This is an article from Wildcat no. 74, summer 2005.
“...the only thing they can expect from us...”
A washing machine factory is closing down
How
quickly things change. It was only 40 years ago that major household
appliances were mass-produced in Western Europe, but there are already
few factories left and most have been shut down or relocated. It’s
nothing new that almost entire branches go abroad. What is new is that
no new branches arise which hire significant numbers of people. Between
1990 and 2003 roughly 330,000 jobs were relocated from Germany to
Eastern Europe. This was around 25,000 per year. Through the worldwide
relocation of production, Germany looses up to 50,000 jobs each year.
With around 38 million employees in Germany this is a little more than
0.1 percent a year. In comparison, the little cyclical boom in the year
2000 increased employment by 700,000.
The first washing machines,
refrigerators and stoves were produced as industrial mass-products in
Italy for the (West-)European market in the late 50s and early 60s.
Before the 70s, companies which were limited to “their” national market
were more productive than afterwards, when all of them had to expand.
They were threatened by companies which tried to compensate massive
class struggles in production with aggressive price competition. As a
result Bosch/Siemens (BSH=Bosch Siemens Hausgeräte) became a “cheap
Jack”, churning out low-grade products at discount prices. In the
second half of the 80s the factory in Berlin/Spandau (Hausgerätewerk
Berlin, HWB) had to deal with product return rates of 15 per cent and a
similar degree of sick leave. We often wrote about struggles in this
factory in Wildcat, and some of us had worked there. Now this factory
is supposed to be closing.
A branch is migrating
More
people work in industry in Germany than in the most developed
capitalist countries. 27 percent of German employees worked in industry
in 2003, five percentage points above the numbers in France and ten
percent above the numbers in Great Britain; in the USA even less people
work in industry. This is the fundamental reason why Germany has always
been the export world champion. But like elsewhere in Europe in Germany
the numbers sunk steadily in the past 15 years (in 1992 it was 35
percent). In the German electrical industry the amount of employees
sunk in the past 15 years by about one fifth (1991 1,087,331; 1993
980,000 with less than 74,000 in East-Germany; by June 2005 less than
810,000). But the electrical industry means everything from the
production of a hair dryer to a generating plant. More important are
the movements in between the generic term “electrical industry”. For
example the relocation of consumer electronics had already started to
take place in the 70s and 80s, during the heyday of the major household
appliance. Today conventional telephones, small household appliances
like mixers, and consumer electronics in general are no longer produced
in Germany. The rationalization in household appliance production in
the second half of the 80s and the increasing internationalisation and
concentration of the sector since the 90s lead to the steady decline of
jobs in Germany (in the beginning of the 90s the turnover was getting
higher, since then that too has sunk). The production of washing
machines in Germany increased from 1.6 million pieces in 1982 to 2.8
million in 1992 (record rates during the re-unification boom). Between
1987 and 1989 US companies got into the European production of
household appliance, for example Whirlpool had taken over Phillips and
Bauknecht. In the beginning of the 90s Bosch/Siemens had bought Spanish
and Turkish household appliance producers. After that Electrolux took
over Italian companies and AEG in Germany and has since been the world
market-leader. BSH is number three in the world ranking (worldwide
34,000 employees, 14,000 still in Germany; 16,000 three years ago) and
makes more than three-quarter of its turnover (of 6.8 billion Euro)
abroad. Of the 42 factories, seven are still in Germany, the others in
Spain, Greece, Latin America, USA, Poland, China and Turkey. In the
last few years Turkey has become probably the most important location
for production of major household appliances in the world. In 2002 the
Turkish Arcelik group took over Blomberg (the last German producer of
household appliance except Miele), two years later Blomberg stopped the
production of washing machines in Germany. Miele too, which had
marketed its expensive products with the label “Made in Germany”, is
going to get rid of every tenth employee of the 11,000 in Germany until
2007. The core segments of the household appliance sector have being
shifted (i.e. for 15 years there has been no development in cooling
units and no big progresses are expected; the lowering of consumer
prices, the increase of laundry and the shift to electronic control was
for washing machines a key development in the last few years, in the
future there will be only gradually advances). What happened with
electrical goods in Germany is now taking place in the production of
top loader washing machines; in about two years no top loader will be
produced in Germany anymore. It happened in France with the production
of refrigerators, in 1960 there were 20 producers of refrigerators, in
1967 only Thomson-Brandt was left, and since 1993 no refrigerators are
produced in France anymore. Except the Miele factory in Gütersloh there
are only three and a half washing machine production locations in
Germany: Bauknecht in Schorndorf - “threatened”; AEG in Nürnberg -
“threatened”; Bosch/Siemens in Berlin and Nauen close to Berlin. The
plant in Berlin is supposed to be closed by the end of 2006. Officially
the plant in Nauen is suppose to produce the new generation of washing
machines, but it has been made known that doubts exist over the continued
existence of Nauen as a location for production. The decision “for
Nauen” depends on the increase of subsidies through the provincial
government in Brandenburg.
Crisis of production
In the
production of household appliances in the last 40 years the typical
mass-production worker compassion was employed: unskilled assembly
workers who were hired from rural areas. Maybe one forth were women, up
to 90 per cent migrant workers. This reservoir of labor is exhausted in
Western Europe. Significantly no workers with Turkish descent of the
third generation are working at Hausgerätewerk Berlin. For them this
kind of work is completely uninteresting. The employer is able to get a
little time advantage when they build factories in rural areas with
high unemployment rates in Eastern Europe. But these areas are in
industrially shaped regions. The situation they are attempting to
escape appears quickly. In general the employers are looking to leave
those regions in 10 to 15 years, when the wages will be “to high” or no
“appropriate labor” will be available.
Crisis of consumption good
In
general the employers make the “cost pressure” responsible for
relocation. In 1992 40 per cent of all washing machines sold in Germany
cost less than 600 Euros, by 2004 it was over 80 per cent! In 1987 1300
DM represented the average delivery price of a washing machine in
Germany, in Italy it was 580 DM. Correspondingly in Germany in 1987
there was 12.3 billion DM worth of major household appliance in Italy,
in it was Italy only 7.3 billion but Italy produced double the amount
of washing machines than Germany (in Germany over two million, one
third of those in HWB!). Not many people pay these high prices: firstly
because “cheap brands” like Eko and LG deliver almost the same quality,
and secondly because the German brands lost their leadership in
technology (they had it with ecological criteria but they didn’t
develop new ones). In the past years this development was aggravated,
because of sinking wages and shrinking domestic markets in Germany.
There is no “national protection for brands through label oriented
behavior of consumers anymore”, not only because of the processes of
industrialization in Turkey, but also because of increasing
single-households and increasing rates of divorces: a washing machine
is no longer a long term purchase.
The household appliance plant in Berlin
From
1960 to 1980 the amount of employees working in electrical plants in
West Berlin halved to 66,000. But it was still the biggest branch in
West Berlin. After re-unification and after the decline of the
“re-unification boom” a clear structural change of industry in Berlin
begun. In May 1992 the whole of Berlin had 223,000 industrial
employees; this was less than 21.4 per cent a year before, in April
1993 only 152,900. The developments lead to a strong increase of the
unemployment rate. Since January 1992 the Western part of Berlin has
the highest unemployment rate of former West Germany.
History of the plant
For
about 50 years washing machines were produced in Berlin/Spandau, at
first little units together with other household appliances. With the
acquisition of the Constructa Company and the amalgamation of Bosch and
Siemens in 1966, they began to produce only washing machines in
Berlin/Spandau. In the mid 70’s 2,100 workers produced 450,000 machines
a year. In the mid 90’s 2,500 workers produced more than one million
washing machines and more than 200,000 tumble- dryers. The increase in
unit-production took place in the 80’s: from 600,000 devices in 1982 up
to one million in 1986. The units of washing machines and dryers
produced per year per worker doubled from 1978 to 1988 (from 205 to
442). In the beginning of 1987 young second-generation Turkish workers
organised a slowdown strike against the steady rise in unit-quotas at
the assembly line. They did this so well that that the employer
couldn’t enforce the new quotas, not even with foremen, spare men,
snitches and forced transfers of workers around the factory. After a
while the workers even reduced the quota. Finally they agreed on more
spare men at the line. The workers
learned a great deal during
their struggle, they could flip the cooperation at the line at their
will. When they had idle time during reorganisation they could force
their ideas about how many machines they wanted to produce. Since fall
1987 they didn’t need to protest against legally obligatory overtime:
they just subtracted the machines they had produced in overtime the
days after from the “normal units”. “If we wanted to, we just reduced
the units anytime”. At this time the vanguards of the struggles became,
in their own words, “professional saboteurs”. More and more machines
had scratches, planned or “just because” (it was possible to buy such
machines on a discount at the factory-shop). Once the early shift came
to work and every single machine was scratched. Now and then the line
stood still because of sabotage at the “robots” or because of a cut
drive belt. Despite the fact that a spare man (a worker who replaces
other workers when there is a problem) supervised the drive belt it was
sometimes broken three times a day. “Then they put a security guard at
the line for three weeks, he was walking around the belt. He had to
listen to a lot of stuff from the workers! But it didn’t help. They
just didn’t understand how we did it.” At late shift the spare man had
to stay until every worker left the factory. Nothing worked. In spite
of repeated transfers of the suspects, nothing helped.
The
management never tried to raise the quotas at this line; instead they
transferred the workers through the whole factory. In 1992 they
decreased production. In the three years which followed more than 1000
workers left the factory, mostly with very good compensation payment.
Since
the mid 60s the HGW in Berlin was now and then an object of
investigation for industrial sociologists and work scientists. In the
end one had the impression that they became desperate: all attempts at
“humanization”, “team-work”, and all of those buzzwords failed. Today
when a system of team-work rules the line which largely corresponds to
those dreams of the work scientists, the plant is in line for closure.
“In
sum one can assert that almost all serious difficulties with personnel
are caused by the execution of the Taylor System.” Wexlberger, former
director of industrial science at HWB
[prol-position news #4, 12/2005]
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