IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 17

manufacture employing both his
ideas and their own, and characterized by the following:
1) What Japanese call kaizen, a
method of continuous improvement of the assembly line effected through suggestions by
the workers on the line.
2) Ironically, this was part of Ford's
original plan, which had gotten
lost.
3) A system of "just in time" production in which cars are created in
response to sales orders. This
contrasted with the American
method where cars were made,
stored, and sales departments
were pressured to move them.
4) Where Detroit produced a single
car in a plant (GM made Buicks
in one factor y, Pontiacs in
another), the Japanese shops
were flexible. Toyota could produce a variety of models in the
same factory in tune with the
marketplace.
5) A "lean system of production"
where parts suppliers sent the
automobile maker components
just as they were needed. Thus,
there would be no accumulation of defective work from a
supplier.
6) Rather than require a worker do
the same job day after day, as
was the case in Detroit, Japanese makers promoted the use
of a variety of skills, e.g., welder,
lathe operator. Workers whose
occupation had some variety
were happier and more careful
about their work. He or she typically served as part of a team,
doing a variety of tasks; the team
also did its own quality control.
The dreaded repetitiveness of
the classical assembly line was
mitigated and the classic Ford
assembly method was discarded. Workers were expected
to cooperate with each other and

june 2016

with management, who were not
regarded as adversaries.
7) The use of automobile designs
that were friendly for manufacturing, e.g., why have 65 parts in
a front bumper when 10 would
do just as well?
Nye's final 40 years deals mainly
with 2 stories: Japan's challenge to
Detroit, which struggled to catch
up, and the spreading use of automation in both countries. The Japanese were remarkably generous
about sharing their methods with
American car makers - a reminder that Ford shared his techniques
abroad in the 1920s.
David Nye's book is slender
and gracefully written - it's from
an academic press but not heavy
on jargon or theory. One of its
strengths derives from Nye's visit
to a Ford Focus assembly plant in
2011 where he vividly describes and
photographs the changes wrought by
automation: robots and computers.
The factory produces 100 cars per
employee per year. The worker on
the Model T, a vastly simpler vehicle,
produced 20 cars per year in 1913.
It's understandable that by 2012 the
"Big Three" of the American automobile industry were employing just 20
percent of the workforce of its peak
in the early 1970s.
Nye is one of the major figures in
the history of technology, An American by birth, he teaches in Denmark and is known for a number
of well written books accessible to
the general reader. The slimness of
the present volume is both a virtue
and a shortcoming. The history of
the American production line lies
at a complicated intersection of
technology, management, capitalism, and labor unions. Information
about the latter is not a strong point
of this work. I ended wanting to
know something about American
labor unions vs. those in Japan. Did

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

Japanese unions strike? Why didn't
they have an adversarial relationship
with management? How did Japanese automakers with plants in the
U.S. (Honda and Toyota) avoid unionization in the 1980s and 1990s?
And where is worker safety discussed? This is a major factor in
industrial history, especially in the
early days of the assembly line.
In 1917, over 11 000 people were
killed on the job in the U.S. - a figure exceeding the number of American soldiers killed that year in the
Great War. One wonders how Ford's
safety record compared with the
other automakers.
And as for capital - there is a
major unanswered question: how
could Ford justify to his shareholders paying his workers in 1914
above what he had to, resulting in
reduced shareholder dividends?
The Ford family didn't own all the
Ford stock until 1918. Would a profitable company today make such
a move? What special conditions
favored Ford?
Perhaps Nye will solve some of
these puzzles in another book. It's
clear too that the American automobile production line, following its near
death experience and resuscitation
after the American financial collapse
of 2009, is undergoing very rapid
changes. Because of automation
and union concessions, new people
being hired are making less in real
terms than they would have in 1973.
Strange to say, by 2011, General
Motors was selling more cars in China
than in the U.S. Will this continue? In
a decade we will need another book,
and I hope Nye will write it.

Reviewer Information
A. David Wunsch, book review editor
of this magazine, is Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering at the
University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Email: david_wunsch@uml.edu.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016