Firestone Tire and Rubber Company: Difference between revisions

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			==TV ad ]==
			:Wherever wheels are rolling
			:No matter what the load
			:The name that's known
			:Is ''Firestone''
			:Where the rubber meets the road
	==Notes==		==Notes==
	<references />		<references />

Revision as of 02:05, 11 November 2006

Bridgestone Firestone, LLC
File:BFlogo.gif
Company type	Subsidiary of Bridgestone
Industry	Manufacturing
Founded	1900 (Akron, Ohio)
Headquarters	Nashville, Tennessee
Key people	Mark A. Emkes, CEO
Products	Tires
Revenue	$2.09 billion USD (2004)
Number of employees	23,000
Website	www.firestone.com

The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company was founded by Harvey Firestone at the turn of the 20th century to supply pneumatic tires for wagons, buggies, and other forms of wheeled transportation common in the era. Firestone soon saw the huge potential for marketing tires for automobiles and befriended Henry Ford, the first industrialist to produce them using the techniques of mass production. Firestone used this relationship to become the original equipment supplier of Ford Motor Company automobiles, and was also active in the replacement market.

History

File:FirestoneTire.jpeg

A Firestone tire

Firestone was originally based in Akron, Ohio, also the hometown of its archrival, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The company initiated operations in 1900 with 12 employees. Together, Firestone and Goodyear were the largest suppliers of automotive tires in North America for over three-quarters of a century.

During the 1970s, the Firestone 500 steel-belted radials were known to separate from the tread, usually at high speeds, due to water seeping under the tread, which caused the belting to rust and the treading to separate. Joan Claybrook, who was the Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) during the Firestone scandal stated before the Transportation Subcommittee United States Senate Committee on Appropriations on September 6, 2000, that, "there was a documented coverup by Firestone of the 500 defect, spurred by the lack of a Firestone replacement tire."

In March 1978, NHTSA announced publicly a formal investigation into defects of the Firestone 500. Firestone refused to cooperate. Firestone first asserted that only 400,000 tires produced at the Decatur plant were defective. But the NHTSA investigation found that the tread separation defect was a design performance defect affecting all Firestone 500's. After forty-one deaths, and after Firestone initially blamed consumers (improper repairs, rough use, or under-inflation), on October 20, 1978, Firestone then recalled ten million tires.

In 1984 the Firestone family decided to look for a purchaser and began liquidating assets at that time. The company was purchased off the stock market by the Japanese tire manufacturer Bridgestone in 1988. The combined Bridgestone/Firestone North American operations are now based in Nashville, Tennessee.

After the merger, allegations of defective tire designs continued, especially in 2000, when an abnormally high failure rate in their Wilderness AT, Firestone ATX, and ATX II tires resulted in multiple lawsuits, as well as an eventual mandatory recall. Ford has since stopped equipping its pickup trucks, SUVs and full-sized vans with Firestone tires. However, passenger cars such as the Ford Focus and Mercury Cougar bore Firestone tires as original equipment. In 2006, Firestone announced renewed efforts to recall tires of the same model recalled in 2000 after such tires were linked to recent deaths and injuries. Although Firestone estimates 97% of the tires were replaced in the 2000 recall concern existed over spare tires that many owners did not think to replace during the 2000 recall.

For 35 years, the company sponsored the radio and television show The Voice of Firestone.

Liberia Controversy

In 1926, Firestone opened what it claims is the world's biggest rubber plantation in Liberia, West Africa. In 2005, "tappers" (workers who extract latex from rubber trees) on the Liberian plantation filed an Alien Tort Claims Act lawsuit against Bridgestone Firestone. The workers accuse the company of serious labor abuses, including exploitative child labor, which they claim amount to modern-day slavery. Workers specifically claim that Firestone's high daily quotas force them to employ their own children, subjecting them to grueling and dangerous work conditions. In response to the claims, the president of Firestone Natural Rubber told a CNN interviewer that "each tapper will tap about 650 trees a day, where they spend perhaps a couple of minutes at each tree." As the network pointed out, this would add up to more than 21 hours of work per day.

Firestone's request to transfer the case to Indianapolis, Indiana from California was granted in April 2006.

In May 2006, the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) released a report detailing the state of human rights on Liberia's rubber plantations. According to the report, Firestone managers in Liberia admitted that the company does not effectively monitor its own policy prohibiting child labor. UNMIL found that several factors contribute to the occurrence of child labor on Firestone plantations: pressure to meet company quotas, incentive to support the family financially, and lack of access to basic education. The report also noted that workers' housing provided by Firestone has not been renovated since the houses were constructed in the 1920s and 1930s.