a nylon cap to reduce the problem of tread separation in all of its tire models installed on SUVs. Labor and management problems Bridgestone purchased Firestone in 1988 to compete with other large multinational tire companies and took on a considerable amount of debt to complete the purchase and upgrade Firestone's manufacturing facilities. At that time Firestone was losing a considerable amount of money each year which put a drain on Bridgestone's profits. Bridgestone pressured Firestone to cut manufacturing and labor costs to improve revenues. Critics and workers claim that this led Firestone to cut corners on production and to allow substandard tires to pass inspection that should have been rejected. This also led Firestone to pressure workers to accept new labor contracts that reduced pay and benefits and increased the hours that its factories were operating. In a deposition retired Firestone workers testified that quality control problems at the Decatur factory could have led workers to manufacture defective tires. One worker stated that, despite getting a company discount, he'd stopped purchasing Firestone tires years before the crisis developed because of quality control problems. Others stated that they had to inspect as many as 100 tires per hour which they believed were far too many tires to do an adequate job; that they were told to sign off on tires that they did not actually inspect; that they rolled unvulcanized tire carcasses, also called a "green tire", across the factory floor which could allow debris from the floor to end up inside a completed tire; that they used an awl to puncture bubbles in tires; and that they were told to use a solvent similar to benzene on tire adhesives that had lost its tack from sitting too long in a humid factory. Organic solvents are commonly used in the tire industry as an ingredient in adhesives used to bond rubber components together. Industry observers, lawyers and workers claimed that too much of the solvent could damage the rubber in a tire and could lead to premature tire failures. Firestone claimed that these were disgruntled workers who quit after a bitter strike. "The comments of these former employees should be evaluated with a critical eye, given that they were carefully selected out of the thousands of current and former employees of the Decatur plant by plaintiffs' personal injury lawyers." Yoichiro Kaizaki, CEO and president of Bridgestone, stated that there were