Social Dumping as Marketization: Management Whipsawing in Europe’s Auto Industry

Abstract

[Excerpt] The focus of this paper is one slow-burning change in the organization of capitalism in Europe, marketization (Greer and Doellgast 2013, Hauptmeier 2011). We argue that a specific species of marketization, management whipsawing, is causing social dumping in the automotive sector. By management whipsawing we mean the staging of economic competition by large corporations with several production units in a way that extracts labor concessions by pitting local workers against each other in contests for investment and production. Multinational companies (MNC) were the first movers and developed various management whipsawing practices; however, the term was also used historically to describe union whipsawing at large national corporations with several production units (Ross 1948). Management whipsawing presupposes the ability to move production from one location to another, due to (for example) the standardization of production techniques, production of similar products in parallel at different locations, and unutilized production capacity.