IH was already failing, McArdell did what he could to right the ship. Reason for IH being only half as profitable as Deere or Cat was that the Union negotiated in 1950 that by default, the most senior employee who would apply for a vacant position would get it, and it resulted in those 11.000 mid and upper level managers in the wrong place, which he fired.
Now he had to renegotiate this with the Union to stop this from happening again, and he lost due to inexperience with union negotiations. Off course a man as bold as McArdell wasnt the right man to negotiate with...
In the end, the company was almost bankrupt, sold its Ag division to Tenneco/Case, which didnt negotiate with the union at all, but fired ALL workers of the Rock Island plant and shipped the 88 series tooling to their own factory in Racine.
Now tell me, what good did the Union do for the workers of IH by holding on to benefits from 1950, which already put the company in a disadvantaged position ? They all lost their job in the end because they attained to a scenario that has proven unrealistic by IHs continuous lack of profitability and therefor lack of product investment. McArdell funded the development of the STS transmission in the 5x88 series which IH desperately needed to keep up with Deere.
The '70s–'80s were a tumultuous time for International Harvester. Between the transitions in leadership, the 1979 labor strike (and the ensuing 5-month halt in
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Meanwhile IH had prototypes of the powershift ready which ended up in the Magnum. McArdell invested a lot in R&D to maintain its 2nd place behind Deere, and without that, the Magnum would still be an outdated Case with red paint, while now it was only a stop-gap to fill the time the IH Hinsdale engineering group finished the 5088 successor into what became the Magnum.
The key to creating the machine that would become the Magnum was proper assembly of the parts that the company already had in place. Harvester had a good engine
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Without McArdell there would be no IH in Case IH, as the Maxxum was a continuation of the David Brown Selectamatic powershift.
True. But society has changed quite a bit since the 1900s. Workers have cars, so they dont have to move to the suburb close to where their job is: In this day and age, people dont rent a house from their employer (like the local milk factory here in the 50s), so they are free to vote with their feet: they can walk away from employers that dont treat them right, without the fear of becoming homeless.
With the new balance of power created by the automobile giving people options to commute to different employers, the unions dont need the same power they had in the 1900s when people just walked to work. When unions have a say in the companies hiring policy, you end up in a situation that McArdell found IH in.
Corporate greed and power kills the middle class, union greed and power kills employment, in the case of IH.