A Savage Factory – Inside An Auto Manufacturing Plant
I have been involved in the automotive industry for over 50 years and found A Savage Factory by Robert Dewar to be one of the most important books I have ever come across.
Mr. Dewar was recruited by Ford Motor Company to run the torque converter manufacturing operation in one of their transmission plants until he was laid off in 1979.
Here is what he has to say about his book in information on his website ASavageFactory.Com:
‘A Savage Factory’ is my memoir of spending six years as a foreman and general foreman in Zone 3 of Ford Motor Company’s Sharonville Transmission Plant. It begins the day I started at Ford and ends the day I left Ford. It puts you in the middle of the never ending war between management and the UAW. It shows you, machine by machine, employee by employee, and component by component, the building of C-4 automatic transmissions that eventually resulted in the largest recall in automotive history. It takes you on a journey to try and change the way auto plants are managed, which put me under the care of a psychiatric hospital. It walks you through the thick jungle of sexual harassment female employees endured before the term “sexual harassment” was coined. It shows you the weak safety rules that destroyed men’s hearing and damaged their lungs. It puts you in my shoes as I attempted to break free of corporate tyranny by working enough overtime to save money to fund my own business. The book ends when American car buyers overwhelmingly choose better built, more reliable foreign imports, as the Big Three fights to avoid having to lay in the bed they spent 30 years making.
He goes on to say that he wanted to write this book to provide a look behind the “dirty gray walls … so they could see … the conditions in the parts plants … and the kind of management that was destroying an industry.”
If you like cars, and especially if you are technically inclined, you should read A Savage Factory. You are guaranteed to get a whole new look on the car businss a few decades back.
