A Savage Factory is a true memoir straight from the factory floor of an automotive giant losing the global auto war to smaller, weaker, less experienced foreign competitors that beat us at our own game on our own turf. It gives an inside look, up close, at incompetent management at war with the labor force that created a quality nightmare and caused the car buying public to lose trust and faith in American cars. It is a true story of the inner workings of Ford's largest automatic transmission plant: the people, the machines, and the never ending war between management and labor that produced low quality cars that opened the door for foreign competitors to come to our country and take our auto market. It gives real life examples of the battlefield like conditions in the auto plants that caused alcoholism, drug addition, sexual harassment, and family breakdown, while producing transmissions that received the largest recall in automotive history and would have caused Ford Motor Company to go bankrupt had the Federal Government not intervened. A SAVAGE FACTORY An Eyewitness Account of the Auto Industry's Self-Destruction By Robert J. Dewar AuthorHouse Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Dewar All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4389-5294-9 Contents Prologue.......................................................ixOne The Sharonville Jungle.....................................1Two Roger And The Wop..........................................19Three War On The Floor.........................................39Four Bad Turbines And Cocktail Hour............................55Five Nightmares Begin At Midnight..............................73Six The Coffee Pot War.........................................87Seven The Downturn: Opec Pulls The Plug........................101Eight Rollmans.................................................115Nine The Upturn................................................129Ten An Equal Opportunity Employer..............................141Eleven Quality Is Job One......................................157Twelve Your Safety Is My Business..............................173Thirteen Foreign Devils........................................187Fourteen The End Of The Sharonville Comedy.....................199Epilogue.......................................................213 Chapter One THE SHARONVILLE JUNGLE As I pulled off Sharon Road and passed through a mound of earth and barbed wire fencing that looked more like a prison than a factory, I felt a surge of excitement. I had just quit a management position at Procter & Gamble to take a job as a first line foreman at Ford Motor Company's Sharonville Transmission Plant. It was a step down in status, a big step up in salary, and it was going to be my last job in corporate America. When I saved enough money, I would kiss corporate life goodbye and strike out on my own. I slipped into a parking space in the lot designated as Management Parking Only, pocketed my keys, and got out. I was still about 100 yards from the guard shack, and the immensity of the Sharonville Transmission Plant struck me. There it was, at the end of a lot built to accommodate nearly 6,000 cars. The gray cinder block walls of a two million square foot industrial plant that occupied hundreds of acres of land. An endless expanse of concrete with dirty, 20-foot-high windows, and a loading dock capable of feeding an entire fleet of eighteen wheelers. Steam or smoke, I could not tell which, punctuated a blustery sky above the plant's flat roof and partially obscured the overbearing letters on the immense white sign that spelled a single word: FORD. I wasn't the only new kid on the block that day at Sharonville. Two other aspiring managers, dressed appropriately for an interview, sat beside me in the Salaried Personnel Office. We were just striking up a conversation when a man roughly the size and shape of a Sherman tank burst through the door. He did not look like a manager, yet the clerk stiffened in her seat as he came in. He gave us a disgusted side glance, spat a stream of tobacco juice at a corner waste can and missed, then said, "Which one of you guys worked at P&G?" I volunteered that I had just quit my job at Procter & Gamble. He sneered at me, looked at the clerk, and said, "I'll take this here one on out to Zone 3." The clerk nodded and said, "Okay, Ed. I will forward his paperwork to Roger." The tank spun around, without saying anything to me, and I made the assumption that I was supposed to follow him. Ed rumbled from the office without a backward glance, and I scrambled after him as we made our way through a maze of corridors in the salaried personnel complex, and then turned toward a set of double doors that opened into the factory. I followed Ed into a different world, the likes of which I had never seen. What had been the distant muttering of a tenor volcano when heard from the heavily insulated front offices was now an infernal roar. Machines, s