Tuesday 03 March 2009
by: Bruno Marzloff | Visit article original @ Le Monde
The no-frills Logan was never intended as a car for the Western European market, but took off immediately after its 2005 introduction there - evidence, Michel Freyssenet argues, of the market for new cars that the new classes of people with stagnant, declining or uncertain incomes can afford. (Photo: lorentey / Flickr)
Why are car manufacturers speculating on the return of the good times? Why are political leaders pouring billions into this jar of the Danaides? It's a mystery when there is so much evidence of a complete rupture. Nothing will arrest the fall of the automobile sector if we don't think about the "mobile" contained in the auto, and the services it's supposed to provide, in another way. The disenchantment with the car does not prevent its use, as long as that is reconsidered.
The automobile's new equilibrium will be found only in the elimination of the "immobile auto," the one that is used only 5 percent of the time, but by everyone at the same time! That presupposes a suppression of the congestion that has always been part of the urban landscape. The future of the car has ceased to be the business of its manufacturers only, which gives everyone an opportunity to rethink their relationship to time and the city, to the organization of daily life, to the exhausting iterations, to the energy loss and the pollution ... that the car has shaped. How do we extract ourselves from these inertias of convention?
Also see below:
Jean-Pierre Durand | Workers Are Worn Out by Profitability •
Michel Freyssenet | A Major Battle Is Joined Over the Transition to the Clean Car •
Before the crisis of the car, there was the crisis of mobility, and consequently of lifestyles, of land use and ... of the planet. In the Greater Paris competition, the Yves Lion plan proposed a reduction of thirty minutes in the duration of all daily movements. Obvious for millions of employees, it was a healthy reaction against an agonizing separation of home and the workplace - the distance between which has increased tenfold in forty years - and a relevant response to a city the centrifugal building movement of which, along with the associated absurd and superfluous trips, no one has been able to contain.
In short, whether they are clean or not, too many cars kill the car. To get out of that situation, two paths must be explored head-on: sharing and urban integration. You said "sharing?" In the drive to and from work, the rate of occupancy for cars barely exceeds that of the driver. One passenger in the same car divides the public space occupied, the energy consumed and the pollution generated by two, and also contributes to eliminating congestion. That's carpooling; it works, and it's perfectible. One self-service public car eliminates between five and ten cars from the road, but car-sharing lacks a bit of impetus for implementation.
A structured route between the car and public transport is a promising track, as are the regulations distributing traffic flows over time that the English are exploring. Of course, nothing prevents a combination of these solutions. Also, tempered use of the car does not exclude other solutions: substitutions, for example, such as on-line shopping or work, so as not to lose three hours a day between uncertain buses and road congestion.
Many actors are delving into these paths, but this revolution will not take place without the manufacturers. How can that be? Look at Japan. Drastic measures against the anarchic development of the car have been imposed there for a long time, car sales have been in decline for close to ten years, digital regulation practices are supported by the Japanese government.
Nissan's thinking, for example, gives evidence of several innovative ruptures. The manufacturer's point of departure is the mobile human, arbiter of his modes of movement, and no longer by car only. It considers that the "smart" car produces "intelligent" information when that information is handled dynamically, combined with other information from other vehicles and the city itself. Finally, the networked car constitutes the most far-reaching of these reflections: the network doesn't only impose electric battery charging, but also structures connections with other means of transport and access to daily resources: "Do your shopping and recharge your batteries."
Should these perspectives come to fruition, then the car will orient itself to a completely new usage and business model no longer dominated by the object itself, but by automobile services.
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Bruno Marzloff is a sociologist and the founder of the Chronos Group. His last book, written with Daniel Kaplan, is "Pour une mobilit plus libre et plus durable" ( d. Fyp, 86 p., 14,90 ) ["For a Freer and More Enduring Mobility"].
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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Workers Are Worn Out by Profitability
Tuesday 03 March 2009
by: Jean-Pierre Durand | Visit article original @ Le Monde
The crisis has just increased the difficulties workers in the automobile industry have been experiencing for two decades, difficulties more or less concealed by the good financial results of European automobile groups, which posted record annual profits up until 2007 (between 2 and 6 billion Euros for European groups), that were, however, tough to live through from the inside because of the unfair distribution of the value produced.
The global financial crisis overlaps with the cyclical reduction in automobile registrations and threatens the entire sector. Yet, in France, the automobile crisis will not be like that of the steel industry, because for the last half-century, the leadership of automobile manufacturers and the government have learned to manage crises over the long term, to soften employees' and the public's perceptions of their efforts.
None of that reduces the brutality of income-reducing technical unemployment, nor the violence experienced at work, nor the difficulties of retraining, nor the perception of abandonment when workers cannot rebound, either because of their age or their lack of means. How did we get to this situation? How could the slow and planned decline of a whole sector of the French economy, which employed close to a million workers, take place without any great backlash either internally or from the outside? And how do the tens of thousands of workers implicated in this new phase of the automobile crisis live through it?
The causes of the euphemization of the automobile industry's social movement are various. The first lies in the significant reduction of the number of employees, and, in particular, of workers on production sites over the last thirty years: Renault-Flins, which produces the Clio, went from 23,000 employees in the 1960s to 3,500. At Peugeot-Sochaux, manpower has fallen from 42,000 employees in 1978 to a little less than 18,000 today.
These reductions are not only the result of technical progress that substituted robots or automation for people; these drops in manpower come both from outsourcing to regions with lower manpower costs and sub-contracting (manufacturers no longer produce more than 30 percent of value-added internally, versus 70 to 75 percent during the 1970s). At most sub-contractors, and especially at second and third-tier subcontractors, there are no unions, but very high levels of part-time workers hired and fired at the complete pleasure of management. Salaries may be 30-50 percent lower than those obtained at the manufacturers.
To summarize, the globalization of the automobile industry's markets and of the capital likely to invest in it tend to align the work conditions and salaries of industrialized countries with those of lowest-bidder countries. And that alignment began at the same time as the explosion of that organizational revolution which occurred almost unnoticed in France, that is, the "Japanization" of production with the generalization of the principle of just-in-time inventory management.
That principle rests on the disappearance of work-in-progress and buffer stocks that would allow workers to "breathe" on the production line. The end of work-in-progress means that if a single link out of 100 to 200 (men or work stations) fails, the whole line stops, entailing significant cost-overruns. This increased fragility of the production process is purposeful and constitutes a vicious cycle constructed by company management to mobilize its personnel; moreover, this organizational model involves a drastic reduction of manpower.
That model operates on the production line as well as in workshops, administrative departments and even in design offices (project management, collaborative work). On top of that, it is often colleagues who pressure the weakest because they can't keep up the rhythms or increase the number of quality rejects. So here are some too-rapid explanations for the deterioration in employees' psychological health and causes for the increase in workplace suicides. But as you will have already understood, these manifestations in the face of impossible work are individual and only very rarely collective.
In the manufacturers' and subcontractors' assembly workshops where there is the most manpower, workers are worn out at 37 to 40 years old: in a one-minute work cycle, they may have to perform as many as fifteen operations measured in hundredths of a second! Effective work time - that is, time in which value is produced - may exceed 85 percent at certain work stations.
Also, between and 40 and 55 percent of assembly workers have "medical restrictions" (according to the factories) that ought to disqualify them from certain positions. But if these workers bring those restrictions up to those who assign positions, they're labeled slackers and will be the first to go in the next round of layoffs. To confront these deteriorating work conditions, the union and the Committees for Workplace Health and Safety delegates demonstrate overflowing imagination in their completion of the notebooks reserved for their complaints. Yet they hardly ever gain a hearing, since the challenges are elsewhere: in the conception of assembly lines that once allowed workers to "catch their wind" as they performed the numerous skilled tasks that have become impossible.
Fewer and fewer workers at the manufacturers, relentless competition between vulnerable works at sub-contractors, car design engineers or technicians tethered to several projects: so many deteriorated work conditions for which there is no space to protest. For every employee, the competition with other car design and manufacturing sites has made job preservation the first urgency.
All the manufacturers are in crisis. The one that abandons the notion of cost competition alone for a concept of multi-faceted competitivity will have the highest chance of survival. But who will dare decree such a change in the productivity model, one that will simultaneously shake up both the certitudes about the product and those about its production?
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Jean-Pierre Durand is a sociology professor at Centre Pierre-Naville - TEPP CNRS. His last book is "La Cha ne Invisible" (Le Seuil, 2004) ["The Invisible Assembly Line"].
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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A Major Battle Is Joined Over the Transition to the Clean Car
Tuesday 03 March 2009
by: Michel Freyssenet | Visit article original @ Le Monde
With the environmental crisis first of all, then the economic crisis and soon, perhaps, the social and geo-political crises, major questions concerning the automobile industry and its future jostle one another. What strikes one first of all is the scale of the problems the sector is experiencing and their global character: There is neither any major market nor any manufacturer that is not in decline.
Then no one seems to have a model or reference point for orienting restructuring strategies or supporting restructuring decisions. In a sector in which political and company leaders convinced themselves fifteen years ago that salvation would come from cost reduction, product diversification, an acceleration of new product roll-out, shared platforms and investment in emerging countries, today one sees nothing but "cash plans," investment freezes, manpower reductions and announcements of cleaner vehicles, all against a receding horizon.
The difficulties of the automobile industry predate the financial crisis, and they are not temporary. Everyone perceives why: It's the type of development the car has experienced since the 1980s. The fact, for example, that in January more cars were sold in China (748,000, a 4.6 percent reduction) than in the United States (657,000, a 37.1 percent reduction) means two things: Demand in the United States had been swollen by unbridled credit extension; demand in China suffers from the drop in exports and foreign investments, the essential engine of Chinese growth. The automobile crisis throws the suitability of the macroeconomic regimes that free-market neo-liberalism has spawned in the world back into question.
The ideas of reducing costs by reverting ever more to supplies from low-labor-cost countries and of investing in emerging countries which alone could offer the necessary growth in volumes belong to that vision of the world. And they become problematic, if the markets' collapse provides anything to go by.
No one knows what the normal volume of demand is in each region. Emerging countries understand that they will only be able to continue to develop in the new international environment by offsetting the reductions in their exports and foreign investments with a boost to domestic consumption, based on a less unequal distribution of wealth. If that should be the case, in China for example, we know that they will try to favor their own automobile industry, which they are using as one of the channels for their economic and political renewal on the international scene.
To these heavy questions concerning the adequacy of installed capacity and its distribution in the world are added those that concern the products themselves. The unprecedented reduction in overall sales is being accompanied by a no-less-radical reorientation in demand. The importance that light trucks (4X4s, SUVs) formerly enjoyed in the North American market and the boom in high-end sedans on the international market corresponded to the growth in inequalities of income and of employment perspectives. Those growing inequalities explain manufacturers' tendency to outsource production of lower- and middle-end cars to low-cost countries to make them accessible to those who have seen their incomes stagnate or decline and their futures become uncertain and insecure. But even that seems to no longer be sufficient: It would appear necessary to rethink car design to reach a price level that would make new vehicles affordable once again for those populations, as the Logan's unexpected success in Western European countries attests.
Either the crisis will lead to an accentuation of the tendency towards the production outsourcing of products for lower- and middle-income buyers, a tendency which will then be endless, since it feeds on itself; or it will force political courage: a review of the distribution of national income and a restructuring of international exchanges on different bases than [rewarding] the lowest social and ecological bidder. Moreover, light trucks and upscale sedans are the automobiles that pose the greatest problems in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and gasoline consumption. It will be difficult to launch the clean car unless both manufacturers and the governments whose support they solicit think about which vehicles they intend to design for their different clienteles.
In fact, neither the same technologies nor the same economic models are to be implemented depending upon whether one envisages cars that respond solely to environmental requirements or vehicles that take into account the constraints on middle- and lower-income households forced by property pressures to live far from their workplaces.
A major battle for the future is joined with the transition to the clean(er) car. Countries and manufacturers are beginning to promote the alternative motorizations that work for them. Will we see a cohabitation of solutions take hold that will operate as a function of the automobile's use, the regions of the world or the sphere of influence of thus and such great car industry? Or will a new coalition form, like that of the manufacturers and the oil companies in the beginning of the 20th century that allowed the triumph of the standard gasoline engine, thus making the automobile exportable and usable everywhere in the world?
Those who will be able to impose viable solutions will not necessarily be historical manufacturers, but could be new entrants: suppliers of alternative energy, the great parts-manufacturers, emerging country manufacturers. Countries in heavily populated continents, such as China and India, know that economically they can only continue to develop their automobile market and industry by designing and producing vehicles requiring a fuel other than gasoline. Great upsets are underway that will affect the future automobile industry's economy, geography, structure, employment and social relations.
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Michel Freyssenet is research director at CNRS and co-founder of Gerpisa (Group for permanent studies and research on the automobile industry and its employees). His book, "The Second Automobile Revolution" (Palgrave Macmillan) is about to be published.
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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