| La lettre du GERPISA | no 92 (mars 1995) |
Debate - Michel Freyssenet
Current solutions are to assemble niche vehicles either on classical assembly lines, mixed with mass production vehicles or by sub-contractors who are for the most part organized along craft lines and are therefore now judged by manufacturers to be barely profitable and without any real future. If the market is actually oriented towards small-scale vehicle production, this ought to lead to a diversification of forms of production. For the near future, however, manufacturers are keeping their minds open, especially in respect to holistic production at a fixed assembly station, which is symbolized by the Uddevalla factory which is now to re-open to manufacture 20,000 vehicles per year.
Studies currently being launched will not necessarily answer the question of the economic, and above all social, viability of the Uddevallian system for the small-scale production of vehicles. Japanese manufacturers who have studied Uddevalla have for a long time profitably been involved in the small-scale manufacture of vehicles. They have considerably reduced the number of work stations, to the point that each group of operators assembles a significant part of the vehicle, just as at Uddevalla. They have, however, consciously maintained the assembly line, so assembly time is not entirely dependent on the production workers, nor need assembly time be negotiated for each model. In short, they have not wanted to change the employment relationship in order to enable holistic production at a fixed assembly station.
Assuming that holistic assembly at a fixed station is nevertheless adopted by European manufacturers who wish to modify their way of undertaking small-scale production, this would only confirm that this mode of assembly is profitable under certain social conditions, which has long since been known as far as small-scale production in other activities is concerned: aeroplane engines, trains, and even trucks etc. It is reasonable for manufacturers to be examining forms of production which have been tested for small-scale production when niche vehicles are no longer marginal in the output of vehicles sold to private consumers, and therefore increasingly disrupt the assembly line.
Therefore, Uddevalla may only represent a radical industrial innovation, as an alternative to Fordism or Toyotaism, and be of scientific interest in the context of our program on "The Emergence of New Industrial Models", if it is possible to demonstrate that its system is equally viable for mass production.
This idea also seems valid in the debate opened by Dan Raff on the subject of American so-called "craft" manufacturers in the period between World War I and World War II. With the aid of statistics, it was demonstrated that such manufacturers did not disappear because they were unprofitable compared to Ford or GM, since they were in fact profitable, but rather due to problems of liquidity during the Great Depression years. Cost structures in which sunk costs (particularly the wages of very skilled workers, whom they were obliged to continue to pay in order not to lose them) were very great prevented them from weathering the Great Depression, whereas the "Fordist" manufacturers were able to lay off and then re-hire. This is a very important illustration of how non-Fordist automobile manufacturers were profitable and could have survived if financial strategies had been adopted in a timely manner. However, this case does not yet permit us to arrive at an alternative solution to Fordism. Let us assume that these so-called craft producers had been able to weather the crisis, with the support of financial aid from banks or the state. They would have developed into manufacturers of luxury or specialist vehicles, as was the case in Europe. They might still have preserved their mode of production over a certain period, or even over a long period (Porsche, for instance).
To arrive at a real alternative to Fordism, at the very least one would be obliged to demonstrate, through archival research, that such manufacturers, or at least some of them, sought or indeed had even experimented with organizational forms that would allow them to manufacture on a large scale in a non-Fordist way. Is this hopeless? At first glance this would seem to be the case, at least judged by the European experience. Not only did the European craft manufacturers not become non-Fordist mass producers, but they progressively adopted "additive" assembly line production.
Is the orientation adopted by European producers further and definitive proof of the superiority of this form of production? No, since some of these manufacturers, and other "generalist" manufacturers, are now investigating the soundness of the principles of "additive" assembly line production for small-scale vehicles (and Japanese manufacturers of these same vehicles have already modified it considerably). If these questions have any real basis, their previous orientation can only be explained by reasons other than pure productive efficiency, thus providing historians with a substantial area of inquiry. The intellectual community of economists and sociologists would be eternally grateful to them if they were able to answer this question! For now at least, we can end by recalling a well-known methodological principle: the widespread adoption of a system does not prove its intrinsic technical or economic superiority.
All things being equal, this rule is valid for large-scale production, all the more so given that it has been carried out exclusively in an "additive" way on an assembly line over a long period of time. Researchers have a particular methodological duty to question the least debated, most widely accepted solutions.
Uddevalla, being the most developed case we have available to consider in terms of how to organize large-scale production, merits examination free of hard and fast certainties which occlude the imagination. This line of inquiry is even more necessary when one has for a long period been hearing about assembly at a fixed station by a single operator of complete electronic products (screens, micro-computers, music systems), the products of mass production par excellence.
As I attempted to show in Actes du GERPISA No. 9, on Uddevalla, in the text entitled "Uddevalla: analyseur du Fordisme et du Toyotisme", it is possible to analyze the Uddevallian system in terms of profitable large-scale production. In order to do this, one needs to understand that this is not a craft production model. In reality, it has one fundamental principle in common with other industrial models: standardization of components. Far from rejecting automation, it has sought to efficiently apply it to non-value-added operations; logistics and management.
Conversely, Uddevalla has served as an instructive case: the two basic principles - fragmentation/recomposition of work in accordance with a theoretical economics of time, and the linear arrangement of the tasks thus fragmented - which are respected by both Fordism and Toyotaism, can in fact be dispensed with. The technical "impossibilities" which justify the two preceding principles: that is, the impossibility of providing each assembly station with all the necessary components, and the impossibility for the assembly workers of memorizing the operation in its totality without major errors, have been shown to be illusory impossibilities. AGVs are capable of transporting all of the pieces required for the assembly of each vehicle to each assembly station, in such a way that their availability serves as a heuristic tool for assembly.
However, this system has at least one pre-condition: the negotiation of assembly time allocated to different models. In fact there no longer exists a mechanical constraint which enforces respect for time. Truthfully speaking, as I have shown (following others), this mechanical restriction, which characterizes the assembly line, has become illusory given the diversification of products so that the real or actual assembly line systematically exceeds theoretical time by 25-50 percent. The Uddevallian system presupposes, therefore, a profound change in the employment relationship. It presupposes a negotiated agreement about the continual improvement of production. Continuous improvement by workers, which Toyotaism seeks to achieve, and which has falsely become its emblem, is not in fact achieved (see Actes du GERPISA No. 8 and No. 13 (forthcoming)).
This system would have no future if it could not be applied to sectors other than assembly and if it stopped or impeded the general trend of automation. Hence the interest and the challenge embodied in the re-opening of Uddevalla, in that the factory will be complemented by a body shop and paint shop which will have been conceived fundamentally along the same lines as the assembly areas: with complete mastery of the process by the operator or group of operators.
Yet as long as its principles have not have been applied to large-scale production, they will not constitute a radical industrial innovation. The re-opening of Uddevalla for small- scale production, along with the interest of other manufacturers in this system for niche vehicles, has at least the merit of keeping our minds open to other ideas on other modes of production, and may create the conditions for possible extension to large scale production. The success of small-scale production can actually lead to its application for production on a larger scale and will aid attempts to confirm whether or not the system can be extended. In any event, its extension will not be possible without modification of the employment relationship.