GM Workers Proud of Making the Team

Rick Madrid is a burly, cheerful auto worker in Fremont, Calif., who whips out his business card whenever he sees a Chevrolet Nova during his visits to nearby San Francisco and other Bay Area cities.

Madrid, 56, might attract some puzzled looks from passers-by who see him walking along city streets, stopping when he spots a Nova, writing a few words on the back of his business card, and then sticking it behind the car’s windshield wiper.

But Madrid is, intriguingly, more than a curiosity: he may well be a symbol of a renaissance in the American auto industry, largely because of where he is employed.

As Madrid’s personalized cards say, he works in the “Quality Control Stamping Plant” at the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or NUMMI.

A joint venture of General Motors and Toyota under Toyota management, NUMMI has introduced one of the most advanced “team systems,” a so-called Japanese-style technique for getting greater worker participation in directing manufacturing operations.

Madrid’s approval of the participatory concept is reflected on the back of his cards, where he scrawls: “I helped build this!”

Madrid says he drops his cards because he just likes to boast about what he says are the “real top-quality cars”--the Novas and Toyota Corolla FX 16s--that he and about 2,200 co-workers build.

Besides, he likes to pass around his business card because “it shows even grunts like me finally have some standing around here.”

His is the kind of pride Japanese auto workers are are said to take in the products they make, the pride that helped them win a reputation for both good workmanship and high productivity.

For trend spotters, Madrid may be more important than the impressively titled higher-ups who turned out in such large numbers in 1985 for the NUMMI plant dedication ceremonies.

The presence of government officials from Washington and Tokyo, top officers of GM and Toyota and the United Auto Workers showed they thought something significant was starting. Madrid sticking his business cards on Novas shows something significant has happened.

Conversations with other workers during a tour of the exceptionally clean plant refuted the increasing number of reports in recent months that the Japanese style of management is a dud when used with independent-minded Americans.

The Fremont workers also helped refute increasing complaints by some workers at GM’s plant in Van Nuys and other locations that the team system of production exploits workers by pretending to share authority with them while really making them work harder than ever so the companies can vastly increase profits.

Productivity at Fremont is at or near the top among all U.S. car makers, so labor costs are at or near the bottom. Workers there turn out about 800 cars a day with one-third fewer workers than they did under the old GM management that closed the plant in March, 1982; labor costs are an estimated $1,000 less per car than comparable models in other plants.

The workers are not getting their fair share of the profits resulting from the high productivity--at least not yet. They average about $14 an hour, $1 more than the average at GM, but that certainly doesn’t reflect their higher productivity.

Despite that inequity, workers do not feel they were being “exploited” and did not want to return to the old, dictatorial style of management used during the 20 years GM ran the plant.

There is real, though limited, power-sharing with management. Some complain that the pace of work is too fast, but nevertheless make it clear that Fremont now is a far better place to work than it was under the old management.

The NUMMI experiment shows that the team concept, not the age of the work force, is the critical factor in improving labor relations. It has been argued that a workers’ rebellion that began at GM’s Lordstown, Ohio, plant in the 1970s ended because the once-young, radical work force matured.

Fremont workers, too, were militant radicals, although they were not young ones when NUMMI began operating full-time in December, 1985. At both plants, though, the team system was primarily responsible for the improvements for workers and management.

Madrid is more imaginative than most Fremont workers in the way he boasts about his job and in the satisfaction he gets as a member of a team that determines how to do its work itself. But his basic attitude seemes to represent the majority.

As co-worker Jo Jo White enthuses: “I really hated to come to work when it was operated by the old GM management. Now we aren’t pushed around by bosses who don’t give a damn about you.

“When the old managers were here, industrial engineers used to tell us everything we had to do. Now we decide.

Janet West, a team leader, says that under the old management, “we could be fired if we pulled the cord” to, for instance, stop the assembly line to fix a part.

“Now we all want quality, not just production records, and those cords are pulled many times a day. Bad cars just don’t go through,” she says.

Perhaps the most telling comment about the workers’ attitude toward the Fremont team system came from Robert Silva, head of the People’s Caucus of UAW Local 2244 and the rival to incumbent Administration Caucus President George Sano for leadership of the local.

While some newspaper and magazine stories tell of rising resentment against the team system at Fremont, opposition leader Silva worries instead that the “old GM style of management could come back.”

“I could like this system if it were done right,” he says, adding that he wants to replace Sano as the leader of the local to help run the system more efficiently, not dump it.

If logic prevails, the cooperative team system will spread to all manufacturing industries, although some GM executives and officials at other firms are pushing it too fast, failing to understand that they cannot order a more democratic system of work. Democratization must come by consensus, not command.

But it is working at Fremont, as shown not only by increased productivity, but also by the improvement in wages and workers’ attitudes toward their jobs. The absentee rate is less than 1%, compared to up to 20% when GM managers ran the show in an authoritarian style; workers’ grievances, which once numbered in the thousands, are now down to a few dozen, and alcohol and drug abuse have dropped dramatically.

The worker participation system is spreading, and will continue to be improved. In two years, GM will move the system another giant step forward when it opens its Saturn plant in Tennessee.

At Saturn, almost every decision, major and minor, about how to run the plant will be made jointly by management and workers, either directly or through their union.

One can rightly say, “Way to go!”

What’s Real Motive?

Corruption in the Teamsters Union was distressing in the mid-1950s. It is just as distressing today, as the Teamster-backed Reagan Administration plans an unprecedented lawsuit to take over the union on grounds that it’s mob-infested.

In 1957, after many exposes of mob activity in the scandal-ridden union, the AFL-CIO conducted its own investigation. The federation kicked the Teamsters out of “the House of Labor” because some of its officers were found to be corrupt and the honest ones didn’t repudiate them.

No one doubted that the labor federation’s motive was to clean house, not break a strong union, even though the action was disturbing because Teamster officers had no formal legal due process protection during the federation hearings.

However, one can certainly doubt the motive of the Reagan Administration. Even though Ronald Reagan was twice endorsed for President by the Teamsters, he makes no secret that he is a management man, not a friend of most unions, which generally have fought hard to keep him out of the White House.

The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization endorsed him, but he didn’t hesitate to fire all of its members and break that union when it called a strike in 1981.

Are the President, the Justice Department or even the courts going to seek strong, pro-worker, pro-union trustees to administer the Teamsters if the government does take over the union? Don’t bet on it.

Most Teamster locals are run honestly and often win good wages and conditions for their members. Getting crooks out of the Teamsters, like eliminating them from corporations, including Wall Street firms, is urgently needed. But it is dangerous for the government to take over an entire corporation, or a union, to clean it up.