Word: fording
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Benevolent Manufacturing State was the self-funded, full-employment, womb-to-tomb society - for autoworkers, auto executives, their families and their communities - that Henry Ford began in 1914 when he hiked the prevailing $3-a-day wage to $5. "Fordism" outraged capitalists; Ford viewed it as a way to make cars affordable to working people. His people. The industry sputtered during the Depression, an era that gave rise to the unions, but was revived by wartime production as Detroit's manufacturing capacity became a vital weapon in the Allies' arsenal. Detroit reshaped America, spurring a great migration from the South...
...Honda and Toyota as they are to collapse. In the past couple of years, Detroit has closed the quality gap. Its cars are competitive on engines and drivetrains and fits and finishes. Some top-class products score well with car rater J.D. Power, such as the Cadillac CTS and Ford's new F-150. "What exposes us to failure now is not our product lineup or business plan or our long-term strategy," GM's Wagoner told Congress. "What exposes us to failure now is the global financial crisis...
...Next year, workers at Ford plants will earn an average $53 an hour with benefits, the result of a breakthrough industry agreement worked out with the UAW in 2007. That's close to the $49 an hour that workers at the transplants average and far below the $71 an hour with benefits that was the old UAW wage, and that was cited by Alabama Senator Richard Shelby as a reason to oppose any bailout. And the cost differential on enginemaking between Detroit and the transplants will narrow to a couple of dollars by 2011. "You want to just choke these...
...Management in a Mess Detroit's corporate culture is obviously complicit in the industry's deterioration, just as it was guilty of creating an unparalleled manufacturing system decades earlier. The Detroit approach has been plan-command-control, stemming from that original control freak, Henry Ford. At GM, a management hierarchy that had been created by GM's master planner, Alfred P. Sloan, in the '20s - GM's first and most successful restructuring - was still functioning in the '80s. Management's job was to create the products, design the production system and provide solutions if there were problems. Everyone else followed...
...Ford's owners have always had a difficult relationship with the hired help. Henry Ford II fired everybody, says Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan's business school - including Lee Iacocca. Jacques Nasser, named CEO in 1999 to reinvent Ford, bought Volvo and Land Rover to create a luxury portfolio; he saw Ford as more than an auto company and tried to overhaul the culture. He was ousted in 2001 by Bill Ford Jr. - great-grandson of Henry - who took back the wheel for a couple of years...