As America's car manufacturers fight for their lives, cost is everything - even down to the price of a bottle of correction fluid or a pen.
Ford, General Motors and Chrysler are all losing billions, slashing jobs and shutting factories as they struggle to cope with a tightening in America's appetite for fuel-hungry sports utility vehicles and trucks.
At an engine factory near the Michigan town of Dundee, the management has fixed a price tag onto every single piece of equipment, giving a value down to a single cent.
Laminated labels inform workers that an overhead gantry cost the princely sum of $214,869.83 to install and is expected to last for 14 years. A cylinder block line is valued at $467,024.17.
On a more prosaic level, a cabinet containing supplies reveals that a pair of gloves costs $3.20 and a bottle of white correction fluid is 35 cents.
The factory supplies four-cylinder engines to popular American cars including the Jeep Compass and Dodge Avenger. It is part of the Global Engine Manufacturing Alliance - a joint venture between Chrysler, Japan's Mitsubishi and Korea's Hyundai.
Bruce Baumbach, the factory manager, says the labels concentrate minds and allow him to track expenses in tiny detail. He recently noticed a rise in the number of gloves his workers were getting through.
"We asked around to find out why and we learned that some staff weren't sure what fitted them so they were taking two sizes of gloves - a six and an eight. They use one and throw away the other," says Baumbach.
The factory is on the outskirts of a modest town of 3,000 people, located 60 miles west of America's car capital of Detroit. It is surrounded by miles of featureless, flat fields which howl with wind on a frozen January day.
Some of the workers in Dundee have been through painful corporate restructuring before - the plant recruited many engineers from Michigan-based Northwest Airlines, which shed more than 10,000 jobs when aviation slumped after the attacks of September 11.
Bruce Coventry, president of the Global Manufacturing Alliance, talks proudly of the way he has kept wage costs to a minimum. Staff work four shifts of 10 hours a week, rather than the traditional cycle of five shifts of eight hours.
Some 500 people work at the factory, which can turn out 840,000 engines a year. But only 300 of them are direct employees, while 200 of them are on the books of "contractors". That gets round union agreements and means they can be paid less - while directly employed skilled workers typically get $45 an hour, those working for third-party entities may only get $20.
Steve Engel, a 47-year-old worker on the assembly floor, told the Guardian that his brother-in-law, who works for Ford, had recently been told that the plant he was working at was to close.
"They're all on pins and needles," said Engel, who entered the motor industry after 22 years in the navy. "The industry is just so full of production cuts that more jobs are going to go. Everybody's worried."
General Motors lost $3bn (£1.55bn) in the first nine months of 2006, while Ford lost $7.24bn over the same period. Chrysler lost 1.16bn (£1.07bn) in the third quarter of the year, according to its German parent company, Daimler.
The cost of resources has crippled Detroit's "big three" automakers. Fuel has rocketed - as has the price of components such as aluminium.
America's steadily rising healthcare costs mean a bill of at least $1,000 to fund care for workers and pensioners in the cost of every car produced. Japanese importers have proven far more nimble in adapting to changing tastes towards smaller vehicles.
On the factory floor in Dundee, nobody is allowed to forget the Japanese threat. On two parallel tables, engineers have carefully dismantled, displayed and compared the components of a Chrysler and a Toyota engine.
Most of the parts look the same - but there are subtle differences. Bruce Coventry picks up two seemingly identical oil trays and gives them a tap. The Toyota one twangs metallically but the Chrysler one doesn't.
"Ours is coated with plastic to dampen the sound," he explains proudly. In a crisis, every little detail helps.
· Email business.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk
