U.S. Workplace Applies New Lessons in Democracy
Francis Ford Coppola’s new film, “Tucker--The Man and His Dream,” makes epic drama out of one person’s failed attempt to buck the big-three auto companies and build “the car of tomorrow--today!”
Back in 1948, Preston Tucker had new ideas that are standard features now, from fuel injection to disc brakes. The not-so-hidden message of Coppola’s auto-biography is that if business had listened to innovators like Tucker 40 years ago, today’s America wouldn’t be flooded with imports, while laid-off auto and steel workers line up for jobs flipping hamburgers.
But Tucker wasn’t the only visionary who tried to steer the auto industry away from impending disaster. In 1949, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther foresaw a market for small cars and urged U.S. companies to produce them. Ignoring this wise advice, American auto makers surrendered the low-price, small-car sector to imports from Europe and later Asia, contributing to the decline of the auto industry and related industries like steel and rubber.
Forty years later, big business probably still wouldn’t listen to mavericks like Tucker. But there are hopeful signs that Reuther might finally command respectful attention. While they haven’t become “born-again” believers in industrial democracy, some corporations are sufficiently frightened by foreign competition to allow workers and their unions a voice in decision-making from the board room to the factory floor.
The most ambitious experiments are in the auto industry, where the UAW is gaining the voice in decision-making that Reuther demanded decades ago. Following Chrysler’s brush with bankruptcy, two successive UAW presidents have taken seats on its board. At Ford, the most successful new model of the 1980s--the Taurus/Sable nameplate for Ford/Mercury--was designed in a team process involving assembly-line workers as well as engineers.
The most far-reaching experiment is General Motors’ Saturn Project to build a small car to compete with Japanese and Korean models. GM worked closely with the UAW in assembling a team of 99 people, including managers, engineers and assembly-line workers, to design a new plant from scratch and devise a new way to make cars. After two years, they agreed on a system involving teams of six to 15 workers who will decide among themselves on such issues as job assignments, schedules, inspection, maintenance, absenteeism and health and safety. The UAW also has an equal voice in decisions, from determining where the parts will be manufactured to setting the eventual price of the product and even selecting the advertising agency.
Meanwhile, other companies and government agencies are exploring ways of letting workers manage themselves. This summer I visited several experiments in shared decision-making, meeting with management and union officials and rank-and-file workers. I found, not surprisingly, that labor-management conflict hasn’t disappeared, but I also found pointers for how business and government can run better. Significantly, these experiments were at unionized workplaces where workers already have a collective voice and the confidence to speak out without fear of reprisals.
At a huge repair shop near New York’s LaGuardia Airport, workers fix the largest non-military fleet of vehicles in the world: more than 6,000 garbage trucks, sweepers, salt spreaders and other equipment for the city’s Sanitation Department. Historically a trouble spot, the department’s Bureau of Motor Equipment has been turned around by an imaginative deputy commissioner, Ronald Contino, who relies heavily on the advice of a “labor team” representing each major craft. Workers decide what supplies and equipment to order, design robots that perform repetitive tasks like painting and even design and build their own vehicles to set standards for outside vendors.
Once running at a multimillion-dollar loss, workers’ jobs threatened by plans to contract out work to private companies, the bureau now “contracts in,” performing repair work for other city agencies. Workers now find their jobs challenging and their good work appreciated; a welder at the repair shop said that, after several decades on the job, he’s finally finding it so interesting he won’t retire.
There are other kinds of veterans at the LS Electrogalvanizing Co. in Cleveland--workers who were laid off from traditional steel mills run by troubled steel companies and who are eager to try new ways of working. A joint venture of LTV Steel and Japan’s Sumitomo Metal Industries, this minimill makes corrosion-resistant steel by electronically plating it with zinc. Under an agreement with the United Steel Workers, the plant is an experiment not only with new technologies but with new ways of organizing work processes; unlike the traditional steel mill where foremen bark orders at workers, this mill has work teams that make most decisions themselves. After two years of operation, its steel is in high demand from U.S. automakers.
Self-management also provides the competitive edge for Ford’s Sharonville, Ohio, plant that makes transmissions for cars and trucks. Suffering massive layoffs and in danger of closing, the plant was turned around with an employee-involvement plan run jointly by Ford and the UAW, with workers and managers meeting in unstructured settings to thrash out job-related problems. It was recently selected by Ford to build a state-of-the-art transmission, the E-40D, with self-managing work teams trained in the new technology. During my visit, some workers complained that management still isn’t letting them make decisions, but most agreed self-management is a good idea. “We know our jobs, we know what has to be done and we just do it,” said a worker in the valve body room where self-management apparently is a reality.
American culture idolizes the entrepreneur, downplaying the contributions of those who actually produce goods and services. But it’s the individual worker--not Tucker, John DeLorean or even Lee A. Iacocca--who ultimately has the best understanding of how to do a job better. For a nation striving to revive its industries, the role-model may not be Tucker, the charismatic super-salesman, but Reuther, the cost-conscious, quality-minded former tool- and die-maker who also had a better idea for the auto companies.
