SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : CHALLENGES OF THE WORKING LIFE : COMMITMENT : A QUESTION OF QUALITY : To Persuade Workers to Make Better Products, Employers Find They Must Move Beyond Slogans to Defy Skepticism

When a major new customer asked the Bay Area metal-parts firm to rush a shipment, the customer used an age-old lure: “They said they would pay us anything within reason,” recalled Thomas H. Melohn, chief executive officer of American Tool & Die in San Leandro.

But if the inducement was an ancient one, the response Melohn gave the Los Angeles disk drive manufacturer was rather novel for American industry: He said no.

“They pressed me--but they were very understanding,” explained the manager. “I would have loved the billing, the revenues. But if we ‘ramped up’ any faster, we could get rejects.”

Melohn’s firm rejects the idea of making rejects, demonstrating what some believe is a growing attitude within American industry. In response to competition from overseas and new pressures at home, U.S. companies are striving for quality as never before. Speakers preach the gospel to rapt audiences. New books are devoted to the subject. Quality is invoked as a cure-all for competitive ills, a productivity fix, even a way to boost profits.

“It’s not a matter of growth,” Melohn explained of the need to spark higher levels of quality and service. “In my judgment, it’s a matter of survival.”

And it is not a matter to be taken lightly, according to management experts. Permanent quality gains often require an employer to shatter deeply ingrained attitudes within its work force. Proposed improvements may meet with skepticism or even outright resistance from the middle ranks, unless managers convince workers that priorities have changed.

For all the luster quality has as an ideal, the episode at American Tool & Die shows that in the real world, it can entail temporary sacrifices that many companies are not yet willing to make.

“It’s very, very easy to embrace the idea of quality,” notes David A. Garvin, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and author of a recent book on the subject. “It’s very difficult to carry it off over a sustained period.”

It may even be difficult to pull off at all. Consider the experience of General Motors, which in 1986 began a $300-million project to modernize a Chevrolet plant in Wilmington, Del. Painfully conscious of the gains achieved by its highly regarded Japanese rivals, GM instructed workers to stop the assembly line whenever they needed to fix a problem. GM even installed special switches for that purpose.

But middle managers at the auto plant, conditioned to believe, “You stop the line and we break your arm,” made no secret of their disapproval when workers exercised their new option, according to Garvin who visited the factory. “After 40 years of running a plant like that, people aren’t going to believe that management is serious,” he said.

It required months of determined efforts before senior managers were able to convince their lower-level counterparts that GM sincerely wanted its workers to halt the line when necessary. “The big problem is not so much at the top and not so much at the bottom, but in conveying the message to the middle ranks,” Garvin said.

Part of the problem is just figuring out what the message should be. Is quality something intangible that the consumer feels? Is it a scientific measurement of how closely a product measures up to factory specifications? Is it service rendered? Broadly speaking, it is all of those things.

According to Karl Albrecht, a San Diego-based management consultant, quality is gauged at critical “moments of truth,” such as when a potential car buyer first steps foot in a dealership or when a factory calls a supplier with a question. “If there’s a screw-up in any one of these moments of truth, the customer is dissatisfied,” he said.

Some managers say the way to ensure quality is in the hiring process--making sure that only people with high standards are brought into the organization in the first place. “We have found that good people don’t want to make scrap, rejects,” Melohn maintained. “They’re proud of their work.”

Others aim their comments higher up the ladder. The burden, they maintain, belongs not with much-maligned middle managers but rather with top executives who must convey their commitment to quality to the entire organization.

“I think middle managers are often dumped on,” said C. Jackson Grayson, who launched the American Productivity Center in Houston 12 years ago--and in July changed its name to the American Productivity & Quality Center. “One minute it’s ‘quality,’ and another minute it’s, ‘Get the product out the door.’ The signals come out of the executive offices.”

Even those executives intent on sending the right signals can stumble across various obstacles in their pursuit of quality.

A typical mistake managers make is placing faith in what Grayson calls the “big bang” theory--that permanent improvements can arise from a single, dramatic push rather than painstaking, long-term efforts. Another danger is placing the blame for workmanship lapses on vendors and suppliers, rather than working with them to nurture a team-like approach toward quality. In addition, he said, companies often fail to give adequate training to their top executives.

“Most of the firms today haven’t really made the depth of commitment that I’m talking about,” Grayson said.

Which raises the question: Is quality merely industry’s latest buzzword, a fad destined to flicker in the coming months? If so, you wouldn’t know it from what executives are saying these days.

Researchers at Boston University reported in July that a survey of 217 executives from large corporations showed a 19% annual gain in “conformance” quality--the gauge of how closely a product meets the company’s specifications. The researchers concluded that today’s push for quality has had a “significant impact” on American industry.

In 1987, a Gallup Poll of 615 executives, commissioned by the American Society for Quality Control, found that the number seeing the need for top management to be involved in quality enhancement efforts had tripled to 45% from the previous year.

A separate survey taken last year by the American Productivity & Quality Center suggests that managers now view quality as more important than price as the key to success. The poll of 314 institute members found that 83% rated quality as “very important” to their firm’s success--compared to just 48% who ranked price as very important. Even Congress has hopped on the quality bandwagon, creating a national quality prize that will be awarded for the first time this November at a White House ceremony.

“The push for quality is no mere fad,” declares Jeffrey Miller, director of the Manufacturing Roundtable Survey at Boston University. “But quality is still a competitive problem for all U.S. manufacturers.” And the stakes are getting higher. Management experts point out that international competition is not the only pressure on American firms to perform more effectively. To cite just two others: The advent of product recalls and product liability suits both provide powerful incentives for companies to make sure quality remains up to par.

Perhaps even more significantly, the trend by factories to slash inventories and procure needed parts on short notice in the Japanese style is sending a clear warning to suppliers: Make it properly and deliver it on time.

“We’re only three hours ahead of Apple in their production line,” said Melohn, whose firm sells parts that must be dumped if their dimensions are off by one-fourth the width of a human hair. “We’re 10 hours ahead of Hewlett-Packard. You cannot ship rejects or the line will go down.”