America’s Assembly Line by David E. Nye (review)

The year 2013 marked the 100th anniversary of launch of the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. One of the host important developments in the history of industrial capitalism passed almost unnoticed in 1913, but David Nye decided to commemorate the event with a book-length exploration of what the assembly line actually was, where it came from, what impact it had industrially, culturally, and globally, and what happened to it towards the end of the 20th century. That was a daunting task, and required a remarkable feat of synthesis of diverse material. The result is a wide-ranging, thoughtful, elegantly written, if slightly too celebratory history.

As a well-respected expert on the history of technology, Nye takes great pains to clarify what exactly went into the development of the line. He dismisses the popular impression that the line was the product of Henry Ford’s fertile imagination. In reality, there was no single plan. Rather, it was a large staff of managers, engineers and skilled workers who drew on managerial experiments in several other industries and brought together a special mix of technology and organization that would speed up the production of automobiles in Ford’s plants without a substantial increase in the workforce – or, in Nye’s words, “to reduce perceived inefficiencies.” (16) In 1909 it took twelve hours to make a Model T; in 1914, just 93 minutes.

He tells us that the industrial synthesis they achieved involved a subdivision of labour (and the creation of many low-skill jobs), interchangeable parts, specialized single-function machines, a new sequencing of machinery according to the work being performed, electrification, and the movement of parts and assembly automatically through the stages of production via slides and belts. The last, of course, became the most vivid feature of the assembly line in the popular imagination, though he argues that it was much less important in cutting costs than the others. This list puts a heavy weight on technological innovations, as one might expect from a historian of technology. But there is a curious silence here about labour markets. Surely the planning that lay behind Ford’s new assembly line assumed a huge surge of recent immigrants and migrants from the US countryside that could be drawn into the auto plants (as well as many other industrial enterprises) and the relative flexibility of that inexperienced labour compared to the skilled metal workers who had been making cars up that point.

There are also question marks over Nye’s suggestion of what motivated all this innovation. He wants to lift Ford’s managers to a higher level than merely “a desire for profits”: “They had a vision of accelerated production and efficiency, and that vision became an end in itself.” (37) Undoubtedly the engineers involved had a strong professional pride in what they were pulling together, but this was the era in which the word “efficiency” was being re-defined to connote that which would be more profitable (helped along by the high-minded rhetoric in particular of F.W. Taylor). It is hard to believe that Henry Ford would have let these men play around with his plants if they weren’t promising greater profitability for the new production processes. Moreover, Nye pays little attention to the contention of previous historians of autowork (such as Stephen Meyer and Joyce Peterson) that the goal of all this innovation was to more effectively control a labour force to ensure that it was working as intensively as possible. In fact, only half way through the book, in a chapter on “critique” of the line, does he note that the assembly line was a mechanism of control. (103)

Nye does point out that the new Ford system was a completely distinct development from Taylor’s “scientific management,” which aimed primarily to get the most out of the bodily actions of individual workers, especially in batch production. Nye urges us to abandon any sequential development between these managerial formulas, and instead to see them as...