Productivity as Social Imperative Automation and Transformations of Labor in the United States and Germany

The purpose of this dissertation is to illuminate the social, economic, and political dynamics shaping automation, labor transformations, and productivity development through a comparative historical analysis of the automobile industry in the United States and Germany from the turn of the 20th century to the present. I examine the US and Germany as two value regimes that represent two distinct models of political, economic, and social organization, focusing on three specific dimensions: (1) business structure and practice, (2) labor organizing and struggles, and (3) governments as they support industries and form the legal basis for industrial relations. Major productive developments are discussed from the rise of Fordism and Lean Production as major production paradigms to the emergence of the assembly line, Detroit Automation, and robotics as major technological developments. From the analysis of these dimensions and productive developments, I examine whether (and if so, how) the distinction between “exceptional” or “free market” American-style capitalism and the “Rhine” or “social market” model of capitalism in Germany provides a useful reference frame. I analyze how each paradigm of integrating business, labor, and government historically fared in response to the dynamics of automation, transformations of labor, and the pressure to improve productivity, and how they are likely to fare in the future. My objective is to develop a social as well as critical theory of automation in modern societies.

Both industries began with similar production processes but soon diverged with the development of Fordism in the US while the German industry retained craft methods with a quality orientation. The value regimes experienced state-led rationalization movements in the 1930s and 1940s as the Great Depression, the New Deal, Nazi motorization programs, and World War II transformed both countries and their respective auto industries. Automation was the watchword of the 1950s and 1960s as the US industry expanded and the German industry spearheaded the Wirtschaftswunder. Since the 1970s, the US industry experienced productivity pressure from Japanese competitors that employed “lean” production methods, while the German industry forged its own path via a diversified and humanized production system. In recent decades, globalization presented new opportunities and challenges, just as new technologies emerged, and many “lean” production principles proliferated in the global auto industry. The comparative-historical analysis concludes with the observation that increasing productivity is a never-ending process that becomes a social imperative that industries must respond to but are nevertheless responded to differently between value regimes.