Word: mazda
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...scene was not Detroit or any other American factory town. Instead, the unlikely site of Daniel's work and play was Hofu (pop. 120,000), a city 56 miles southwest of Hiroshima in Japan. Daniel, along with 47 other Americans who work for the U.S. subsidiary of Mazda, the third largest Japanese automaker, was finishing up a four-week stint at the firm's Hofu assembly plant. Their goal: to learn how to build cars the Japanese way. Said Daniel, a Michigan native whose father and grandfather worked for General Motors: "I'm the first member of my family...
...Mazda will be bringing hundreds of American workers, most of them supervisors, to Hofu in preparation for next September's opening of its first U.S. factory, an assembly plant in Flat Rock, Mich. Much like the fictional Assan Motors in the recent Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho, Mazda bought a closed-down factory from Ford, which owns 25% of the Japanese company, and is building a new $450 million facility on the site. It is Mazda's largest single investment ever, and the Japanese are sparing no effort to ensure the factory's success...
Labor-management relations will be especially delicate. As Mazda fills the 3,500 jobs at the new facility, the company has been giving preference to laid-off Ford workers, most of whom are members of the United Auto Workers. The U.A.W., which has saluted Mazda's Hofu training program as part of an "enlightened approach" to operating in the U.S., intends to organize the entire Flat Rock work force. That would create the closest partnership yet between a Japanese car company and an American union. Although Toyota's joint car-building venture with General Motors in Fremont, Calif., employs U.A.W...
...Hiroshima has long been bulldozed away, the dead cremated, the air blown clean. Today on streets over which the Bomb's cloud rose like a red-purple flower are coffeehouses where Mozart is played, gilded hotels with blazing chandeliers, COKE IS IT signs and the headquarters of the Mazda corporation. Everything faces forward, except that the name of the city can never be mentioned without invoking a past to which everyone is attached, and an immediate private silence. Hiroshima survives in the mind, which broods, denies, forgets and eventually must deal with what...
...union's leadership recognized, however, that GM needed something like the proposed contract to compete against a host of Japanese invaders. In addition to Nissan's Tennessee factory, a Honda auto plant is already operating in Marysville, Ohio. Mazda intends to build a factory in Michigan by 1987, and last week Toyota announced that it too would set up a U.S. plant within three years...