations may be moving their
employment practices in the direction of the kind of Fordist
practices that provoked major waves of labor militancy from
the CIO struggles of the 1930s to the more recent labor
upheavals in Brazil, South Korea and South Africa--and the
late 1940s and early 1950s strike wave in Japan itself.
The contradictions of success for "global Toyotism" are
now showing on the horizon, and raise a number of questions
about the future. First, can the automobile industry retain
harmonious labor-capital relations in the face of wage freezes,
merit pay distinctions and layoffs, or will the mid-1990s for the
Japanese industry resemble the mid-1930s for the US industry?
Second, as the Japanese automobile corporations decentralize
production in an effort to lower costs and be close to large
markets, will they be able to recreate the elements that
fostered relative industrial peace in Japan from the mid-1950s
to the present? Or, will they retrace the long trajectory of
global Fordism by creating and strengthening new working
classes in each new favored site of investment?

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