Production Geographies and the Decline of the U.S. Automobile Industry

• In Event: 044 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Paper Session. Collective Action in Comparative and Historical Perspective

Abstract

Over the last 40 years the U.S. auto industry has experienced a sharp decline, going from almost 90% U.S. market share to under 50%. The traditional explanation for this relationship is that union success bred the fall of the industry. That is, the general argument is that unions became too powerful, got greedy in their demands, and the result was a competitive disadvantage for a U.S. auto industry that began facing foreign competition in the 1970s. The decline of the auto industry, then is the result of the dual forces of globalization and the labor movement. We propose to flip the script. In this article, we document the relationship between the structure of auto production, innovation, and market share and profit to argue that it was management's actions that led to the fall of the U.S. auto industry, not labor's. That is, after the 1936-37 Flint Strike revealed the positional power of workers that resulted from the concentrated structure of auto production, management sought to remedy the situation. Rather than give workers a say in the production process, the Big Three auto companies abandoned centralized just-in-time production for a system of parallel just-in-case production. The unintended side effect was that management killed their own ability to implement innovations.

Authors

• Joshua Murray, Vanderbilt University

• Michael Schwartz, State University of New York-Stony Brook