‘Revolution’ Surveys Problems, Experiments in U.S. Workplace

ABC plans to kick off the Labor Day Weekend with a prime-time examination of some of America’s problems in the workplace and at experiments aimed at solving them.

“America is in tremendous trouble in the workplace right now,” said Forrest Sawyer, explaining the reason that ABC News undertook “Revolution at Work,” to air Saturday at 10 p.m.

“As you may have noticed in a news story recently, SAT scores are the lowest in history. As a consequence, our work force is the least educated in generations. We are finding they are not as literate as they should be or as skilled as they need to be.”

In the program, Sawyer visits three places in the United States where efforts to find solutions are under way. The first is the Saturn automotive plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., which hired 5,000 Detroit auto workers who had been laid off from their jobs.

“This is a multibillion-dollar experiment in which General Motors is trying a new management system modeled after that of the Japanese,” Sawyer said.

From the Saturn plant, the show will look at the proposal that has come from the Bush Administration and others, Sawyer said.

“If we have difficulties in our educational system, the idea is maybe we should get the private sector involved in public education. So we went to a school in Los Angeles, the California Academy of Math and Science, which is doing just that. It is a public school with tremendous input from the business community.

“We also went to a hospital in Columbus, Ohio,” Sawyer said, “to take a look at health care and other service industries where people do things for people.”