Critical Encounters. Wolfgang Streeck
politics.
February 2019
IT WAS IN THE early 1960s, I think, that our class at a small-town gymnasium made a trip to southwestern Germany, herded by several of our teachers. We visited Heidelberg and Schwetzingen and similar places, without really seeing them; seventeen-year-old boys have other things to consider. However, we also went to Rüsselsheim, near Frankfurt, for a tour of the Opel car factory. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined a place like this: the deafening noise, the dirt, the heat, and in the middle of it all, living people stoically performing predefined minute operations on the cars-in-the-making that were slowly but relentlessly moving by their workstations. The high point of the visit was the foundry, located in the basement – which, as I now learn from Joshua Freeman’s marvelous book, was the way car factories were then designed.* Here, where the heat seemed unbearable and there was almost no light, half-naked human beings carried, in small buckets of obviously back-breaking weight, the molten metal, red-hot, from the furnace to the casting stations. To me, trained in the classics rather than the real world, it seemed as if I had entered the workshop of Hephaistos, Homer’s crippled Olympian blacksmith. Looking back, I think it was on that day that I began to become something like a radical and decided to study sociology, which I then believed could enable me and others to help improve the lives of those having to slave away in the basements of the factories of this world.
Later, as a young social scientist, the car industry remained an obsession for me. I included car manufacturing in my empirical work whenever I could, and made a point of visiting the factories to renew my ‘feel’ for them and replenish my supply of mental images of what I tried, often in vain, to convince my colleagues were the Gothic cathedrals of the twentieth century. What I found amazing, among other things, was how these places were changing, and how fast, compared to what I had seen back in the 1960s: less and less noise, dirt and dust; much better air; no welding by hand and no overhead assembly anymore; hermetically sealed automatic paint shops; the heavy lifting all done by machines and later by robotics. In final assembly it was now the workers who were lifted up, sitting on movable platforms along with the doors or seats or whatever else they were installing. My last visit to the VW plant at Wolfsburg, more than three decades ago, ended as usual in final assembly, where no sound was to be heard apart from soft music and the first firing of the engines at the end of the line as the new cars were taken away to the storage area. The workers were mostly women, dressed in jeans and t-shirts. With a big smile and the male chauvinism that will always be part of the culture of car making, my guide, from the all-powerful works council, let me know that what I was seeing was ‘Wolfsburg’s marriage market’: ‘The lads drop by here when they have a break to see what’s on offer’.
Of course, much of this change was due to technological progress, and also to labour market constraints like the need to feminize the workforce and the labour process. But politics and industrial relations were at least as important. In the 1970s, after the strike wave of 1968 and 1969, governments, managements and trade unions in European manufacturing countries began to take seriously demands for what in Germany came to be called Humanisierung der Arbeit – the ‘humanization’ of industrial work. Under Brandt and Schmidt, this became a national research and development campaign, run out of a special department in the Ministry of Research and Technology, which lavishly funded academic and industrial projects in engineering, management and industrial sociology. Ending Taylorism was the object, and there were results, especially where workers and their representatives had rights, not just to information and consultation, but also to co-decision-making on work organization, technology, working time, training and the like.
Freeman, whose history centres on the UK, the US, the USSR and China, largely sidesteps the European continent, which is regrettable given the enduring success of manufacturing in countries like Germany and Sweden. Certainly workforce participation and anti-Taylorism had their drawbacks, as did worker co-management. In Sweden, work reform culminated in avant-garde production methods at Volvo and Saab that were not only expensive but were disliked by the workers they were supposed to benefit – like ‘group work’ on ‘production islands’, where complete cars were individually put together almost from scratch and workers were encouraged to sign ‘their’ product with their names. For a while, Saabs and Volvos were the favourite cars of European intellectuals because they were made, it was believed, by ‘happy workers’ – until both firms returned to more conventional work organization (which, however, did not in the end protect them from being taken over by GM and Ford, respectively). In Germany, meanwhile, cooperation between management and the works council at Volkswagen gradually deteriorated into collusion and co-optation. The scandals included multimillion euro payments to the head of the works council and his girlfriend, authorized by the company’s personnel director, Peter Hartz. (In 2002, while at VW, Hartz was appointed by Gerhard Schröder to chair a commission on the labour market, which eventually led to the ‘Hartz-IV’ reforms, which cut benefits for the long-term unemployed.) Still, on the shop floor this mattered less than in the press, and whatever else it was that management, union and works council did together, the workers who no longer had to work overhead surely appreciated that.
Freeman’s book tells a long and elaborate story that begins in England in the late eighteenth century, then moves to the United States, and from textiles to steel and from there to automobiles, and on to the worldwide victory of Taylorism and Fordism in the first half of the twentieth century. That victory extended even into the Soviet Union under Stalin, and peaked in the mass production of the Second World War. This, in turn, was followed by the Cold War and the hopes that accompanied it for peaceful global convergence driven by the inherent constraints and opportunities of modern industrialism, until history moved on with the rise of China and its peculiar pathway of industrial modernity. Throughout his account, Freeman manages to convey the deep ambivalence associated with modernization as industrialization: expulsion from the land, proletarianization, exploitation, repression, cruel discipline on the one hand and emancipation from traditional ways of life on the other, coming with money wages, new solidarities, trade unions fighting for higher wages and better conditions, and with the possibility of industrial citizenship and social rights gained by supporting and participating in popular politics of social reform.
Among the things that make Freeman’s book special is that he pays attention, not just to the internal organization of factories, but also to their relationship with, and indeed their effect on, their surrounding societies. That factories require particular patterns of settlement – large new cities or extensive company housing – does not always figure prominently in accounts of industrialization. Planning for the sudden arrival of large numbers of people in a previously sparsely populated geographical space attracted urbanists with progressive visions of a new society and a new industrial man or woman requiring, and thriving from, access to collective infrastructures, entertainment, education and culture: a modern lifestyle in sharp contrast to the villages where the first generation of industrial workers, mostly young, were recruited. Architects could design factory buildings not just to meet utilitarian requirements but to make aesthetic statements about the value of what was produced inside them. Factory architecture, we learn from Freeman, especially as it developed in the United States, soon became an international style that eventually spread even to the Soviet Union, where factories were designed to represent and celebrate the same industrial modernity that was taking shape under Western capitalism.
Freeman’s account of ‘the making of the modern world’ opens our eyes to the enormous extent of international cross-fertilization, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, not just between the United States and the USSR, when large-scale manufacturing was developing into a world of its own, with Henry Ford