The Politics of Industrial Restructuring: Transnational Firms’ Search for Flexible Production in the Mexican Automobile Industry

Abstract

The emergence of a highly competitive world automobile industry and the internationalization of automotive production in the 1970s and 1980s intensified transnational firms’ search for new corporate alliances, innovative production technologies, and more flexible labor relations. The global transformation of automotive manufacturing has produced broad challenges for workers because in many countries the process of industrial restructuring has resulted in lower employment levels, reduced wages and fringe benefits, and other economic disruptions. Moreover, in their drive to achieve higher levels of production efficiency and quality control, many US and West European automobile companies have also re-examined the long dominant Fordist—Taylorist model of workplace organization in which relatively unskilled workers perform repetitive, narrowly defined tasks in a hierarchically organized, fragmented (assembly line) work process dedicated to the mass production of standardized products. 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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