The Automation Race

Looming up out of the verdant, time-resisting fields of rural France like a grotesque invader from outer space, the great factory hums mechanically about its business. Indifferent to the handful of humans who keep watch, a complex of electronic controls selects silica, alkali and lime from giant bins, mixes them together and feeds them into a white-hot furnace. From the furnace pours forth a river of glass 10 ft. wide, 1.7 in. thick and nearly half a mile long.

This eerie giant, the Chantereine plant of France's Saint-Gobain glassmakers, is the most modern glass factory in France--and among the most modern in the world. One of scores of heavily automated factories now operating in Europe and Asia, it throws doubt on a thesis popular with many Americans: that U.S. industry despite rising wages and costs, can keep its products competitive abroad by ever-increasing recourse to automation and mechanization.

Coal & Chocolate Bars. Though many U.S. businessmen know better than to assume inevitable superiority for U.S. technology, others are insufficiently aware of what industrialists in the rest of the world are up to. In Western Europe the pace of automation is steadily quickening, as industry within the expanding Common Market gains the same cost-saving benefits of big-volume sales long enjoyed by U.S. business. Already, in a few fields, the Europeans can point to factories and techniques equal or superior to any in the U.S. Items:

P: France's state-owned Renault plant outside Paris is one of the most completely automated auto factories in the world. In the past 13 years, Renault has increased its output 600% with only a 40% increase in its work force.

P: In the highly automated Kloeckner-Werke's wide strip mill in Bremen, 90 West German workers are turning out flat bar steel at the rate of more than 110,000 tons a month.

P: Thanks to mechanization and automation, Sweden's S.K.F. ball-bearing factory has tripled its prewar production with no increase in labor force.

P: French coal miners, whose output is now among the lowest in Western Europe, will soon be operating a cutter-loader machine that can chisel out 45 metric tons of coal per man-day in the shaft. The new cutter-loader and other advanced French mining machinery is being sold to customers in 49 countries, including Britain and the U.S.

Even in Japan, where manpower is so cheap that there is little incentive to economize on wages, automation is spreading. Tokyo's Kawasaki Steel Corp. is building an electronically controlled mill that will ultimately produce steel at prices competitive with U.S. mills--even though the Japanese must import almost all their coal and ore. Other Japanese companies turn out auto parts, cameras, transistors, television sets and chocolate bars on automated equipment. Manufacturing a two-cylinder motorcycle now costs Japan's booming Honda Motor Co. (TIME, Aug. 25) no more than it used to cost to make a one-cylinder machine before automation.

Productive Proof. Unlike U.S. businessmen, foreign industrialists generally do not see automation primarily as a means of beating labor costs. In Japan the incentives are to offset a lack of skills that makes quality control difficult or to compensate for the high cost of imported raw materials. European firms are often spurred on by labor shortages to find means of increasing production without additional manpower. Nonetheless, the net effect in both Europe and Asia is a labor saving that shows up in productivity gains that, in most cases, outstrip the U.S. rate of increase. While U.S. manufacturing productivity has risen 15% since 1953, West Germany can point to an increase of 53%, Japan 71% and France 54%.

Despite the quickening pace abroad, the U.S. is still solidly in front in both the development and widespread application of automation. (Against 12,000 computers in action in the U.S.. Britain has only 600.) Most foreign industrialists concede that the U.S. will probably stay ahead for years to come, but doubt that the U.S. lead will be big enough to offset the combination of foreign automation and lower foreign wages. As consolation, some foreign businessmen argue that high labor costs alone will not necessarily make U.S. exports noncompetitive. Says British Industrial Consultant L. Lamdon Goodman: "Price isn't everything. Quality, design, prestige and timing of new products are equally important."

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