COLUMN ONE : Bringing Teamwork to America : A system of increased employee participation is designed to improve productivity and quality. But it also creates a variety of human conflicts.
Wellford Wilms came back to the assembly line the other day, to the spot where he’d put thousands of right rear interior door handles on Toyota Corollas and Geo Prizms. The men and women on the line greeted him warmly with hugs and jokes. It would have made a great beer commercial.
Except that Wilms isn’t a retired auto worker. He’s a prematurely gray professor in UCLA’s Graduate School of Education who decided to learn about how a plant works by working there himself.
Wilms and a team of a half-dozen graduate students, who combined spent 600 hours working on various parts of the New United Motors Manufacturing Inc.’s assembly line, are engaged in a novel study of how industries shift to the much-vaunted “cooperative” system of management. This system, which stresses teamwork and heightened employee participation over traditional authoritarian rule, is routinely hailed as a cure for lagging productivity and quality.
The team system is supposed to improve production by holding workers accountable for quality, minor maintenance and cleanup on the assembly line.
Within that comfortable abstraction, however, lurks a myriad of tiny human conflicts that even the most progressive companies are still struggling to resolve, the researchers have found. Scraping away the residue of generations of adversarial relationships between bosses and workers is harder than it looks, particularly in a world where variables such as technology and competition change so swiftly.
The researchers’ work, conducted in boots and helmets and with unlimited access to the factory floor, has plunged them into the heart of America’s industrial crisis.
They have been able to see, on one hand, how New United Motors, a Toyota-General Motors joint venture, breaks scores of rules that have traditionally limited workers’ involvement in the affairs of management. A union leader marvels at being able to attend company meetings with suppliers, where he is able to ask questions as a member of the management team, no longer an adversary.
On the other hand, the researchers have seen the crankiness that developed 50 miles to the north in Pittsburg when a steel plant run as a Korean-American joint venture embarked on a modernization program requiring more initiative from its veteran work force.
There, the local steelworkers union president still boycotts classes on a quality-improvement system to retaliate for what he describes as management’s violation of labor contract language. And a company executive frets over having to tell candidates for promotion that they now have to be “team players,” and that “by the way, being a dominant leader isn’t part of it any more.”
Wilms and his team are focusing on six California plants that are trying to change the way work is done.
By varying degrees, all of the companies have bought in to the notion that supervisors can draw better work out of employees by adopting the production-team approach that is loosely known as “Japanese-style mangement.” The shift to this production system affects not only the estimated 300,000 Americans who work for Japanese-owned companies in the United States, but millions more whose companies are copying some components. About 5% of American companies operate with a truly collaborative management systems, according to one recent national study.
Working microcosmically, dissecting the day-to-day mechanics of production, Wilms and his students are trying to answer big, intimidating questions: What human dynamics are most important in making collaborative systems work? Do these systems really increase quality? How are problems solved so that emphasis is put on correcting problems rather than assessing blame? Do schools have to change so that students learn not only technical skills but an appreciation of interdependence in a continuous production system?
Issues such as the low educational level of workers, so often decried as a national crisis, came into human focus for the researchers. At the USS-POSCO steel plant in Pittsburg, a joint venture between USX, formerly United States Steel Corp., and the Korean Pohang Iron and Steel Co., they found that a read-out dial in the control room of one of the plant’s new steel preparation lines had to be simplified because some workers were confused by the concept of negative numbers.
Interestingly, that change was devised not by a manager but by a worker who had gone through retraining and later boasted to one researcher, “I learned I was smart.”
Scores of studies have been performed on cooperative management in recent years, but they focused on executive opinion or questionnaires handed to workers. By contrast, the two-year UCLA study is an exercise in cultural anthropology. The researchers are trying to describe how people respond to changes in the workplace by living their subjects’ on-the-job lives and interviewing them over a prolonged period.
“Nobody has sat down as far as we could tell and tried to measure what happens when American companies try to use” cooperative management, said Robert Monagan, a former Speaker of the state Assembly and president of the California Economic Development Corp., a business advisory group created by the Deukmejian Administration.
The UCLA study, which may cost up to $375,000 by the time it is completed, is itself a cooperative venture. A collection of business, labor and state government officials are sponsoring and helping to finance it. Company presidents and labor leaders at the firms under study sit on the board of the California Worksite Research Committee, created by Wilms. Researchers share preliminary conclusions with their subjects in exchange for permission to peer into virtually every nook and cranny.
Wilms’ team alternated between working and interviewing workers and managers during the several months they spent at the Fremont auto plant. They are currently finishing their study at the Pittsburg steel plant, where the more dangerous nature of the work limited them to interviewing rather than running equipment. From there, they plan to move on to McDonnell Douglas’s Long Beach subsidiary, Douglas Aircraft, which last year drastically reorganized its management system, forcing 5,000 managers to quit and rehiring only the 4,000 who passed personality tests geared to measure “team-player” qualities.
The study is the brainchild of Benson Munger, a staff member on the state Senate Industrial Relations Committee and an eager student of Japanese culture, who began urging Wilms as early as 1982 to analyze cooperative management.
Munger is a strong advocate of labor-management cooperation, but he recognizes that cultural differences make it stressful for American companies to institute change.
“There is an existing sense of obligation between workers and managers in Japan,” he said. “Here, since labor and management have never been close, that coming together is what makes the cooperative model stressful. . . . All the skills people need today have changed.”
It took Wilms, Munger and the rest of the team nearly four years to get permission to study New United Motors, which had been cool to outside researchers since it was established in 1984 in a GM plant that had been shut down in 1982. New United Motors--clean, well-lit, where employee suggestion boxes are jammed and workers on all levels are held rigorously accountable--is often held up as heaven by proponents of industrial progress. It remains an assembly plant, however, where work is broken down into 60-second bites and life can take on a sameness that is numbing but still valuable at $15 an hour.
“At first, I was scared to death just learning a job,” Wilms said. “I’d never worked on a production line before except for a summer in a cherry cannery in high school. What an iron horse it is.”
If New United Motors is an iron horse, the USS-POSCO assembly line is a rusted one. Parts of the plant look as if they haven’t been touched since the 1950s, while other sections, completed last year under the joint venture with the South Koreans, feature the latest technology for milling American and imported steel to various thicknesses.
The joint venture represented USX’s acknowledgement that it could no longer compete against the South Koreans. The plant’s 900 workers, many of them with 15 or more years’ experience, accepted wage cuts and more flexible work rules in their last contract. In return, the company promised to invest its wage savings in worker retraining. About 150 workers were sent to West Germany, France, Japan and South Korea to train on up-to-date equipment.
Jelling the old and the new--employees, equipment, methodology--has been painful. Management has trouble translating its goals through supervisors. National union leaders have trouble translating their support for the new practices to the rank-and-file. New United Motors had the advantage of starting up new, recalling the old work force; USS-POSCO has to discover the future while simultaneously producing the day’s load.
“We’re neophytes,” says Randy Smith, vice president of employee relations at the Pittsburg plant and a veteran of 39 years with the company. “This is a long process. I don’t think we’ll get to where we should be during my tenure.”
In some sections of the plant, workers are using calculators for the first time in their lives. Managers no longer wear white safety helmets--like everyone else, they now wear orange ones--but the division is still felt. Workers object to the absence of consistent shifts; they are rotated constantly.
“We still use levers (of obstruction) against each other,” said Joe Stanton, president of the union local, who came to California from Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley when the steel industry there went bust in the mid-1980s.
Stanton, a plant electrician, has benefited from the joint venture’s unprecedented emphasis on employee training. He was able to go to school for several months to upgrade his skills.
“This time we gave up money and got something,” he said, referring to the wage concessions and the training. “It ain’t in my pocket, but it’s in my mind.”
