Auto-plant design and worker orgranizing: was, well, lots of other things

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Charles Brown charlesb at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue May 5 12:14:45 PDT 1998 Previous message: "Strategic" Plants (was Replies: "Better times" cannot...) Next message: Auto-plant design and worker orgranizing: was, well, lots of other things Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] Search LBO-Talk Archives

Limit search to: Subject & Body Subject Author Sort by: Reverse Sort I can't answer all of this now, though I could do some research.

The distributability of Communist literature is not the biggest thing I am talking about, but I've been wanting to say it to someone. I used to handout papers at the Chrysler Jefferson Avenue Assembly plant. The workers parked outside the plant entrance or road buses. As they went in, there was a public street/sidewalk area they crossed where you could hand them literature. Now with the new Jefferson North Assembly, (2000 feet from the old plant) they drive in and park where you can't go. You could try to get them to roll down their car windows,but it's difficult.

An extreme example is the placement of the GM Saturn plant in a cow pasture in Tennessee, a neo- feudal manor, far from the madding crowd of workers.

My main point is that the whole locus of plantworkers' lives, work and home, is scattered compared to before - >From the city to the suburbs,from the North to the South, and from the U.S. overseas.

This , I hypothesize, undermines collectivity. I believe Lenin noted the sense of their collective power that workers get from their "massing" at the point of production.

The reduction in the number of job classifications from the 1980's and the subsitution of "team concepts" and workers module teams was rationalized by technological development. This directly undermines the union, in that teams are workers supervising themselves.

I have no specific evidence now on keeping workers from computer/CAD systems. In fact there is a lot of emphasis on computer training in joint labor/management projects (yuk). Training and jobs are two different things, but I think there is rank and file usage of computers.

I will look for more evidence on this if you want.

Charles Brown >>> Les Schaffer 05/05 2:42 PM >>>

Charles> Now they

Charles> design the plants so that you can't stand at the gate and

Charles> hand out literature to the workers coming and going to

Charles> work, too.

I'd like to hear the specifics of this and similar developments. how exactly are the new plants designed to interfere with worker organizing and such?

also, are there deliberate attempts to keep workers seperate from computer systems? and tangentially, do workers on the line have access to the CAD systems used by the engineers? regards -- ____ Les Schaffer godzilla at netmeg.net ___| ------->> Engineering R&D <<-------- Theoretical & Applied Mechanics | Designspring, Inc. Westport, CT USA Center for Radiophysics & Space Research | http://www.designspring.com (soon) Cornell Univ. schaffer at tam.cornell.edu | les at designspring.com The big evidence of what I am saying was the wave of plantclosings and runaway shops, the migration and mobility of plants in the 1980's. - Just in time delivery from thousands of miles away. This seems obviously a reorganization of production and the "point of production " to me. I will look for more of the materials relevant to this. Somebody mentioned Shaiken. I am not an expert and I never wrote the paper I planned years ago beyond drafts. From your "card" , you can probably get evidences of what I am saying as well or better than I (if what I hypothesize is true ). However, I could contact the UAW research dept. if we really pursue this. There is a book by Mike Parker of Solidarity on the team concept. The rank and file workers are not being trained as computer engineers. I'm pretty sure of that. And robots have not taken over or anything. I look forward to your next post. Charles >>> Les Schaffer 05/05 5:15 PM >>> >>>>> ">" == Charles Brown writes: >> My >> main point is that the whole locus of plantworkers' lives, work >> and home, is scattered compared to before - From the city to >> the suburbs,from the North to the South, and from the >> U.S. overseas. This , I hypothesize, undermines >> collectivity. okay. but your specific examples a.) workers cars now parked inside gates and b.) locating large plants in rural areas, made it clearer to me what you're getting at. >> I have no specific evidence now on keeping workers from computer/CAD >> systems. In fact there is a lot of emphasis on computer >> training in joint labor/management projects (yuk). do you know what the main function of this training is? is it the passing of manufacturing specifications and instructions from engineering and management down to the workers or somehting else? >> Training and >> jobs are two different things, but I think there is rank and >> file usage of computers. >> I will look for more evidence on this if you want. yeah. i'm interested. i will write some more after work this evening or tmw re/ computers, the web, and the workplace. -- ____ Les Schaffer godzilla at netmeg.net ___| ------->> Engineering R&D <<-------- Theoretical & Applied Mechanics | Designspring, Inc. Westport, CT USA Center for Radiophysics & Space Research | http://www.designspring.com Cornell Univ. schaffer at tam.cornell.edu | les at designspring.com