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

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.

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.