The casting has already been taken away
from it and has gone to the River Rouge plant. So now we are on our way
back to where we started from--excepting that, instead of buying our
parts on the outside, we are beginning to make them in our own factories
on the outside.
This is a development which holds exceptional consequences, for it
means, as I shall enlarge in a later chapter, that highly standardized,
highly subdivided industry need no longer become concentrated in large
plants with all the inconveniences of transportation and housing that
hamper large plants. A thousand or five hundred men ought to be enough
in a single factory; then there would be no problem of transporting them
to work or away from work and there would be no slums or any of the
other unnatural ways of living incident to the overcrowding that must
take place if the workmen are to live within reasonable distances of a
very large plant.
Highland Park now has five hundred departments. Down at our Piquette
plant we had only eighteen departments, and formerly at Highland Park we
had only one hundred and fifty departments.
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