GM Managers Go On Line : To keep close to his workers, the Reatta plant chief takes a turn banging metal.
It’s 6 a.m. on a Monday morning, and Jim Rucker, with bag lunch in hand, is ready for the start of his first day on an automobile assembly line.
“Well, seeing as how you’re a new hire, I’ll take you to your job,” a gruff union committeeman tells Rucker.
But Jim Rucker is no ordinary production worker; he is the plant manager here at General Motors’ Buick Reatta assembly plant, the only auto factory in America where the top boss regularly takes his turn on the assembly line.
Rucker, a 44-year-old engineer who has just taken over as manager of this small plant, is continuing the tradition of his predecessor, Robert Thompson, who took it upon himself--without any goading from upper management--to work a shift on the line at least once a month.
“Probably more managers at GM should do this,” says Rucker, clad in a sweat-soaked blue T-shirt and blue jeans, as he takes a short break from his job in the plant’s body shop, hanging doors and welding metal panels on Buick’s new luxury two-seat models.
“If you don’t understand what’s going on out here on the floor, you can make the wrong decisions, and you also might develop a fear about not knowing what’s really going on. This way, you come to understand that the people on the line are regular guys just like you.”
Show of Interest
After some initial misgivings, most of the plant’s union officials and hourly workers now eagerly await the boss’ time on the shop floor.
While a few workers grumble that the plant manager’s time on the floor is little more than a publicity stunt, most say it shows that management really cares about them. By having the plant manager come down and get his hands dirty, workers say, management is showing a level of interest in their problems that Japanese-style “quality circles” and employee involvement programs never could.
“I love it, I love it,” said Dan Vanneste, a big, friendly bear of a man who has spent 18 years on the line, as he shared his job in the body shop with Rucker. “This way, they can understand your problems. Before, you know, they would walk by and say hello, how are you, and you knew they didn’t mean it. But now, when they talk about teamwork in the plant, this proves they mean it.”
Local union leaders like the arrangement because they get to choose where the boss works. Each time, they have tried to give Thompson and Rucker some of the toughest jobs in the plant--jobs that workers have been complaining about--so the manager can get firsthand experience with the most troublesome problems that Reatta workers face each day.
“You get much faster feedback on problems when he’s out there like that,” says Ross Sherman, president of United Auto Workers Local 1618, which represents the Reatta plant’s 630 hourly workers. “Now the people beg us to send him to them, so that they can get their problems fixed.”
But Rucker’s time on the floor is just one of the many innovative labor practices that the Reatta plant is now pioneering.
Today, it is the only auto plant in the nation that has done away with many aspects of the traditional assembly line.
Because Buick only planned to sell a few thousand Reattas each year, the plant has been designed to build only about six cars an hour, compared to 60 per hour in a typical auto factory. As a result, GM has been able to take a slow, “craft” approach to car production here; the body shop, where Rucker worked his shift, is one of the few areas of the plant that still runs on a traditional assembly line.
Much of the assembly work is instead conducted at 14 “craft centers” where teams of workers perform a wide variety of tasks.
When they are finished, workers signal a robotic cart carrying the car body to take it to the next craft station. So rather than handling just one or two highly repetitive--and monotonous--functions the way workers on a typical assembly line do, many Reatta workers get the sense that they are actually hand-building cars. In fact, this is the only plant in GM where the official job description for an assembly worker is that of “craftsman.”
GM officials credit the craft center approach with helping the Reatta plant gain some of the best quality grades of any GM assembly plant. Over the past year, in fact, the Reatta plant has been running neck and neck on quality with the GM-Toyota joint venture plant in Fremont for first place in GM’s internal quality audits of its plants.
The only problem--the Reatta hasn’t been selling as well as expected. Many inside GM blame a poor advertising and marketing effort by Buick for the fact that Reatta sales have been far below the company’s initial forecasts. Although Buick officials say they are now pleased with Reatta sales--which are expected to total between 7,000 and 8,000 in the 1989 model year--97 workers were laid off at the Reatta plant in January, when production was cut back from 56 cars per day to 42.
Slowing the Line
Still, GM seems committed to the Reatta and to the experimental approach being followed on the factory floor here.
So Rucker plans to come back each month for his shift on the floor. But his supervisors can only hope that he gets the hang of the intricate choreography of the assembly line a little quicker next time. After starting his shift at six in the morning, it took Rucker until about 9:30 a.m. before he could keep up.
But his co-workers didn’t mind waiting for him.
“Is he slowing up the line? Yeah,” says Charley Barnes, a body shop worker near Rucker’s station. “But hey, anybody on their first day on a new job takes a little extra time.”
