TRANSFORMATIONS IN WORK 255
the Wall had become a reality in the GDR. The legally defi ned workweek
in East Germany went from 48 hours in 1949 to 43.5 in 1972, before
dropping further to 42.9 in 1988; in the last decade before reunifi cation,
however, East Germans actually worked on average only about 36 hours
per week.^31
The Limits of RobotizationAround the same time, union demands for shorter work hours across the
board began to disappear from the agenda again in the Federal Republic.
The new buzz word was “fl exible working hours,” which was accompa-
nied by the notion that the “end of Fordism,” or even more fundamen-
tally, the “end of our work society” (“Ende der Arbeitsgesellschaft” was
a phrase coined by Ralf Dahrendorf in 1982 at the Bamberg Conference
of Sociologists), was coming. In addition to the expansion of the service
sector, the so-called Third Industrial Revolution fed into this discursive
shift. This third wave of industrialization was refl ected in the trends to-
ward full automation and robotization, as well as digitalization, which
were supposed to create a factory utopia without human workers. This
vision for the future of industry, however, was very much rooted in the
dynamics of Fordist production. After all, it was not a coincidence that the
Ford factory in Detroit became home to the fi rst robot in the car manufac-
turing industry in 1961. Ford had also been the fi rst carmaker to establish
its own automation department back in 1946.^32 In West Germany, it was
the Volkswagen (VW) plant in Wolfsburg, which was the incarnation of
Fordism and the economic miracle in the early postwar period, that de-
veloped a particular preference for the use of robots.
The move toward extensive robotization, however, met with unex-
pected diffi culties.^33 Similar to FIAT, for example, VW had followed the
Japanese model and automated parts of its car manufacturing system
under the motto that “Robby”—which referred to robots—“does the dirty
work” (as cited in the factory newsletter in 1982). In doing so, it hoped
to signifi cantly accelerate production times and reduce costs. But, by the
end of the decade, the company’s executives had to face the surprising
fact that the standstill phases were even longer than before. The reason
for this proved to be that the robots were unable to properly deal with
any situations that deviated from the norm. They were only capable of
reacting appropriately to foreseeable situations for which they had been
programmed. The robots lacked the “tacit knowledge” of their human
counterparts that came from socialization, “common sense,” and expe-
rience; they did not know what to do when unexpected situations arose,
nor could they improvise when necessary. Leading VW managers were