Word: plants
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...comeback from near bankruptcy, Chrysler has long seemed invulnerable to adversity. Suddenly, though, the proud No. 3 automaker's image has suffered back-to-back black eyes. Last week the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Chrysler $1.6 million for 811 alleged workplace violations at a Newark, Del., plant that produces Chrysler LeBarons, Dodge Aries and Plymouth Reliants. The penalty, the largest ever imposed by OSHA, came only twelve days after a U.S. grand jury indicted Chrysler for selling cars as new that had actually been driven -- with their odometers disconnected -- by employees...
Despite workers' complaints, though, only a portion of the country's increased productivity can be chalked up to more intense toil. Much of the gain results from the scrapping of obsolete plants and the installing of improved technology. Says Stanley Mihelick, Goodyear's executive vice president for worldwide production: "The mistake that people make is that all of this productivity is because workers are sweating more. Hell, no. It comes from our $1.5 billion investment in new plant and equipment...
...Unimation for $107 million marked Big Business's arrival in robotics; IBM, Bendix and General Electric soon followed. Unimation, founded in 1959, was a robotics pioneer. Its first product was an $18,000 Unimate machine used by General Motors to load forged dies at a New Jersey auto-assembly plant. As recently as 1981, Unimation made 45% of all robots sold in the U.S. Another setback for robotics will take place next month, when GE plans to fold its $4 million robotmaking plant in Plymouth, Fla., idling 118 workers...
...Taurus and Sable cars. At Doehler-Jarvis, a major Ohio metal fabricator, robots load and unload die-casting machines, trim parts and ladle molten metal. At IBM factories across the country, robots insert disk drives into personal computers and snap keys onto electronic typewriter keyboards. At a General Dynamics plant in Fort Worth, one robot drills 550 holes in the vertical tail fins of an F-16 fighter in three hours. It used to take three workers eight hours to do the same...
Some of those who rushed to buy an expensive robotic system got less than they bargained for. At a Ford Motor plant in St. Louis, snags in 200 production-line robots delayed the 1986 introduction of the Aerostar minivan. Then the discovery that the same robots had been skipping many key welds led to the recall three months later of some 30,000 of the vehicles. In another disastrous episode, a Campbell Soup plant in Napoleon, Ohio, was outfitted with a $215,000 system designed to lift 50-lb. cases of soup. But anytime it encountered defective cases, the machine...