>The point is to build a community of people who hold the
>knowledge/skill base for as much of society as possible. In this
>sense, then Charles B's quote, fits right in:
>
>``I do think it would be good if every class conscious worker (
>material or immaterial) could take on the lawyerly intellectual style
>of being responsible for figuring out or understanding big problems ,
>and acting decisively to solve them. Every party member should , in
>theory, be able to step up and lead. The kind of meglomanicial /take
>charge confidence and boldness that lawyers have too much ( workerly
>criticized and reworked , of course) would help in knocking the
>bourgeoisie on their asses.''
And in the end, it is workers, not managers & capitalists, who know how to make products right & care about how end products will affect users. This topic has been already touched upon by Tom Lehman, etc., but let me return to Firestone:
***** The New York Times September 15, 2000, Friday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 3; Business/Financial Desk HEADLINE: Firestone Workers Cite Lax Quality Control BYLINE: By DAVID BARBOZA DATELINE: DECATUR, Ill., Sept. 14
In April 1990, just months before the Bridgestone/Firestone plant here began making tires for Ford Explorers, John J. Boettner, the plant manager, gave a speech at the local Kiwanis club saying that the company had spent millions to modernize the 30-year-old plant.
The quality "is the highest in the plant's history," Mr. Boettner said. "And we're building the most complicated product."
A decade later, the huge plant, on the northeast side of this working-class city, has become Exhibit A in one of the biggest tire recalls ever.
Firestone and the Ford Motor Company say that an unusually high number of tires produced at the plant were prone to tread separation. And on Tuesday, a Firestone executive told a Senate committee that the company now believes that design flaws and variations in manufacturing at the plant were chiefly to blame.
The mystery everyone is trying to crack, though, seems far less of a mystery in Decatur, where about 40 percent of the recalled tires were made, in a process that still depends largely on workers building tires by hand. Interviews with more than two dozen current and former employees suggest that heavy production demands and lax quality control were basic causes. And workers maintain that despite what Firestone says, a prolonged and bitter strike in the mid-90's played a big part.
Last month, when four former plant employees gave depositions criticizing the plant's operations, Firestone dismissed the accusations as those of disgruntled former employees. But now, other retired employees and workers still in the plant are saying similar things.
Though many workers insist that they followed the rules and produced the best tires they knew how, several say that rubber was allowed to sit too long, that solvents were used haphazardly to try to improve the rubber's adhesive properties, and that efforts to speed up the vulcanization process may have led to flawed tires.
Some workers also say that poor supervision of the tire-making process and poor training of new workers persisted after a 10-month strike ended in May 1995.
Cecil Aldridge, who has worked at the plant since 1963, said he noticed poorly trained workers and quality-control problems when he returned after the strike.
"I knew there'd be some kind of problem with the tires," he said last week. "I just didn't know it would be this serious."
Scientists and industry experts say they are zeroing in on design and manufacturing flaws that would weaken the bonding of tires. And they say quality-control lapses, like those some workers mentioned, could be a critical reason tire treads shear off.
Indeed, the accounts of workers like Mr. Aldridge, as well as interviews with industry experts and lawyers investigating the recall, paint a portrait of a company and a plant that have struggled to keep costs down and production in line with soaring demand for tires for popular vehicles. They portray a company so eager to keep pace that it delayed, neglected or even ignored design and manufacturing problems.
In a surprisingly candid admission, Yoichiro Kaizaki, president of the parent Bridgestone of Japan, said as much in a Tokyo news conference on Monday, when he acknowledged that Bridgestone executives ignored signs of trouble.
"If there was a problem with a Bridgestone tire," he said, "our technology staff in Tokyo would rush to the site" overseas to help out. "But if a problem arose with a Firestone tire, they wouldn't do anything."
As a result, Firestone's recall of 6.5 million tires last month now looks similar to its troubles in 1978, when it was forced to ask buyers to return 14.5 million tires in what remains the largest tire recall in history.
Then as now, the company singled out the Decatur plant. (The initial recall involved about 400,000 tires made in Decatur.) And then as now, the cause was thought to be faulty manufacturing, although this time many more factors seem to be involved, such as the tendency of sport utility vehicles to roll over when they lose a tire. At the time, Firestone officials said the plant had allowed moisture to seep into the vulcanized tire, resulting in corrosion of the steel belts and eventually -- often when tires reached high temperatures -- tread separation.
This time, Bridgestone/Firestone has not yet determined the exact cause. An engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley has been hired to examine the problem. But again, experts say, early indications are that something was weakening the sliver of rubber that bonds the two steel belts together below the surface of the treads.
"Much of this is about the steel bonding to the rubber," said Alan Milner, a materials scientist and consultant in some lawsuits against Firestone. "The failures mostly start off with belt edge separations, and then the treads come off."
Firestone has not yet come to that conclusion. It says it is re-examining the design specifications of the recalled tires and the width of the belt. The company is also looking at "process controls" at the Decatur plant.
"It's very, very evident there was something going on in Decatur that caused this," John Lampe, an executive vice president of Bridgestone/ Firestone, said in an interview today. "When we do something in the plant we want to do it the same exact way every time. We don't want to see a variance."
Ford and Firestone say the statistics on tread separations point clearly to Decatur. Damage claims were sharply higher for tires produced at this sprawling plant, which served as a military depot in World War II. Firestone, for example, released a chart to Congress this week that showed 356 damage claims for every million ATX tires produced here. That was more than double the figure at the Wilson, N.C., plant and nearly 10 times the figure for a plant in Oklahoma City.
Decatur also produced a vast majority of the tires listed in a consumer warning by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. On Sept. 1, the agency asked Firestone to recall an additional 1.4 million tires. Firestone refused, saying it interpreted the figures differently.
Tires with the highest tread separation rate, company documents show, were produced from 1994 to 1996, during and shortly after the strike, which affected 4,200 employees. About 1,400 workers at the plant went on strike at a time Decatur was also burdened by strikes at Caterpillar and A. E. Staley, two of the city's other large employers.
The strike began in July 1994. A month later, Firestone began hiring replacement workers, persuading some strikers to cross the line. Things turned ugly, with some saying that this contributed to defective tires. "It takes two years to become a good tire builder," said William Newton, a retired tire builder. "By the time I got back, I saw a lot of people who didn't know how to build tires."
Mr. Boettner, the former plant manager, now retired, defended the work done during the strike. "We had a lot of technical people at the plant," he said. "We were monitoring things."
But workers say the number of scrap tires -- those thrown out because of defects -- soared during the strike. Rubber stock piled up and often became too dry to use. And supervisors and newly hired employees were often called on to master highly skilled jobs to keep the plant running.
When workers returned in May 1995, they said many problems lingered, partly because many seasoned workers retired.
The company also started operating seven days a week. Employees began working 12-hour shifts, often alternating between days and nights -- a practice that was scrapped after numerous complaints. "It made a difference in my workmanship," Mr. Newton said. "My production went down during the last four hours."
The basics of manufacturing tires, though, remained the same at Firestone's biggest and oldest American plant, which today produces more than 25,000 largely handmade tires a day.
In giant red-brick buildings spread across 52 acres, rubber components are mixed in a machine invented in the 1890's; workers build tires piece by piece, with machines sifting and distributing rubber, nylon, steel belts and other components. The raw tire is still cooked -- or vulcanized -- in a steamy curing machine.
This is the process that investigators are now focusing on.
Firestone will not say what its experts have found. But tire consultants involved in lawsuits against Firestone say they have evidence that throughout the 1990's, Decatur was poorly managed and proper procedures were either not in place or not followed. "The problem is bad housekeeping and bad material," a consultant, R. J. Grogan, said. "It's a weak rubber, and they don't take care of it; they use stale stuff and freshen it up."
Many experts say the critical bond between the steel and rubber, aided by the use of brass and other materials, may be flawed. Investigators are trying to determine what solvents were used to aid the adhesive process.
Workers at Decatur say they commonly "gassed," or sprayed, a chemical solvent on the rubber to make it tackier. Several workers say they were told to stop using the solvent in the last year. Others say that it is still regularly applied, and that its use has been common for decades.
"During the strike they were using it all the time," said Jared Thompson, a tire builder, "because the quality of the material going from one department to another wasn't as good."
Four former Decatur plant workers said in depositions that solvents were employed to make use of otherwise unusable rubber, that production quotas made thorough inspections nearly impossible, and that plant conditions made it possible for moisture to seep into the rubber linings.
Still, industry experts say none of these factors is likely to be a smoking gun. They say that there may have been design flaws, and that poor quality control made Firestone tires more vulnerable on heavy sport utility vehicles.
"It's partly a design and partly a manufacturing problem," said Dennis Carlson, who once tested tires for Michelin and is now advising lawyers about the recall.
Still, many suspect one of the problems may be that the Decatur plant uses older equipment than other plants and is only beginning to switch to more highly automated technology that will reduce the margin of error that comes in making tires by hand. The company has spent about $60 million over the last few years on new equipment that highly automates the process.
Workers here, however, insist that they followed proper procedures and that they never witnessed defective tires being approved for shipment.
Indeed, despite some lapses they saw at the plant, many of them suspect that the problem lies not with the Decatur plant but with the Ford Explorer. The Decatur plant is a scapegoat, they say, and that has many worried about the future of the plant.
"I hate to see the reputation of the plant tarnished," said Roger Gates, union chief at Decatur. "And I don't think the reputation of the workers deserves to be tarnished." *****
The use of scabs, outrageous production quotas, cost-cutting measures, etc. made it impossible for workers at the Decatur plant to use their knowledge, and look what happened. Unless workers have ownership & control of work processes, there is no way that they can make full use of their knowledge to their & consumers' benefit (except on the margins & in emerging industries).
>``On general principles, I agree with Kelley, in that we don't have
>time to keep up with every innovation in every science & technology.''
>
>Remember through all the smoke and mirrors, that originally Kelley was
>on a rant over geeks, hackers and cyberspace. My suggestion was that
>any one interested in that world should get an open source OS, install
>it in a throw away box, and see for themselves what all the noise is
>about. Consider it field work.
The above will go on my to-do list. I have been avoiding learning computer languages because this is _exactly_ what university management & leaders of "the profession" (the MLA) have been recommending to lit critters as an "alternative career" and a path of salvation. My feeling was, "if I had wanted to become a programmer, I would have studied math & CS, not English, assholes!"
My agreement with Kelley comes from concerns about gender as well as practicality. For women, taking pride in crafts of sewing, cooking, bread-making, dish-washing, house-cleaning, etc. is a double-edged sword that only "difference feminists" who have lots of time on their hands & Martha Stewart who uses hired hands have embraced.
I remember that when I was very little, my mom had a huge argument with my dad & grandma (mother-in-law to my mom) about the introduction of the gas range. My mom got sick & tired of using hibachi (which was becoming obsolete then) & wanted to have the gas range (it's not smoky & easier to clean), but my dad & grandma wanted to continue with hibachi, because it gave food better flavors (which is true -- in the best Japanese restaurants, hibachi-cooking is still sometimes used & advertised as such for higher prices). My mom won (bless her!), and the Furuhashi family entered the mainstream of mod cons (well, not quite -- my dad resisted the introduction of the telephone for some time).
Also, until I became twelve or so, my mom made me many of my clothes (my mom had been a professional dressmaker before I was born), modelled upon what Grace Kelley (Rearwindow), Audrey Hepburn (Roman Holiday), etc. wore (my mom used to be a Hollywood film buff). Sewing ruins your eyes & gives you terrible backache, though -- that's why she quit professional dressmaking.
Yoshie