(^486) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
they knew, wanted big cars you could love and make love in. When
someone at Chrysler designed a low-slung model, the top exec
sneered: "Chrysler builds cars to sit in, not to piss over."^24
Meanwhile Japanese compacts took a growing share of the
American market, and when trade measures set bounds on the
number of cars the Japanese could ship, they just moved upscale, first
to midrange vehicles, and then to the best. So, the foilers foiled. This
was also a way to build customer loyalty, bringing them up as their
income and social status rose.^25 When the Japanese announced that
they planned to compete with German luxury cars, it seemed a joke.
A year or two later and Mercedes and BMW were no longer
laughing. The Japanese had just about swept aside their higher-
priced success symbols.
It would be wrong to see these gains as simply a matter of technique,
there for the taking or copying. People made all the difference. For
anyone who has ever visited Japan and suffered in the traffic that is
one of the vexatious, even nightmarish features of overcrowded
urban and industrial agglomerations, the ability to run a just-in-time
system comes across as miraculous. How can anyone deliver parts on
call and on time? The answer: by sleeping on the job. The driver
takes his lorry close by the factory gate and parks there overnight,
curling up in the cab. On the morrow he's there.
But that makes another point: what's sauce for the goose is not for
the gander. The just-in-time mother plant is saving its time. Very
smart. But the supplier is spending his time. The whole Japanese
system of outsourcing rests on pressing down, on squeezing the
purveyors while they in turn squeeze their workforce. All is not
immaculate, then, in the Japanese industrial heaven. On the other
hand, the mother firm is not unreasonable: it squeezes, but it also
helps with equipment, technique, and funding. These are tough,
resilient people, as always very hierarchical, but with a strong sense
of reciprocal obligation up and down the scale.
In the automobile manufacture, all of this depends on a team
approach that unites management and labor, in a commitment not
only to efficient performance but to continuing improvement. Labor
is not expected to oppose innovation, even of the labor-saving
variety,^26 and in the big firms every worker feels obliged, indeed is
pushed, to make suggestions, mounting to the tens of thousands, for
saving effort here and money, even a few yen, there. (One can only
wonder how management vets this flood of ideas.) Everyone on the
nora
(Nora)
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