No Longer Just for Managers : Companies Firm Up Worker Fitness Plans

Mike Halstead mopped his face with a towel as he walked away from an exhausting session that had nothing to do with making cars at the local Mazda Motor Corp. plant.

Halstead headed for the shower while other Mazda employees continued grunting through repetitions on weight machines, pedaled away on manual exercise bikes and worked on balance and agility on a simulated cross-country ski unit in one corner of the Flat Rock plant’s fitness center.

“Job One”--the first Mazda car made at Flat Rock--rolled off the assembly line in September. In November, the company opened the $1-million fitness center in a 90,000-square-foot section of one of the plant buildings.

Fitness programs, once the reserve of management, are moving from the front office to the plant floor at many companies, said Thomas Merry, Midwest region vice president for Fitness Systems. “That’s where we see the direction of this thing going.”

‘White-Collar Phenomenon’

“It’s been an administrative headquarters, white-collar kind of phenomenon,” said Merry, whose Los Angeles-based company designs, sets up and operates fitness programs. Now, he said, “We do see more plant sites getting involved.”

Reasons range from simple economics--an unhealthy worker costs more to keep on the job--to companies’ desire to be involved with employees as a way of keeping them involved in their work.

At Flat Rock, the matter was never in question, said Don R. Kricho, personnel safety and health director.

Japanese corporations routinely provide extras for improving the health and life style of their employees. Single workers may even live in company dormitories there.

“It was always pretty much taken for granted that we were going to do something in terms of a fitness center,” Kricho said. “In Japan, it’s something they do.”

A study conducted last year on the StayWell program Control Data Corp. of Minneapolis implemented for its employees linked higher health insurance claims with various risk factors, including lack of exercise, smoking, excess weight and high cholesterol.

For example, sedentary employees have 30% more hospital days than those who get adequate exercise and employees who smoke a pack or more of cigarettes a day have 18% higher medical claims costs than nonsmokers.

“There are some very solid, practical business reasons for wanting to do this,” Mazda’s Kricho said. “Fit, happy workers produce more. They are less likely to be absent, they are less likely to be injured.”

Before and after work at Flat Rock, as early as 5:30 a.m. and as late as 9 p.m., the sounds of weight machines, dribbling basketballs and squeaking sneakers, footfalls on the one-fifth mile track, volleys on the tennis courts, golf balls driven into a net, Ping-Pong games, and players’ shouts echo under the high plant ceiling.

“Some nights I call over here and it’s so loud you can’t even talk on the phone,” said Cynthia T. Nemon, plant medical services coordinator and fitness center director.

Domestic companies get the message. General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. plants offer a scattering of exercise rooms and aerobics classes. Chrysler Corp. is surveying some assembly plant workers to see if they want aerobics classes.

Kellogg Co. in Battle Creek, Mich., offers a “healthy life style” program for employees that includes newsletters and reimbursement for participation in fitness activities, said Dick Lovell, company communications manager.

Kellogg opened a fitness center at its corporate headquarters in 1986 and followed in January with a center at its Battle Creek cereal plant, where the exercise bikes, rowing machines, weight-lifting equipment, jogging track and aerobics room are in such demand among the 3,200 employees that hours have been extended to midnight, Lovell said.

At Flat Rock, Mazda’s center is part of an involvement with employees similar to that in its Japanese plants.

The number of Japanese employees at Flat Rock--600 of the plant’s 3,500--eventually will fall to about 100. But the company wants U.S. employees to be instilled with Japanese-style team spirit.

“We were not so much interested in building a recreation center for employees. It’s great if they want to use it for that. But we wanted to emphasize the team concept,” Kricho said. “We were interested in building a facility that would cater to team activity.”

Committees Run Activities

Team activity caught on immediately. Nemon said intensely involved employees formed committees for baseball, volleyball, weight training, running, martial arts, aerobics and golf.

“All the committees have established classes and leagues,” she said. “The employees themselves completely run those activities. They have 20 different teams in the basketball league.”

“I worked at Jeep before. They never had anything like this,” said Halstead, just out of training as an assembly worker at Mazda.

He compared the center favorably with outside programs, explaining that he and his wife had spent $400 at the Y, which didn’t have a place to run.

Kricho said he envisions annual physicals for employees, with prescriptions for good health habits.