Abstract

Retooling: The Big Three US Auto Firms in the 1980s

The 1980s have variously been described as a period of financialization, globalization, industrial policy debates, corporate restructuring, automation, deindustrialization, and union decline in the United States. The tendency to generalize about processes in the economy as a whole, however, has obscured the particular ways that business leaders navigated the period and how their specific decisions affected US workers. This paper focuses on the Big Three auto firms—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—to understand how these processes unfolded, how and to what extent they related to each other, and how they impacted the workforce. The paper seeks to understand how corporate leaders strove to “reinvent” the US auto industry as they navigated the 1979 oil crisis, the “Volcker shock” and the recession of the early 1980s, and rising import competition, particularly from Japanese firms. In so doing, it seeks to offer a nuanced explanation of how macroeconomic changes, technological innovations, and business decision-making affected the labor movement and the nature of work in the United States.