In singing the praises of Steven Rattner, the New York Times reporter who became an investment banker and is now the odds-on favorite to be Obama’s “Car Czar”, Slate’s Mickey Kaus points to this Rattner article from 1981:
But the resemblance ends at physical appearance. This [German] plant produces some 1,200 cars a day, more than the 1,015 that Ford planners had anticipated, and requires 7,762 workers. Its counterpart at Halewood, with virtually identical equipment and production targets, has averaged only about 800 cars a day this year, and 10,040 workers have been needed to achieve even that production level.
”Our standards say it should take something like 20 man-hours of labor in both the body and assembly plants to make an Escort,” said Bill Hayden, vice president of manufacturing for Ford Europe Inc., in an interview. ”At Saarlouis, they do it with 21 hours. At Halewood it takes 40 hours.” …[snip]
Aside from statistics, subjective differences between the two factories become evident. Halewood seems to overflow with workers – some of them reading or eating, others kicking a soccer ball – while Saarlouis seems almost depopulated and nearly every worker in evidence is hard at his job. At Saarlouis, workers dash to open doors for visitors touring in electric carts, while at Halewood, one worker greeted a news photographer by exposing himself. …[snip]
For their part, the workers at Halewood maintained in recent interviews that shop conditions at Saarlouis were unsafe. ”If that was in England, I’d stop the job immediately,” said Stephen Broadhead, the ”convenor” at the body plant, who has visited the German plant twice. ”It was such a violation of our health and safety regulations we couldn’t live with it.” Nonetheless, the Saarlouis plant has the lowest injury record in Ford’s entire Europe subsidiary.
That’s just good reporting. You can occasionally find comparisons like this in academic management journals, and you can find occasionally find well-told stories in the newspapers, but finding both together is a rarity, at least to my experience. If Rattner is able to marry facts and narrative that way in overhauling the US automotive industry, he could bring revolutionary change to Detroit.
good report