Group Work in the German Automobile Industry — The Case of Mercedes-Benz

Abstract

Starting in the mid-1980s, attempts to depart from Taylorist and Fordist structures of production and work organisation, and efforts to establish a new politics of the workplace could be observed in the German automobile industry. These developments coincided with a ten-year span of expansion in which the German auto industry, in particular, was very successful and in which employment increased — in contrast with most of its European and American competitors. Over the 1980s, the production concepts of the German auto industry [1], were considered successful on an international scale (Dertouzos et al., 1989; Streeck, 1988). More recent empirical studies, though, show that real changes of the structures on the shopfloor were only hesitantly implemented before the early 1990s (Jürgens et al., 1989; Schumann et al., 1994). While the present attempts to implement team concepts or group work are influenced by the reception of management concepts such as lean production, the course and pattern of reorganisation cannot be understood without their history of slowly moving reorganisation of work structures in the 1980s and attempts to introduce group work within the framework of government programmes such as HdA (Humanisierung der Arbeitswelt — a QWL programme funded by the government), started in the 1970s.