Word: lordstown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even so, the shared misery of economic hard times does not always lead to better management-worker relations. In the early '70s, General Motors' Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant was the leading example of "blue-collar blues," a malady caused by repetitive, dehumanizing assembly-line work. Today Lordstown workers are still angry because of the wage and benefit concessions they have been forced to accept. Says Bill Bowers, vice president of United Auto Workers Local 1112: "The people in this country expected us to do something to help the auto industry and the consumer. But the contract that...
...prices and fears of natural gas shortages, however, have pushed companies, and even some families, into looking for fuel in their own backyards. General Motors is one of nearly 200 companies drilling for gas in Ohio, and today the automaker has 200 wells pumping on property adjacent to its Lordstown plant. American Standard supplies its Swissvale, Pa., switch and signal manufacturing factory with gas from four wells located a scant 40 ft. from the building...
...Carlisle, Unimation's general manager for West Coast research, warns that "we're a long way from a robot that can assemble a carburetor." Nor are robots a panacea for all the ills that industry is heir to. The most automated factory of its time was the Lordstown plant that GM designed to produce the unsuccessful Vega, evidence that productivity is not worth much if the product is hard to sell. As the robotmakers look ahead, though, they see a promised land. It is a land in which the factory computers guide the original design of a product...
...Mondays and Fridays were frequently defective because high absenteeism meant the job was done by less experienced fill-ins. Workers at GM's notorious Lordstown, Ohio, plant rebelled at attempts to streamline production in the early '70s and brought the factory to a halt...
...some of the other new and redesigned American factories. The Toyota operations in Toyota City near Nagoya are noisy, dark and cramped. At 60 cars per hour, the assembly lines do not even approximate the blistering 100-car-an-hour pace once set by GM's Lordstown, Ohio, line. But the slower speeds allow workers more time for the job at hand, and as a result the parts fit snugly and the screws are tight. Each Toyota worker is also a kind of one-man inspection unit. If he sees something amiss, he can pull a red cord that...