on april 21 and 22nd, where live in the campus of the university of southern california for the los angeles times festival of books featuring author discussions on labor, the trump administration, immigration, history and more. and then the annapolis folk festival in maryland state capital at the end of the month. for more information about upcoming book fairs and festivals and to watch previous festival coverage on c-span.org >> welcome. we are delighted to have you as our guest this afternoon and evening and to listen to someone's on this new book our

colleagues joshua freeman. i am a professor of anthropology and director of the advanced research collaborative here at the grandson get when josh spent i think a useful year in 2014 and 2015 which partly, only partly to produce a book. have a little bit for helping this realization of this log was an important book. this book is intriguing because while today everyone is talking about labor market polarization and the growth of the service sector, and application of artificial intelligence and automation and so on, josh takes us on a different tack. it is emphasizing the continuing importance of large-scale manufacturing of a massive kind. i think he is a particularly interesting work from this point of view. something that which if i may

say so, justifies the price we have been charged. [laughter] i urge you to purchase your copy if not now, as soon as possible. i am delighted that you are here with us. let me introduce people who need no introduction. steven greenhouse -- mr. greenhouse is i think everybody who i spoke to told me that he is the preeminent labor correspondent in the united states. [applause] and i looked briefly at all of these things and it is very impressive. the recent article on workers and even went to -- something is going on there.

he is, he went to columbia university graduate school of journalism and nyu school of law. he is a tremendous public importance. with a constant deal with the issue of social justice unrelenting focus on issues that affect ordinary working people. whether by whatever race, color, creed or whatever. there is a real i would say where focus on this kind of person and their destiny today. he, among other things, has tough times for the american worker, that that -- in 2009. other awards. they society a professional journalist award for the world

of hurt i think it was. we have a person in our presence to discuss his work. who is i think -- we are delighted to have him. josh of course is a professor of history here and he is a distinguished professor of history. which is important. and deservedly so i think. his books include american empire, the rise of global power, the democratic revolution -- life and labor since world war ii. and in transit the transport workers union in new york city 1933, 1966. which i think got a history book award. he is also a number of other

awards. a book price, and education award and of course fellowships from the american societies, national endowment for the humanities and it goes on and on. i will not. ladies and gentlemen, our test. [applause] >> thank you for that wonderful introduction. i am honored to be asked to interrogate the eminent doctor freeman. one thing you did not things that my first was covering manufacturing. it was the steel industry and when i left the times 31 years later i was writing but sweatshops. josh winans augustine and sweatshops and in between. this is a wonderful book. i recommend a very highly.it is not just about factories with a history of manufacturing in the world.

it goes from the beginning of manufacturing in old england to the beginning of manufacturing in the united states. it talks about conditions and what inspired marx to become marx it talks about henry ford and the sitdown strike and fast forward to -- where there are 300,000 workers. many of home are making ipads and iphones. josh is a wonderful writer. it is really an excellent read. we do not expect academics to write so well. but sometimes they do. i always thought that manufacturing began in the late 1700s. in the very first paragraph of your book, you write about the factory in 1721 in derby, england. the very first factory in the world. can you tell us a little about the factory and what the

arrival of manufacturing meant for humankind? >> yes, i'll do the political thing. i just want to thank everyone here at the phd program for sponsoring this. and my publisher and my editor, mac -- in derby england there still stands a foundation. it is an extraordinary thing in a way because if you look at a graph of it you look and you say it is a factory. and yet in many ways it was completely pioneered. it made silk thread. it was a common increasing want for this and be thread the sill form in the cocoon eventually

you had to get this, the process was made by hand, extremely slow and so, this factory was built to use machinery to do it. and they stone leaves from the italians. they sent a man to go there to sneak around. it was illegal to export the machinery so he memorized it. hired some italian workers and they went back to derby and they felt this factory and they had 300 people. which was a vast enterprise. mostly children, the integrated production and they had all of the components that we think of as a factory. instantly, people think like,

wow! something is happening. danial defoe goes there he writes a description goes there and people rightly recognize that something new is happening here. it becomes very important not because of the silk industry which turns out to be a dead end in england but because it becomes a template for the cotton industry for the first large cotton factories are in the same area that directly copied from this template that this guy developed in 1721. >> you write about the next century like textile factories are springing up in england and scotland and he mentioned that a lot of them employees seven year old. some manufacturers prefer 10-year-olds and 12-year-olds. and the only adults on the overseers. what is up with that? [laughter] >> that is a quick question! first of all, you have to

recognize that the problem of assembling a workforce of this size is a new problem. these and forced labor and unusual circumstances but on an ongoing basis, no one had 200 -- in the 1790s that a thousand people in a factory. where will you get the people from? factory owners like the case because they are extraordinarily cheap. they are extraordinarily able to intimidate. parents tested for income, sometimes they formed this parish apprentices. these are kids from orphanages sometimes where the local authorities run the orphanages signed contract with the textile mills to commit these kids to work. it is criminal activity. these kids could -- they could be arrested for doing this.it is very cheap, justifies that

they have small fingers and a nimble and so forth. young women mostly began a kind of that they were available and with the factories do not want his craft workers. they do not want skilled workers with a sense of their own knowledge and autonomy. they want someone who has no knowledge. that they can simply control. >> this is a good meeting to discuss -- they felt their jobs are being taken away by kids and others. can you talk a little about that movement? >> well, sure! it is funny because you know it is one of the inheritances we have of that moment. and the term is often used sometimes by people who have no idea where it comes from. like in the tech world here of the time. anyone who is against

instagram. primarily not the factory workers themselves but workers were threatened by the introduction of new systems and mechanical production. which will undercut not only the likelihood but there self-respecting workers. and there are very few avenues for protest.this is prior to the suffrage. working-class men do not have the right to vote. they are extraordinarily draconian laws about assembly and organizations. but this is the aftermath of the french revolution where the english are very worried it will spread across the channel. machine wrecking becomes a motive protest and there are waves of this around 1811, 1812 and a few years later. it was met with severe repression. the armies mobilized, people were arrested. some were deported to australia and somewhat hung because it

was seen as a threat to his home new emergent system. it was kind of a brief episode but it kind of goes down to us now even. >> the book had a terrific sense of this. the child workers, 12 hour days, horrible temperature, the lack of light. and they say this is where dickens comes from and marks. and you get an idea that manufacturers, this was really horrible then the conditions were very harmful. can you talk about how this might have inspired the very dark vision of capitalism? >> you know marx is already a revolutionary excellence. a critic of emerging -- capitalism is not the one that existed them but of the political economy. and of course after that he was

exiled and ended up in england which he reunites with angles and begins to write. partially to his own investigation he becomes very engaged with looking at what is going on in these factories. i think that marxism is often a certain type of system and he is concrete. transsexual ...

and so it becomes the central energy in capital. i think again why that is '02 ingels by the way marks ago to write the book, ingels subsidized him while his writing capitalism. >> let's skip across europe into the united states. it's eye-opening to read about the early history of manufacturing in the united states. i was having dinner with someone from rhode island and he said one of the first factories come just as english sole technology from italy, , america still technologies from england. you write at length about first

the factories there and then you need more water power and they moved to an ideal site. you describe lowell as in way a model is a strong word but they try to make it into a benevolent manufacturing community attracting the daughters ofnd dr outside life and they built fashionable factories. there was a much better image than i thought. can you talk about what, what was it called the boston capital -- >> you know, first americans copied english but then shortly after the war of 1812, francis lowell, robert lowell, sorry, who was in england came back to the united states and decided to

set up manufacturing improving english technology. they kind of steal some of the technology and they improve it. but they were aware in the american political lexicon, manufacturing seemed threatening to the existing order. alexander hamilton was a big proponent of manufacturing but he had a lot of critics who feel what distinguishes us from the old world is precisely the kind of independence and autonomy that would be undermined by the factory system. child labor and pollution, people think that's manufacturing. they want to avoid that and also the great challenge system in a labor force. there aren't enough children, and where to get workers from? the united states has a labor shortage. it hasn't had that kind of

peasantry that england had. the idea of getting young women to the hinterland as are coming, settle down, get married start allies but to get those young women they have to assure the women and the parents that this is a respectable, safe thing to do. so they set up mail system. one contemporary newspaper which i found calls it a system of mall mall police. they have boarding houses, rules, terms of employment is there to go to church and they set out to make it attractive. these women don't have to come they are not destitute. it's not like it is in england so that to make it attractive. for a while people like dickens comes from england to the united states, de tocqueville comes.

you go to niagara falls and you go to lowell massachusetts and although this is amazing. it's like so much better than england. for a while lowell was probably a little oversold there was a lot of truth to that, changes but at least from the beginning there was some truth to that. >> one thing that struck me was when you wrote about the factors in england, the air is filthy and the lowell is waterpowered and there is much better. there is cotton dust but that was a big difference. you wrote using young countryman and short-term workers in lowell and other new england textile factories avoided the creation of a database proletariat. i thought those of typesetting thought. >> that's a great fear. people are kind of self aware about this, they see england driven by class division. this is pretty early in history of the republic and this will be a different kind of society and not levelers but to believe at

least there should be no great social distinction, no huge economic distinction. and they're they are still thin terms of classical notions of the republic would be undermined by a proletariat which is both dangerous and crap because it would be manipulable. so this system needs a lot of social and clinical need at this very moment of american manufacturing. >> the subtext of the book that we had this driving textile industry in england, thriving in new england but who is providing the raw material? >> well, thank you for bringing that up because this is completely embedded in slavery. in some ways it's the reason why american slavery explosively expands. lots of people thought slavery was going to die out in the

united states. it was deemed less profitable. it's the growth of english textile industry that creates the huge demand for cotton that leads to the spread of slavery and places, the mississippi valley basically, and that's where the bulk of the english cotton is coming from. these things rise together at a fact in the case of lowell not only are they using slave grown cotton but the english -- a lot of american problems were crude cloth. some of the soul back to the south of slave clothing. this is inseparably bound, and what of the point i try to make is sometimes ideological we think of manufacturing as part of the kind of capitalist revolution that is something associate with freedom. maybe that's true but it's bound at least in its origin,

unfreedom, they rise together. >> as i said i thought my sense was factory conditions in new england were pretty bad. we all know about the 1912 strike where all these children of the strikers came down to new york to be fed and housed because their parents couldn't afford to keep them. so something with south, something went wrong from the pretty good model conditions in lowell to lords in 1912 we had this horrible strike. what happened? >> well, in the early days these lowell mills which are owned by kind of consortium of wealthy boston nurse have very little competition. they are very technically advanced and have a lot of capital so the huge jumpstart. by the 1830s, 1840s bottom of the people built these mills.

they had to do patents. there's no competition. there really wasn't that much competition in the beginning and competition means there's pressure on costs. basically the only two costs in these places which is rock on which they can't can control te price, and labor. so they began to push down salaries. they began to come used to be you tended to reading machines. now you and format, now six, speed up. by the mid-1830s there were too short little strikes by these new england women because it's getting worse and then just begin to walk away. a really don't need these jobs. they become schoolteachers. they go back home. unlikely for the mill owners along comes the irish famine which may also out because you get this flood of irish immigrants coming in the mid,

late 1840s and very rapidly within a decade that replaces the new england workforce. the whole context is that different. these are people fleeing starvation, very few alternatives. they begin to cut cut cut and that process continues really for the next half century. so slowly but surely conditions in the mills and also the towns, so by the time before world war i there gone from a kind of commercial utopia to kind of yet another mill store. >> meanwhile in another part of the united states, the middle western pittsburgh the steel industry was developing. steel is kind of a symbol of a nation of industrial might. can you talk about why the steel

industry was so important and why it located in the pittsburgh area? >> steel succeeds cotton as the forefront to pioneer manufacturing industry and it's different because it's mostly making local capital goods, things use by other industries as opposed to direct consumer products. a little building of america depends on it. the key is the railroad system. it needs rails and that's what the u.s. iron and steel industry grows up on. armaments, american naval power, even the great battle of merrimack, it's armor. it is economically important. it's kind of symbolically important, kind of the great age of iron. you take the eiffel tower which was made of iron, the great

symbol of this new age. i think many countries including the united states come to believe that you can't have kind of full sovereignty and autonomy as a nation unless you have an iron and steel industry. it becomes the biggest, the most capitalist industry in the united states, and out of the grows the kinds of fortunes that the never been seen in this country before, carnegie and eventually comes the morgan's. so it essentially symbolic but also you just kind of technically and economically, to the new nation and the scale of these places is amazing. >> with regard to the rise of steel and machinery, one thing that was eye-opening for me was we all heard about the crystal palace in the beginning of the world the first but i had not realized what in many ways was a main purpose of the world fair, two introduce people to machinery and manufacturing.

>> it -- you can resist it. in 18766 when the united states celebrates its 100th anniversary of the declaration of independence, there's this big worlds fair type of thing in philadelphia on the centennial expedition and what is the centerpiece of it? it's this building and machinery with this gigantic steam engine which it then runs shafts and belts and post them in the gigantic room full of machinery. they open the fair with president grant terms, and the emperor of brazil who just happen to be around this moment, so the two of them both turn these steam valves and this room full of machinery comes to light. in a very i would associate the declaration of independence -- celebrate. instead of the notion of national greatness.

where does national greatness come from? it is utterly transformed over these 100 years. >> here we are in new york not far from the morgan library was investment maker for andrew carnegie and other, we have carnegie hall and wonderful museum and so this brings us to these are the leaders of the steel industry and there was a famous strike lockout in 1892 in homestead pennsylvania just south of pittsburgh. there was a strike and frick with carnegie making itself delivery scarce public as to not take responsibility, argument to europe so they brought in pinkerton stood break the strike and the strikers started shooting the pinkerton is on ferries coming down the river. the government brought in the national guard. the union very badly lost the strike and then how the union was innocent broken and conditions got bad with workers

working 12 12 hours a day 13 ds in a row. then they get half a day off and they were switched shifts to the night shift for two weeks. can you talk about the importance of homestead and how it made things so much worse? >> share. you know, what's interesting about it is homestead is an offensive by carnegie because workers had in his you accumulated too much power. this is a very well unionized factory which was the text we most, the most largest or second-largest steel mill and the united states. workers had created a sliding scale so they got paid by the ton that keyed into the price of the products the fact was making. so every game in efficiency or every improvement in the process come workers got a big chunk of that and they controlled production processes. the mayor of homestead was a unionist, and carnegie wanted

the ability to control his own mill and to be the low cost producer. the carnegie model is, and is going to survive the inevitable recession by being the lowest cost. he sets out to break the union and he succeeds and it comes at the end of an era of an extraordinary rising of american labor with the knights of labor and the union, and in the 1880s and 1890s, make a labor was really important force in shaping the country but homestead is one of a number of moments when the tide really turns and these new industrials were very political and economic power is never before, really free themselves of these shackles. steel is most important in america when morgan integrated with other companies and carnegie becomes the a large corporation world and grows

nonunion basis. it fuels the faith i was a have sent you really until the new deal, that the most advanced, biggest manufactured in the united states was being nonunion. >> so not long after henry ford really got going in detroit and you explain very well how you -- in developing manufacturing as we know it today. can you tell us what that speedy i always get a little worried when it with the book and it talked about, i get very interested in details so i will try to -- >> you really let out this is what -- >> for i think can be social with december light and that's correct but it's in the line is the culmination of whole series of developments. the extreme standardization of the product and the extreme standardization of the particles into it which is made with highly specialized machinery. so the model is a very long

production line of a single product where you can invest in to lower the costs everything and then comes the assembly line. it used to be when you assemble a sewing machine or car you literally take, it's like a kid playing lego. you take one at each piece you need and you put in a big pile and the skilled assemblers would build up the car or sewing machine. you have the worker standing still and the parchment in front of them and each one of them is extremely minute motion or changing something doing something. this turns out to be an enormously efficient system. and enables ford to take a luxury good, the automobile, and make it into a mass consumption product. and it therefore suggest, people said this way, a whole new way of life. where normal farmers and workers could at things like cars. it's a labor system but it is a

social system as well. people call the fordism, that was the phrase before mass production. >> i'll ask you about fordism. i see it mentioned many times and some people think, say fordism is great. that brought efficiencies, lower-cost goods, a vastly increase productivity. made america america what it is today. then that brought us the five-dollar day. other people say fordism stank, that it cribs the charlie chaplin modern times insanity and he created road automaton workers. what is your verdict on fordism? >> it's all of the above. those things come together. whether they are inseparable or not is a nurse a question but they certainly come together. there is no question that

fordism made possible and makes possible to this day our ability to get huge amounts of stuff cheaply. i know some people don't like stuff but for most of us it kind of improves, we think of it as improving our lives. it comes at the cost of the kind of work which is extraordinarily difficult. in fact, it is so unpleasant that -- workers leave these jobs as soon as they get the work because it is so debilitating. it has both sides and yet it's very sophisticated discussions immediately about this like, for example, a guy named lincoln was like a philanthropist andy writes about fordism.

he says this holds promise for better life for the people the world beyond anything ever dreamed of. he said this is boring. he said it's better than starvation. boredom is not nice but starvation is a lot worse. eventually made we could get shorter hours and so forth. people often grappling with this problem for very a very long t. >> you write about the famous river rouge complex in dearborn michigan which is the culmination of all things ford. there are 102,000 workers, the largest manufacturing company in the world, and a lot of people there, you wrote the turnover rate was 370%. this wonderful quote, going to find this, our cursing if i keep putting not number 8686 more days i will be not number 86 in the bughouse.

so what are the efficiencies of building this humongous complex of 100 -- >> ford is an obsessive guys we try to do two things. basically every ford, every part in the americas were made in this one factory. he also vertically integrated to the degree that almost no one else does. most car companies, even today, they don't make most of the things in their cars. ford decides to make everything starting with the seal, he built his own blast furnaces. picky as his own class factory. he buys force in northern michigan to make wooden parts necessary. the favorite discovery in this book is an object in american life which i love, the charcoal briquette, you know, what's it called?

ford something. kingsford was the name of the cousin who is put in charge of a factory. they were recycling scraps of sawdust that there is some a burn. anyway, he had extreme vertical integration. a vast market. he thinks this will be great efficiencies and they were in a way but they're also great dangers because all your eggs are in one basket. eventually, american manufacturers move away from this model but his is the culmination, extraordinarily integrating factor in a million ways in its architecture, in the technology and labor relations, and recognized as such. no factory in america is more important, i i mean photographs and filmmakers, painters, they all go to river rouge.

it's kind of magnetic. >> a wonderful section about the great architect. that's a a nice section. you write about ford being vehemently antiunion and the same for its it was serviced apartment headed by harry bennet. bennet. that would be different sometimes kill union supported. how did it go from ford's huge anti-unionism to the future union success in flint 1936-37 at the gm plant? >> they key is the depression, the new deal. that is critically important that the depression kind of delegitimize this american business in the 1920s piccolo that like our age, the businessman is a a cultish big issue brilliant, but the depression, the businessman claimed credit for the good stuff. they get the blame for the bad

stuff and the new deal brings in a new legitimacy for workers. this reaches first that gm at flint and here's where this model that ford is most extreme example boomerangs on companies. because if you have, for example, one playmaking all let's say the engines of every chevrolet which was actually the case for chevrolet, if you stop that one plant, you shut down every chevrolet production facility in the united states. that's exactly what the union was able to do by picking these chokepoints. you'll need a minority of workers, you only need a few key places the sitdown strike is way they did it. the lots of reasons why he was so effective but one thing that surprised if you workers were involved in all this. ford has this whole that. it's old in 1940 when he finally

cracks when the union goes on strike again but also now the government is really coming down because world war ii is around the corner, and the government has got to get everything set up so the union is much stronger. there's one jvm and one at chrysler. -- gm. he seldom reverses and he's an odd guy and when he reverses he gets the best contract in the industry. he gives them the union shop and get some things no one else has. >> a very nice chapter about the movement of manufacturing from the west to china and vietnam. there are several river bridges and they copy some of the best and some of the worst ford -- can you discuss that? >> when people start jumping all

the roof of factories in 2010, buried in the stories were things at the plant went the worst rash of suicides took place had various estimates about 200,000 workers. i was completely mindful of your personal never heard of this place to be honest and second only idea the fact with 300,000 workers just blew my mind because american factors have been shrinking to twirl to. six, 7000 is huge, huge factor in the training. it sort of got me interested in them. you're right, they are not integrated in the way henry ford was. they are not comfortable seat assembly factories actually probably did make some parts. they do it on a scale without any precedent. the model is so similar to lowell or at least a start out that way in that they depend on migrant workers and initially mostly young women from poorer parts of central china who just as in lowell came to factories

as kind of working before going back home. they are very, very cheap labor. there are a lot of differences between these factors and the ones i talked it up today. these are companies not making products for themselves. they're making under contract for other companies. they are not sources of national pride the way of the places were because they are mostly foreign owned. foxconn is taiwanese owned. the most make the stuff in export market, and unlike these of the factories, henry ford loved up people visit his factories. including his rivals. these places are hidden here they are not models of the new utopia. they are both very different and very similar. they're kind of culmination in an odd way. >> you just talking about flint

and i sitdown strike and how can waste general motors was down to make all the chevy engines in one place because that made it very affordable if that one place was shut down. so we have big famous apple were virtually all the ipads and ipods and work are made at one or two foxconn factories. that's monumentally stupid for any number of reasons, but apple is not a dumb company. so why this type of -- why focus it -- >> i thought of this a lot. why after world war ii did american factors shrank by bute against a very large? the answer in my gut and it sounds very counter, america had more conflict than almost any place the world. the ability of labor to shut down the central integrated plans to let american manufactured by the late 40s to say we will disperse, have smaller, multiple plans. places you don't have to worry about that captivate model. so west germany, for example,

the workers are on half the board of volkswagen. river rouge has 5000 workers. china, he got, i mean, apple has the red army. things get really nasty, you guys and heavy artillery out there to maintain order. i think you see the rise of the super gigantic factories and super concentration of production in places where there's not a fear of labor disruption. i should say is not as if there's not labor problems in china. it's all local short strikes. the government tolerates them as long as it lasts two or three or four days and it is totally nonpolitical but if they start getting out of hand they are immediately shut down.

apple knows all this. >> the point about labor market polarization. all this talk now that manufacturing is going to evaporate, disappear, slide over the cliff and replaced by robots for ai. what do you make of all that? >> it's interesting, foxconn, people start jumping of the roof and the cut criticism and they said we'll just have robots. they have robots in a few factories but at the same time they built a new factory so their new iphone factory, where the new iphone is being made, it's really hard to predict where things will be going. clearly there are multiple models and high range areas where automation issues of the key to operate in those kinds of places but there's lots of low-wage part in the world left and sometimes it doesn't pay.

the extreme example is bangladesh works almost receiving history going backwards. bangladesh factories compared to foxconn look like the lower east side in 1900. foxconn, these are big new modern air-conditioned well lit. bangladesh, buildings can fall down on their heads. ten times worse. this is not some large flavored kisses walmart, h&m and edwin under the sun subcontracting. there's no principle to how do you make money to your company what moment? it's hard to predict. robots will continue but i don't think we will see globally anyway to kiss appear, the disappearance of factory laborers as a major part of the world economy. >> put on your philosopher hat for a second.

what would you do to fix manufacturing, make it better? what might've been done 50 years for 100 100 years ago to make t better and what would you do going into the future? >> that's a tough question. i think in the united states, 80 years ago what should have been done was done, which was the unionization which it workers both some say as to what happens on the shop floor but probably even more a more equitable slice of the enormous if each city of these factories. this is what people are nostalgic for. when they say make america great again it's that combination did thinking of. have the ability to sin the kid to college, own a home, a car and so forth. the other side is even after that happens, these jobs were really rough. people didn't like the actual jobs. they were physically taxing. they were still autocratic.

i think there's a deeper question you can unionize, unionize in china and unionize in place and that would be a great step forward. is there some fundamental transformation of the technology in the organization of production that could officially put out goods, keep our luxurious lifestyle without the kind of toll, mental, and there is nothing that much instrumentation, either in the comments world or in the capitalist world. each was something that's only very occasionally been toyed with. that to me is the question, can have the best of both worlds? the answer to that is i don't know. >> thank you. we will take questions from the audience. [inaudible] how do you know that the iphone pad is made -- [inaudible]

>> ask it again in the microphone. >> i'm sorry. how did you get you information about what's going on in china? >> well, steve's employer the "new york times" does cover this, and particularly the asian business press covers it. the other thing is there is a group of extraordinarily talented, ethnically chinese academics, most of whom are based either in taiwan or hong kong some based in the united states for england done a lot of work on this. some of them have gotten jobs in these factories and so there's a fair amount of information, even though it's very difficult for foreign researchers to get in. every once in a while even apple itself talks about it. kim cook who is the current head of apple is a guy who developed this system. apple used to make computers for

a while it was tim cook is said forget it, we don't want to make things. he built the system and he is occasionally talk about it over the years. >> thank you for this interesting conversation. you said that you are sort of theory on why american factories became smaller what other factors in other parts of will became larger because it was more acute. how do you apply that to the rise of the technology giants, the technology companies are massive in the u.s., right? now we talk about the repatriation of cash but is not really cash, it's held by a few companies, it's all corporate bonds so how do you apply some of these, your research to the -- >> that's a very great question. i haven't studied that as much

but i was a couple things about it. the earliest example of a massive workforce would be walmart. walmart develops and a part of the country which effectively the new deal never happened. when you are talking about rural missouri, world arkansas, the labor conditions, the legal circumstances almost were a kind of throwback to the 1920s. it's almost as if they picked up from the pre-unionization time. by the time you get to places like amazon recently with these warehouses which are abysmal working conditions, the american labor is so much weaker than it was let's say in 1950 when general electric began building factories all over the country. i don't think this is in the forefront of the thinkers thinking of this as executives today. it's not something their particularly word about, where

as acutely at the forefront of the minds of people thinking where will i build my next plant? i would say the 1970s but since this whole seachange in the american political economy, starting in 1980s, the circumstances are different so we have kind of moved back almost to an earlier context of these decisions. >> isi statistic today that when apple introduced the iphone, i think nokia was built at $110 billion market capitalization and apple was worth maybe a hundred. now -- apple is worth 100 billion and the other is 47 going. the value of your ideas and marketing to come up with a really smart market-leading idea and know how to produce overseas cheaply with foxconn, great things happen for shareholders. >> may be this question is too

broad, but it's one of definition. you call it a factory and you take it back to 1731, but a lot of which are talking about tonight in many ways could be generalized any collective human effort. if you go back to any great building projects, cathedrals, pyramids, trade guilds, ship building before the 18th century, even fruit pickers in the depression, a lot of the same themes come out. so how did you arrive at this sort of the unit of analysis you have used? >> your point is very well taken. there clearly or large assemblages of working people to build the pyramids, to build aqueducts, often associate with war. your point is very well taken but, ship building is a good

example because that is making things with lots of people but most manufacturing is the kinds of things we not associate with factories, close or building material or metallic goods were done by very small groups of people who, until the 18th century anyway. i was sort of think of that group and this is a kind of quantum leap in that kind of activity. not unprecedented but different. so will only examples were important, civil engineering to large extent comes out of the military and lot of the practices that made possible, like, for example, for interchangeable parts come out of the military come out of the armory. the used it on guns because militant wanted to present. there are interconnections and even in the language of labor you see that, the language of the pickets, the strikes, that sort of thing.

the common notion of particularly the consumer goods and how that's made, i guess that's what i was trying to focus on when i was launching on this project. i guess i was thinking about foxconn and i thought what is the historical precedents? if foxconn is the biggest most advanced template of the future of today, what with the previous versions of it and that is essentially what the book is, i case study of what was that foxconn of the 1820s and so forth? >> so the book opens up with like the history of the very first factory building in the world where there's -- where they are spinning silk thread that you are right, ship building was going on with the greeks and romans and you could argue whether shipbuilding facility was a factory but the book starts out with here's a factory, first factory in the world and for some thinking, i'm going to read a book about this

factor in that effectively becomes a history of factories and ash josh said especially think that consumers want, which is somewhat different from shipbuilding and making canons because that's much more for government or the very, very wealthy. >> thank you very much. i was really intrigued by your comparison between u.s. and western germany, i am from germany so i know the system there, and in general i would very much agree with your assessment that it's related to the specific way the conflict laid up in the u.s. pirg if you think about the history of the union movement in germany in comparison to the u.s., something seems to have reported that someone time because the union movement in germany was certainly also the victim of repression by authoritarian

government, of different stripes from bismarck so on. so is very contentious class conflict up until the 1950s but then it entered this phase. in the u.s. that some of seems to me simplify greatly elevate the reverse because u.s. started out as the city upon a hill, democracy, freedom of association and at some point it seems it shifted in different equilibrium because now when they come from germany and look at the debates about labor relations in the united states i am actually pretty shocked about how all the legal obstacles that unions sometimes faced to organize. somehow the think of reverse and i would be interested in hearing your opinion about union organization, what happened there? >> i'm not an expert on germany so my comments would be pretty -- i think, you know, german

industry has a somewhat different model with a midsize from was much more important in germany. after world war ii when they finally got the mass production model, some extent it's still doing the occupation. americans help set up, , kind of ironic and insist on that leads to a kind of social democratic model that extends into the firm itself. and, therefore, makes managers more confident. i ran across this great thing like the bsf, the chemical company, where their main production facility still has like 3000 people. no chemical company in the united states as 30,000 people. they said we understand there could be a strike, there could be a flood that they saw a lot of fans and the don't worry as much. in the united states a lot of research by historians the last 20 years have sort of reversed i think for you to think about the new deal which was that it was

utterly triumphant. i think what a lot of the new literature has argued is that the business class was never really reconciled from the new deal. they were practical and pragmatic and understood what they could and couldn't do. they worked ideologically, but other ways like moving people out of these fortresses of workers strength, the detroit's or people like schenectady where ge was, or cleveland. to the weekend. but finally the moment comes in the '70s and '80s, they are quick to seize it. it's not like the auto industry the unionized itself. i think there is a business culture in the united states which is deeply hostile on both practical and ideological, spiritual ground, anything that

interferes with the freedom of management, the right to manage, edit think that may be stronger here in europe. exactly why i'm not sure. >> thank you. i want to ask a question, see if i can put a concisely on value creation and that, like what values created intrinsically in the factory as a unit, and then what value is created by, let's say, taxpayer-funded research and then infrastructure without it, like florida, for example, we can be able to have his cars used. is there a way to track the

historical shift in the value created from economic unit called the factory, and then what are the interdependencies of that with infrastructure and government and also information technology, i would be interested if there's a way to make a parallel. >> there's a lot there and i'm not sure, i know i can't do all of it. let me just get a couple angles briefly. there's a lot of debates at the time and now like what i factories efficient? why was this model adopted? it seem self-evident but the more you look at it the more complicate it gets. there's a lot of discussion about and some people argue the original argument or sort of now almost rejected, technologically determined. someone invents the machine and they get a factory to house it. most people don't think that

anymore. the are lots of things about the internalization of transactions, expenses greatly reduced both financial and transportation expenses by integrating things in one space. labor control is much greater. there's also much less staff. there are all kinds of theories put before them in the 1800 and now about why it might be more efficient. i think your question is, races and important point is there is no self-sufficient entity. the factory can't exist without a structure. beginning the factories themselves had to build it. the simplest things, how to get the con to these obscure places by waterfalls? in england they had to put them on pack courses and carried them over the moors. until the factory owners build the road at a couple years ago i drove on to go visit these factories. they build it themselves. there's a good book from a

former colleague of stephen just cannot in info about manufactug in the united states and he says look, it's always subsidized to get subsidized by state or other enterprises. he's making the argument that there should be social input in decisions because these things are not these self-contained private owned things. they can't exist that way. i think that's true. do do the quantification, the self-contained which comes from that is beyond my capacity although i suspect some economists have tried to do it. >> how important do you think it is that we have manufacturing in this country at -- as opposed to doing, contracting it out

overseas? >> well, i guess it's one of the few things i share with my president. i think it's a good idea to have manufacturing in this country. that 8% of the workforce networks in manufacturing down from 24% not that many decades ago. there are multiple reasons why. some of it is these are good jobs. what makes them good could apply to other kinds of jobs but right now manufacturing jobs to be better paid and benefits. i think you could also argue that many people have that have greater multiplier effect enemy of the kinds of jobs and the treat ancillary jobs of all kinds, which i think is important as well. by the way, of course people make national sturdy arguments as well which are not sure what i think about that some people argue if you have a hollowed out economy, ultimately your

military and political power have to be reduced, and that's traditional thinking. i think those are all reasons why we might want to have manufacturing here. even some companies like ge who disaggregated, have designed ann marketing here are increasing now arguing that design benefits from proximity to the production process and that one of the reasons why american products got crummy because they resigned -- they were made, they gather feedback from people who made them. i think there are a lot of arguments that have been put forth, even kind of almost like, articles about spiritual well-being almost of the nation, that is somewhat sort of creepy about ugly did anybody exploitation of other people far away so you don't see it. we are exporting the questions.

we are exporting the questions we need to confront, what's the price willing to pay for the way of life we live. if you don't have to see that price being paid, you don't have to think about the question and that's a disaster for the united states. we are on an utterly self sustainable ecologically, financially path. it's going to crash and burn. we are oblivious to what's involved in sustaining our way of life. if something happens there, we don't know anything about it. people work very hard to keep that image after i was so amazed, it's hard to find images of inside the foxconn doctors. there's a zillion images of river rouge but not any inside of foxconn factors. >> another quick interjection. the steelworkers say if we let china physic all-american steel mills out of business and their heading that way, at some point

time china says you going to stop exporting still to you in the united states, that could lead come hypothetically complete our military and industry in a very vulnerable position. maybe we can get steel from brazil or romania but it could create real vulnerabilities. one last question. >> i want to raise two things and see how you want to put them together. one of the things that i think is the most neat about the book is when you take fordism and you transfer it soviet russian and soviet poland and their interest in fordism as production but it's a different social model and a different social ideology over there. they may be connect that to, stephen as about what you would fix but you didn't say anything about workplace control. along the lines of germany, i wonder if workplace control in the boardroom is good enough or do you need workplace control in

the shop floor? >> well, i think the chapter, i'm glad you brought it up, that i had the most fun writing about was a child but the soviet union because it was a story i did know very well. i think very few americans know it. in the great crash and socialization of the late 20s and early 30s, american companies were very, very heavily involved in designing factories and staffing them and giving the whole industrial system set up. you transported basically an american-style actresses into a totally different social system what was remarkable to me was how robust that system was, how impervious that system was to change. although it was changed somewhat. so the question you raise, the second question is greatly debated at the time in the soviet union. one position, the winning position was, what matters is

who gets the product. if it goes to the state which is all the people, that's what makes it different than capitalism. there's this other group assess no, these are inherently oppressive systems. socialism shouldn't be here. we should have different organization of work in terms of the actual technology and issue you raise, who controls and what should be the role of workers on the shop floor. that position was mostly defeated. although there were unions in the soviet union, workers probably come in stalinist russia it was less danger for a worker to criticize and in the river rouge. when people get executed in the soviet union, it's the managers not the workers working executed. unjustly but there are various reasons not the worker. they do make some gestures in that direction but not fundamentally. they became the notion of a hierarchical organization of work and say but we'll put this

marvelous machine, social machine to work for benefiting the whole society. the only place we got a little bit of experimentation doing it differently was in china of those experiments which were fascinating were also disasters for lots of reasons. i don't know if we'll ever see a moment again where people race is question of such profound way but that was one of the really devastating parts about looking at the factory system under common regimes -- communist regimes. >> if you tell is kind of from foxconn looking backwards and the striking thing is, so

manufacturing, in this story,, manufacturing doesn't change that much. changes location and changes location ascension on disempowered workers. so the connection between manufacturing and authoritarianism actually becomes a greater. the factory is not a democracy. in the modern world manufacturing is more and more an authoritarian practice. i mean, from the kind of global perspective. this is where the kind of germany example is interesting and possibly says more about the future. because it we were ever successful and kind of raising the standards from the bottom up, setting some kind of global

standard, global floor, not just on wages but on rights and so on, then the implications, like the recent manufacturing doesn't change is it doesn't have to. we essentially have a global low road manufacturing system. it doesn't mean technological change doesn't occur, it does. but it occurs much less than it would if you were pressured by rising wages, you know, which you kind of see in germany, powerful unions, 28 hour work week, something like that based on a recent contract. the history of manufacturing is not necessarily the future of manufacturing, if we were ever so successful in raising the standards globally. >> very well put. i mean, my conclusion, one of the things i argue is this model

has been with us for a few hundred years but it is not sustainable for long time in any one place. almost none of places i write about still exists or at least on the scale they were. natural history, the defendant using old-fashioned phrase, accumulation, they take people basically outset the workforce whether it's peasant children or orphans, and they could exploit them and provide them with new technology. but then thought to things begin to happen. unions come along, wages go up, you have huge fixed costs in what was once innovative technology and some else is developing a new thing. 100 when hundred years later te fact is gone. what is sustainable is he going to redo this over and over again in a different place. that's what is sustainable. so maybe germany is the exception that proves the rule in 50 years but so far --

>> right out of places to run to. >> exactly. i've been thinking like will run out of new things to exploit and i keep being wrong. >> on that optimistic note, thank you. [applause] .. [inaudible conversations]