> Can you imagine managers like that implementing the Toyota Production System? Or anything else where the workers have an individual autonomous contribution? Of course not. So that's why the remaining large car factories are foreign-owned.
I'm not convinced that what you apparently feel is a fair outcome, is an actual logical consequence. Where did manufacturing go? To SE Asia. What is the industrial relations and individual autonomous contribution like in a SE Asian sweatshop?
I mentioned Toyota for a reason. Car manufacturing did not go to China. And the whole basis of Japanese manufacturing style after W Edwards Deming's influence is very different from sweatshops.
I don't know about "fair", but Nissan Sunderland being Japanese-run is not a bad outcome compared with the other possibilities of the 60s and 70s labour relations problem which included fears of both left and right wing coups. In the end we got moderate state violence and mass unemployment. That does need to be put right, but we can't go back to the 70s.
Much of what we now import from China did not exist in the 1950s and was developed as a technology in America, so it's not so much "went to China" as "failed to develop here". And there we do need to have a discussion about business and tech development in the UK.
(Textiles also worth considering, but that was always a sweatshop from industrialisation onwards. The brief attempt to run it with SE Asian (Bangladeshi largely) workers in Britain didn't stave off the flight to cheapest.)
I'm not convinced that what you apparently feel is a fair outcome, is an actual logical consequence. Where did manufacturing go? To SE Asia. What is the industrial relations and individual autonomous contribution like in a SE Asian sweatshop?