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Are car assembly plants which have adopted 'lean production' trading with 'lean' parts
suppliers? Or are they using suppliers as buffers and as sources of low cost labour? This
paper examines these questions empirically by using official statistics in the UK, US, Germany
and Japan. In the UK, there is evidence of parallel reduction in inventories at suppliers and
assemblers in the 1980s, but also of growing productivity and wage gaps between the two
groups. It is argued that management, unions and policy-makers should all be concerned about
this emergent dualism in the UK automotive industry, and that attention should be paid to the
mechanisms for diffusing innovative practices from assemblers to suppliers. |
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