Fordism

Fordism is named after American industrialist Henry Ford, who pioneered the mass production of automobiles during the early 20th century using standardized job tasks, interchangeable parts (which date back to gun maker Eli Whitney), and the moving assembly line. Ford's methods, which were very successful, were widely imitated by other industries and soon became almost universal throughout the North American, European, and Japanese economies.

The precise moment when Fordism became the dominant form of production in the United States is open to debate. Some argue that it began as early as the late 19th century during the wave of technological change of the 1880s and 1890s, when mass production first made its appearance, displacing the older, more labor-intensive, and less profitable forms of artisanal production. For example, during this period, glass blowing, barrel making, and the production of rubber goods such as bicycle tires became steadily standardized, and the Bessemer process for fabricating steel was invented. Fordism, however, elevated this process to a whole new level, including highly refined divisions of labor within the factory, so that each worker engaged in highly repetitive tasks. Ford engaged the services of Frederick Taylor, the founder of industrial psychology, who applied time-and-motion studies to workers' jobs to organize them in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. By breaking down complex jobs into many small ones, Fordism made many tasks suitable for unskilled workers, including the waves of immigrants then arriving to the United States, and increased productivity greatly.

Others argue that Fordism was a particular kind of contract between capital and labor, one that tolerated labor unions (e.g., the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO]) that came into being during the 1930s, and so Fordism should be seen as beginning during the crisis years of the Great Depression. Yet others make the case that Fordism was the backbone of the great economic boom during the three decades following World War II, when the United States emerged as the undisputed superpower in the West, and that it should be dated back only to the 1950s. Whenever its origins, Fordism is reflective of a historically specific form of capitalism that dominated during most of the 20th century.

Fordism came to stand for the mass production of homogeneous goods in which capital-intensive companies relied heavily on economies of scale to keep production costs low and keep profits high. Thus, mass consumption and advertising would also come into being as the demand side of Fordism. Typically, firms working in this context were large and vertically integrated, controlling the chain of goods from raw materials to final products. Ford's plants, for example, saw coal and iron ore enter one part of the factory and saw cars come out the other end. Well suited to large, capital-intensive production methods, this system of production and labor control was largely responsible for the great manufacturing complexes of the North American Manufacturing Belt, the British Midlands, the German Ruhr region, the Inland Sea area of Japan, and similar agglomerations of industrial firms around the world.

While Fordism “worked” quite successfully for nearly a century, ultimately it began to reach its social and technical limits. Productivity growth during the 1970s began to slow dramatically, and the petrocrises[Page 171] and rise of the newly industrializing countries unleashed wave on wave of plant closures in the United States. Because wages and salaries are often tied to the overall growth of productivity, these changes led not only to widespread layoffs but also to declining earning power of American workers. Rates of profit in manufacturing began to drop during the 1970s and 1980s, and many firms faced the choice of either closing down, moving overseas, or reconstructing themselves with a new set of production techniques. It is in this context that Fordism began to implode, giving way to post-Fordist, flexible production techniques, which have become widespread throughout the economy today.

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