BMW Gives Employees Sense of Pride in Work : Auto industry: Those in South Carolina who have landed one of the coveted jobs are making sure they are up to task.

When Allison Ballenger forgets to take off her BMW name tag after work, strangers often stop her and offer congratulations for landing one of South Carolina’s most coveted manufacturing jobs.

“Everybody in the area wants a job at BMW. I mean everybody,” says the 29-year-old woman, who left a cable-making company to try her hand at building cars.

With four months left before the German auto maker opens its first U.S. assembly plant here, Ballenger and her peers say they are working hard to make sure they are up to the task.

The 300 initial hires are being taught to assemble cars in a hangarlike training building next to the unfinished factory.

Body panels fastened to display boards sit in one corner. Car bodies in various states of repair are available for hands-on work. Scattered chalkboards mark classrooms.

BMW plans to make its 3-series sedan here first, moving to a two-seat sports car by 1996. It hopes to have 2,000 workers at the plant when it reaches full production in six years.

Pay starts at $12 an hour, increasing to $16 in two years. The average wage statewide for manufacturing jobs is about $10 an hour.

Aside from the money, workers say jobs at BMW offer other advantages.

Most of those hired so far have been flown to BMW factories in Germany to learn from their overseas colleagues.

Terry Gainey, who had worked for a company that produced household and industrial cleaners, was with BMW for four days when he was sent to Munich for a month to watch workers install seats, steering wheels, air bags and windshields.

“When you actually see it done, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to you,” the 29-year-old Gainey says. “I’m ready to start up.”

Overseas training is not unique to BMW. When Nissan built its Symrna, Tenn., plant in the early 1980s, nearly every worker spent time at a pickup truck assembly plant in Japan.

“We told them that while we recognized it would be very costly, we saw so many long-term advantages,” says John B. Schnapp, a consultant with Mercer Management Consulting who worked with Nissan in opening the Symrna plant.

“Workers get a clearer sense of the company,” Schnapp says. They also get a sense of pride in their work, he adds.

At BMW Manufacturing Corp., President Al Kinzer also has taken a page from Honda’s Marysville, Ohio, plant, where he was a vice president.

Everyone, including Kinzer, wears white lab coats. Managers work in an open area next to the training floor--no walls, no private offices, no executive washrooms. The practice is meant to promote a feeling of unity, spokesman Bobby Hitt says.

“I think a key thing was the teamwork and how well you work with others,” says Ballenger, who left a job she held for her entire adult life for the chance to work at BMW.

“It wasn’t just money. It’s just such a big opportunity to learn new things,” she says.

When the plant was first announced amid much publicity, 60,000 people mailed initial job application requests to a state agency, which handled screening and testing.

When BMW ran another ad in April, application requests flowed in at 4,000 a week. And Spartanburg County is no corporate backwater. The area already is home to other multinational companies and boasts a 4.5% unemployment rate, one of the lowest in South Carolina.

Nevertheless, Hitt says, BMW has promised to give preference to workers living within 50 miles of the plant.

BMW is quickly becoming something of a tourist attraction as well. Spartanburg Chamber of Commerce spokeswoman Laura Corbin says people from across the country wander in asking for directions to the factory.

“They come in and say, ‘Tell me where BMW is. Tell me how to get a job,’ ” Corbin says.