256 RÜDIGER HACHTMANN
forced to concede that humans “cannot just simply be traded for ma-
chines.” In part for this reason, Toyotism kept a remarkably fi rm hold
on production in large industrial companies. “A quiet return to strongly
collaborative and standardized production systems” thus set in from the
mid-1990s, and “Toyota—Asian discipline—has become the model to
follow.” With the onset of the fi nancial crisis in 2008, the “work cycles
on the assembly lines” at Mercedes-Benz, Bosch, and the Zahnradfab-
rik Friedrichshafen were “shortened even further.” In the words of one
of the workers’ council members at the Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen,
this resulted in “fewer and fewer movements, but always the same—‘it’s
mind-deadening.’” The managers systematically reduced the number of
more diversifi ed steps. “Everything that is not strictly part of the produc-
tion assembly line” the head of the workers’ council at the Zahnradfabrik
Friedrichshafen surmised in early 2009, is being “cut.”^34
Despite the unexpected rehabilitation of creative human labor and the
continued existence of Toyota-style production regimes, the trend toward
robotization in direct manufacturing has not been reversed. As the Frank-
furter Allgemeine Zeitung headlined on 12 February 2015, robot manufac-
turers were “drowning in orders.” In turn, innovative corporations in the
main German industries operating on the global market have been hiring
fewer and fewer unskilled production workers. Between 1993 and 2000
alone, the number of “plain workers” in the industrial sector nationwide
sank by almost 30 percent, from 3.03 million to 2.15 million^35 (although
their number increased in the growing service industry subsectors^36 ).
Repetitive jobs, which had been the norm for assembly line workers in
the classic Fordist system, had been reduced down to the few shrinking
“gaps” that were still left in the wake of full automation, especially in
corporations with more capital, like those in the automotive and electron-
ics industries. However, in other sectors of the manufacturing industry,
such as wood and furniture making, simple forms of Fordist production
systems and the unskilled labor needed to keep them going still continue
to play a signifi cant role in manufacturing.^37
The fascination with industrial robots (IR) and the idea of a fully au-
tomated factory without human employees existed on both sides of the
Wall. In the GDR, however, the failure of robotization did not necessar-
ily lie in the fact that robots lacked “tacit knowledge”; rather, the “ro-
bot off ensive” that was announced in 1980 never really got going in the
fi rst place because of system-related factors. The fi rst devices that could
be described as “robots” were installed in automotive and machine tool
factories in 1976 and 1978, respectively.^38 But most of these exemplars
were rather primitive “feed-in robots” that loaded pieces into factory ma-
chinery. More complex “technological robots,” such as those that could