GM ‘Team Concept’ Car Making Shifts Into High Gear

A controversial plan that could change the way cars are made in the United States will go into high gear next week when a massive education program opens for more than 2,500 first-shift workers at General Motors’ plant in Van Nuys.

They will go en masse to Woodland Hills Junior High School on April 30 to learn new ways of doing their jobs. Then, on May 11, they will be followed by 2,000 second-shift workers who have been on indefinite layoff but will be recalled so that they, too, can learn how to use an Americanized version of the Japanese “team concept” of making cars.

If, in practice, the system comes reasonably close to the high expectations that most officers of both the United Auto Workers and GM have for it, the company and union will almost surely join forces to introduce similar systems throughout the giant corporation.

That major, corporate-wide transformation could take months if not years to implement, but if it succeeds, it will probably spread to the other U.S. auto makers.

GM and other U.S. manufacturers already use some of the methods planned for Van Nuys: “workers’ circles,” which increase workers’ responsibilities on the job; fewer special privileges for management, such as private dining rooms and convenient parking.

And there are some systems already operating in other plants that are working well and indicate that the Van Nuys experiment will, too. But there are no exact precedents, so success is not assured.

The Van Nuys system is most closely modeled on the one now used in Fremont, Calif., by the GM-Toyota joint venture called New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., which produces Novas.

But Japanese executives manage the Fremont plant, and about half of the parts used to assemble cars there are imported from Japan.

In contrast, practically every piece of the cars assembled in Van Nuys are American-made, and the managers are Americans, too.

Also, while all the Van Nuys workers are going to Woodland Hills for their training, selected groups of the Fremont workers were sent to Japan to learn the “team concept.”

But in many ways, the system at Fremont and Van Nuys are comparable, according to Bruce Lee, the regional director of the UAW who helped plan operations at both plants.

Nearly 100 different job categories are reduced to three or four, which means that workers can move more easily from one task to another. Teams of six to 10 workers and a team leader decide themselves how best to distribute the work equitably, how to design their jobs most effectively and how to check the quality of most of their own work.

Workers and their union leaders and management representatives at Fremont say that after nearly two years in operation, the system there is thriving.

Worker grievances against alleged abuse by mangement are relatively rare; absenteeism is down to less than 3%, compared to about 15% and more before the new system began; productivity is higher than ever, and workers’ wages are $1 an hour or more above the GM national average.

It will cost a minimum of $40 million to get the Van Nuys system operating, because the plant is closed for the worker training program. (About $20 million of that comes from a California job retraining fund.) Production will be slow for months as the workers learn the new system, and they will all be paid during the entire period.

Since last October, experienced workers from Fremont joined with a staff of experts from UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations to teach more than 100 workers and supervisors, who will, in turn, train all the other workers.

While it will take several months to see if the program really lives up to expectations, the workers’ evaluation of it will get a secret ballot test in early June.

If they are opposed to the new system, they can vote for Peter Z. Beltran, president of UAW Local 645, who is running for the job of shop chairman.

Beltran thinks the new system will be a disaster both for the workers and their union. Last week, he and some allies filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board to block its implementation. They allege that the worker teams will be used by GM to diminish the right of the union to represent its members, in violation of the terms of the GM-UAW nationwide contract.

In the long run, the dissidents charge, the new system will mean that employees will be forced to work harder and will be more vulnerable than ever to job losses, even as the union’s ability to protect them is diminished. Beltran can build support not only on the natural doubts that workers may have to any new system, but also on their deep distrust of the company.

GM has laid off more than 100,000 workers since 1980, and the damage that those job losses inflicted on workers has been exacerbated both by the recent announcement of even more planned layoffs and the creation of 2,100 more jobs in Mexico.

Hefty salaries and bonuses for executives--averaging more than $200,000 each in 1986--adds to the resentment of workers, who got nothing from GM’s profit sharing plan.

(In contrast, a profit sharing plan at Ford reaped an average of $2,100 per worker last year.)

But the new system is logical. It gives workers a chance to do more than just say “yes,” or at times “no,” when some boss gives an order. They are supposed to be treated as adults. The new system also gives them a chance to make more money as productivity and car quality improve. And, with the help of union supporters like Beltran, the UAW could increase its effectiveness as the representative of the workers.

While the new system will not have time to fully prove its worth in a few months of operation at Van Nuys, some early signs of success could have a much more immediate effect: It could become a significant, positive factor in this summer’s contract negotiations.

The Van Nuys experiment could affect the talks because if it does appear to increase productivity, GM will presumably be less hard-nosed at the bargaining table. The company will need the cooperation of the workers and their union to spread the Van Nuys system. Also, GM should be less tempted to move more operations to Mexico or other low-wage countries.

Also, meaningful early signs of success at Van Nuys could ease some of the workers’ antagonism toward GM as they go into negotiations--if, indeed, the company at last stops its seemingly casual use of layoffs, foreign production sources and non-union domestic sources of parts as ways of cutting costs.

The negative mood of some company executives and many auto workers as they go into negotiations may not be eliminated by a success at Van Nuys. But the atmosphere at the bargaining table will be improved tremendously if representatives of labor and management have a chance to praise one another for their cooperation in creating the new system at Van Nuys.

A Raise by Any Other Name

Anyone who has ever tried to get through to a company executive, even a low-level one, knows that a secretary is usually the first and often the most formidable barrier.

The best of those office gatekeepers always have had a variety of talents: diplomacy, ability to use a typewriter, take shorthand, etc.

Now, the steno pads and typewriters are going, replaced by word processors and other, ever more complicated, electronic office equipment.

The result: There is a shortage of these multitalented secretaries (almost all of whom are still women) because many of the best are moving into managerial jobs themselves. And not enough other potential secretaries see such jobs as a goal for a career.

One study estimated that the median salary of a secretary these days is about $16,000: Half make more, half less than that. Clearly, that hasn’t been enough to attract the competent people needed to fill the job openings.

The Professional Secretaries International, the world’s largest secretarial association, says there are critical shortages of secretaries in big cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Washington.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that between 1982 and 1995, the number of secretarial jobs will go up 29%, and the real puzzlement is why employers cannot seem to find the answer to the shortage.

It should be so obvious.

Celebrate National Professional Secretaries Day today by adopting the catchy slogan of the National Assn. of Working Women:

“Give a raise and a rose to your secretary today.”