The fault lies within the system itself

The recall of fault-ridden products, which is spreading throughout industrial manufacturing, tells us much about the acute contradictions that permeate the global corporations within the capitalist drive to maximise profits.

Yesterday Nissan announced a recall of just over half a million vehicles, mostly in the US, because of problems with brake pedals and fuel gauges. Toyota leads the field with 8.5 million cars, trucks and sports utility vehicles recalled in the last few months. Toyota’s recalls are for faulty accelerator pedals, jamming floor mats, and braking problems. The pedals are supplied by CTS a US corporation.

General Motors has blamed the supplier JTEKT, a joint venture between Toyoda Machine Works and Koyo Seiko with five manufacturing plants in the US, for a faulty car part that led to the recall of 1.3m Chevrolet and Pontiac cars in North America. The fault in the cars’ power steering has been linked with 14 crashes. Last month Honda recalled 438,000 cars with faulty airbags.

The problem isn’t restricted to cars. On Monday, Sony told millions of PlayStation 3 users not to use their games consoles as it rushed to fix a bug. The warning appeared to be another blow to one of the biggest names in the electronics industry.

Last week Akio Toyoda, the Toyota chief executive whose family name appears on every one of the company’s products, appeared before the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee to explain and apologise. His simple explanation gets right to the heart of the problem. “I fear the pace at which we have grown may have been too quick,” he said.

Though it didn’t come out in the questioning, unpicking Toyoda’s simple statement gets us to the real cause of the crisis which has engulfed the interdependent worlds of finance and production. After World War II, US occupation forces introduced modern production control methods into Japan. These had been developed by it’s the US War Department.

Toyota adopted these as the basis for its development of the “kaizen” philosophy of continuous improvement. Kaizen is a process that, when done correctly, humanises the workplace, eliminates overly hard work ("muri"), teaches people how to perform experiments on their work using scientific methods and how to learn to spot and eliminate waste in business processes.

And it worked. Over the decades, Toyota grew to lead the world in quality, building cars with a reputation for durability and reliability. Other companies followed Toyota in their competition over quality and price.

So what went wrong? Akio Toyoda’s simple statement encompasses the consequences of decades of the fierce competition for profit which obliged Toyota, like all corporations, to globalise, to export production volumes to cheaper labour regions to cut costs. At the same time, the company led built highly-sophisticated vehicles dependent on ever more complex software and computer chips.

In the process it was obliged to outsource production of its components to companies over which it has little control, whilst all the time driving up productivity at a faster rate than its competitors. In the end, the complex, globalised supply chain was Toyota’s undoing and it engaged in a cover-up of mounting problems.

Toyota’s rush to expand simply added to a global saturation of the market, which is another inescapable feature of the capitalist system of production, one which is driving the present recession towards outright slump. Car sales are dropping off the cliff. In Europe they are expected to fall by 10-15% this year. GM is cutting European production by 20%. Europe has a production overcapacity of 6.5m vehicles.

The whole saga demonstrates beyond all argument that capitalism is simply not sustainable. Intense competition has meant the building of cars that are increasingly unsafe to drive, that add to carbon emissions and then lead to over-production with the consequent loss of jobs and pensions.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Car workers abandoned by union leaders

Toyota car workers at plants around the country yesterday voted by more than two to one to accept a 10% cut in pay and hours, which was recommended to them by UNITE and GMB unions on the spurious grounds that the negotiated “deal” was better than redundancy.

Peter Tsouvallaris, the UNITE representative at Toyota, argued that the deal would mean that workers would not suffer the fate of the 1,000 workers at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), 850 at Mini and 1,200 at Nissan who have their jobs cut recently. But taking a pay cut won’t save Toyota. Predictions are that the company will face an operating loss of £3.4 billion by the end of March due to sharp falls in global sales. Sales of new cars in February in Britain were 22% lower than a year earlier.

And while the unions betray their members by peddling hours and pay cuts as the lesser of two evils, 1,000 jobs are disappearing each week in the Birmingham area alone in companies supplying the major manufacturers. And union leaders are doing nothing about it.

Other car manufacturers are in the same position as Toyota. General Motors introduced a three-year wage freeze for Canadian workers earlier this month. GM Europe, Vauxhall’s parent company last week warned that it was about to go bankrupt. GM spokesman said that "everything will fall over" if support for the company was not forthcoming. This includes plants at Ellesmere Port and Luton, which employ 4,000 people. GM is seeking huge bail-outs from European governments as a price for keeping plants open.

Is there any help forthcoming from the Trades Union Congress about how to cope with the threat of the sack? Well, actually no. In two booklets, called Coping with the Downturn and Facing Redundancy, pains are taken to explain the difference between the “sack” and “redundancy”, claiming that “redundancy is a fair reason for dismissal”.

Clearly the TUC believes that unemployment is inevitable and that people must accept the “fate” that capitalism is dishing out to them. It sees its role as mediating between workers, their employers and the government to convince workers that there is no alternative and that they must accept the pain and find ways to live in poverty.

The stark fact is that no amount of pay freezing and shorter hours will resolve the  massive over-capacity that has built up in the industry over past decades, not to speak of the ongoing collapse of the global capitalist economy. As to the claim by union bureaucrats that their “solution” is the lesser of two evils, well, as someone once said, the lesser of two evils is still an evil.

Instead of accepting the demands of the global corporations, there has to be an organised resistance to the economic slump. It’s not going to come from UNITE and GMB leaders, who have run up the white flag, nor TUC bureaucrats. If Toyota and other corporations are going bust, it is because the economic system they are part of has fallen off a cliff.

The real way forward is for global car business to be run on an entirely different, not-for-profit way in a re-shaped transport industry. In any case, what is the point of the vast over-capacity in the motor industry, which churns out unneeded metal boxes while carbon-induced climate change takes the planet to hell on wheels?

It’s time for the biggest industrial and social change ever. Toyota and GM workers could be making really useful, ecologically-sound forms of transport. The first step towards that goal is an occupation of threatened plants and an ousting of the executives whose failed policies have brought the company to its knees and the removal of union officials who have absolutely no intention of leading a fight back.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary