Schwartz and Murray - COLLATERAL DAMAGE: HOW CAPITALS’ WAR ON LABOR KILLED DETROIT- Catalyst 2017 (original) (raw)

Schwartz and Murray - COLLATERAL DAMAGE: HOW CAPITALS’ WAR ON LABOR KILLED DETROIT- Catalyst 2017

The accelerated deindustrialization of Detroit during the 1970s was indeed a reaction by the Big Three to the arrival of Japanese (and European) automobiles in the US market, but high wages in Detroit were not the primary or even secondary reason for their actions. Instead, the 1970s crisis derived from the incapacity of the Big Three to match the new and upgraded features incorporated into the imports and/or implement flexible production systems that would allow continuous improvement in production efficiency. Moreover, these incapacities were not timeless features of “Fordism.” Forty years earlier, the Detroit production culture had been home to a fully flexible production system that was copied in Europe and Japan in the years after World War II. But, as the system was implemented overseas, the captains of capital in Detroit dismantled it as part of a successful effort to defeat the campaign of unionized auto workers, who were utilizing the leverage flexible production conferred to demand a proportionate share of the massive profits it generated and to attain a degree of veto power over the intensification of the work process. Ironically, had the workers succeeded in resisting this attack on their power, Detroit would have been much better positioned to match the price and quality of the imports. Their lack of success meant that when the flexible producers from Japan and Europe arrived in the U.S. market, the Big Three were unable to implement innovations. This led to the accelerated departures from Detroit in search of rock bottom labor costs to offset the efficiency advantages of the flexible producers, while Detroit declined from the most prosperous to most impoverished large city in the United States