Reddit reviews A Savage Factory: An Eyewitness Account of the Auto Industry's Self-Destruction

This is the plot to A Savage Factory if you're interested:

https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Factory-Eyewitness-Industrys-Self-Destruction/dp/1438952937

Robert J. Dewar came from a working class family in the bituminous coal fields. He paid his own way through Penn State and receivied a full academic scholarship to earn an MBA at the University of Southern California. His first job was at Procter and Gamble, managing the Duncan Hines Cake Mix operation in Cincinnati. When he left P&G to take a supervisor's job at Ford, he was shocked at the incompetent management, the never ending war between management and labor, and the lack of real quality standards. He quickly concluded that at some future time the entire auto industry would simply collapse under its own weight, much like the old Soviet Union collapsed. Dewar wanted to give people a long, hard look behind the walls of auto plants to show people how the cars were built that lost our largest and most important manufacturing industry. So he kept a daily journal. He made copies of telltale internal memos. He made an extensive collection of defective parts that were routinely assembled into Ford C-4 automatic transmissions. When Ford received the largest recall in auto history because of defective transmissions built at the Sharonville Transmission Plant, Dewar decided to write A Savage Factory.

I know because most people that have worked in a UAW plant will tell you what a screwed up work environment it is and that the UAW enables much of the behavior in question.

A Savage Factory

First-hand account of the adversarial relationship between labor and management at a Ford transmission plant in the 1970s.

I highly recommend a book I came across called A Savage Factory. It’s about an earlier period at Ford when they were also selling cars with with transmissions they knew to be bad. The author was a manager at the plant and kept a diary, but for some reason put it away for 30 years until he wrote the book. But clearly the book is still relevant and it’s excellent writing that may have been overlooked.