Critical Encounters. Wolfgang Streeck
was, of course, Adolf Hitler. Immediately upon taking power Hitler had tried hard but in vain to make German auto manufacturers abandon their traditional style of small-scale craft production and produce a simple car ‘for the people’, a Volkswagen. In the end it had to be Ford himself who helped him set up the first Fordist German car plant (apart from the two much smaller Ford and General Motors plants in Cologne and Rüsselsheim), at a place later named Wolfsburg, with second-hand machinery from Dearborn, Michigan. To show his gratitude, in 1938 Hitler awarded Ford the highest decoration of the Nazi regime for foreigners, the Great Cross of the German Order of the Eagle (Großkreuz des Deutschen Adlerordens).
Another feature of Freeman’s story, also unusual, is the space he devotes to the representation of the factory in the arts, beginning with the futurism of the interwar years. Particularly prominent were photography and cinematography, the most modern branches of artistic production, whose works were as technologically reproducible as the new mass consumer products. While photographers and film-makers did document the drudgery of mass production and the misery of exploitation, they were no less fascinated by the promise of progress embodied in the newly minted cars coming off the conveyor belt, the polished airplane engines and turbines ready to start, and the huge workshops with their avant-garde architecture, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Factory in Racine, Wisconsin, where hundreds of people could be seen to be working together in quiet discipline for American and universal improvement.
One question that reappears at each turning point of Freeman’s long story is whether the suffering in the factories of early industrialization was really necessary for, and must therefore be justified by, the progress of industrialism and, with it, of mankind. This debate begins with none less than Adam Smith, who discusses the pros and cons of the division of labour, the increase in productivity and the decline in humanity it simultaneously portends – so that at some point the progress of the former is undone by the damage done to the latter, by chopping away at human mental capacities and personal self-esteem. In the West, it was capitalists who insisted that the waste of one or two generations in the living hell of the factories of Manchester and then the world was a sacrifice that had to be made for a better life for all in the future. But where can that sacrifice end if the systemic imperative of capitalism is the endless accumulation of capital? This was not necessarily an issue under socialism: both Stalin and Trotsky considered the use of brutal force indispensable for a socialist variant of primitive accumulation, meaning unfettered reliance on Taylorism and military-style discipline to advance the formation of a socialist working class. The promise was that with the arrival of Communism, the toil would be over, as society would be liberated from work by a combination of socialized fixed capital and Soviet power. European social democrats, for their part, settled for liberation mainly in rather than from work, with less managerial discretion, shorter chains of command, job enlargement, group work, use of productivity gains to slow down the work pace, and the like. The results were observed by a new generation of industrial sociologists, in the wake of the worker uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s.
Not surprisingly, a prominent theme in Freeman’s account is the conflict between labour and capital, or management, over factory organization and factory discipline, and above all over how to share the proceeds from the superior productivity of organized cooperation in large-scale production. Factory work is teamwork, making it impossible to devise a simple formula for dividing its benefits, and opening the door for bargaining between parties with conflicting demands and interests. Here a crucial parameter is relative power, as brought to bear in, as well as affected by, national and local institutions of industrial relations. A pervasive force in factory life, power extends to and shapes the organization of production even where one would not necessarily expect it. Freeman recounts how in the post-war era giant factories began to go out of fashion in the United States, to be replaced by much smaller, geographically dispersed production sites. Changed transportation and coordination technologies helped make this possible, as did vertical disintegration and just-in-time delivery of ever more parts contracted out to a growing supply industry. But these were only facilitating circumstances; the driving force, according to Freeman, was the response of managements to the power organized labour had been allowed to build under the New Deal, most effectively where factories were large. To avoid costly concessions to their newly empowered workforces, firms shifted to greenfield sites in places where the labour supply was not yet spoiled by a tradition of unionization. Here, ‘human resource management’ could choose from 100,000 job applications for an initial workforce of 1,500, making sure that those finally hired were anti-union, had a family with children, and had to pay off a mortgage for their family home – on the plausible assumption that a mortgage makes for a robust work ethic and at a minimum militates against going on strike.
More as an aside, Freeman notes that management flight from large factories was not universal. It didn’t happen in countries and companies with effective institutions of industrial democracy, where worker representatives could veto job relocation while at the same time guaranteeing management industrial peace, and indeed collaboration, in return. Here a prime example is, again, Volkswagen’s main factory at Wolfsburg, which did not just remain big but in recent years has actually expanded its workforce, from 44,000 in 2007 to 62,000 ten years later (a little less than Freeman claims), at a time when the company was also growing rapidly through internationalization. To a large extent, this was possible because the union was able to extract from management new investment and employment guarantees for the Wolfsburg plant, in exchange for its services as an effective manager of worker discontent. Another factor was that the Land of Niedersachsen, where Wolfsburg is located, is a privileged shareholder in Volkswagen and sufficiently powerful in this capacity to ensure that enough of the company’s jobs remain where its present workers and their families live and vote. (This is a condition that the European Union has for years tried to put an end to, in the name of ‘free movement of capital’.)
Of course, it is not just management that may find factories of that size scary; workers may as well, in particular if they have nothing to say inside them. An interesting experience I recall from the late 1970s was taking a British trade union officer to Wolfsburg for a tour of the factory. Coming from the doomed, geographically dispersed, never really integrated, effectively stand-alone small British Leyland plants of the time, torn by industrial strife and dependent on heavy public subsidies, he grew increasingly depressed as we walked through the seemingly unending factory halls – until he burst out to complain about the inhuman enormity of so many people pressed into one industrial plant. His frustration increased when a question regarding the extent to which the plant reached its production target on an average day went unanswered, since his German counterparts had no concept of production targets ever not being met. In the evening over a beer, he found relief in violating the first commandment of Fawlty Towers and telling us about the war (‘Back then when you fellows didn’t behave’): as a member of a small special unit of the British Marine Corps, he had landed in Flensburg to arrest Großadmiral Dönitz, an act of heroism for which, to his surprise, we expressed our deeply felt gratitude.
Freeman’s final chapter is on the ‘giant factories’ of Asia, in particular the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn plant, or plants, in Mainland China. Here, too, size is not a problem, made possible, not by industrial democracy, but by industrial repression. As behoves a historian, Freeman places the contemporary labour constitution of China in the context of recent Chinese history, in particular the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, when management was to be subordinated to the will of the masses and factory discipline replaced with revolutionary ardour. Nothing of that is left today, except for the fact that the harsh regime in the fast-growing private sector of Chinese manufacturing may be explained, in part, as an outgrowth of the economic and political disasters of the 1960s and 1970s.
Looking at Europe in particular, there seems to be yet another, even more sinister connection between the politics of liberation in its Western version (if not from then in work) and the new ‘Asian mode of production’. As satisfied consumers of the electronic toys, colourful running shoes and cheap t-shirts that come to us courtesy of modern Asian industrialism, we tend to forget about how they are produced in Shenzhen, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, in Saigon in Vietnam, and in Taiwan, Indonesia, Cambodia and Myanmar – in factories not owned but directed by firms like Apple, Disney, Adidas and Walmart. Manchester still exists, but on the global periphery, too far away