Content area
Full Text
Laurie Graham, On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu: The Japanese Model and the American Worker (Ithaca: ILR-Cornell University Press 1995).
THE ARRIVAL in North America of Japanese transplants allegedly marked the beginning of a golden age in the auto industry. In The Machine That Changed the World, a multi-million dollar cross-national study conducted by a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, Japanese production management, or lean production, was portrayed in evangelical tones as a post-Fordist corrective to mass production's inefficiencies and inflexibilities, its mind-numbing jobs performed by alienated workers, and its adversarial labour-management relations. While the study compiled reams of comparative statistics on output per person, defects, space utilization, die-change time, and other measures of efficiency, its portrayal of workers as multiskilled, empowered and continuously challenged was devoid of an empirical foundation.
Graham's book is one of a handful of studies of auto transplants in North American that have exposed the MIT group's fanciful characterizations of what it's like to work under lean production. The author spent six months working on the assembly line at the Subaru-Isuzu (SIA) plant in Lafayette, Indiana. During this time, unbeknownst to the company and her co-workers, Graham was gathering data -- mainly systematic observations and informal conversations with coworkers -- for her PhD thesis. From a shopfloor perspective Graham provides a rich account of a lean factory and the experiences of workers as they were quickly transformed from raw recruits to hardened veterans.
A pre-employment screening process -- batteries of tests and interviews conducted periodically over two months -- is aimed at selecting (from some...