THE CIRCLE GAME

...Business leaders are also betting that QWL will not raise expectations about the right to respect and dignity on the job, or if it does, that workers will not turn their anger and disappointment into anything more than cynicism...

...Some programs concentrate on "hard" issues, such as product quality or productivity, while others focus on attitudes and factory relations...

...Management's "cooperative spirit" at the Rouge plant surfaces only when it serves to increase productivity, cut costs, or clamp down on absenteeism...

...I really like it...

...Second, unions must develop plans to cope with technological advances and train circle representatives to protect workers from job cutbacks...

...they must instill a collective union consciousness in the ranks...

...A union that decides to buy into quality-of-worklife should make circles the vehicle for greater rank-and-file participation in collective bargaining But these are exceptions...

...Among the reasons Local 1250 of the Cleveland engine plant refused to be taken for a ride was that Ford would not guarantee a new engine job in return for concessions...

...Management was about to scrap a planned improvement because outside bids were too high, but members of the employee involvement program said the job could be done with in-house labor...

...For many unionists, QWL is a job-security strategy...

...Circle 81," as this group calls itself, grapples with a single problem for several meetings...

...One cynical observer calls this "a bigger-participation fix...

...A model for this once existed in the auto industry, when "working stewards" (often called "blue button" or "line" stewards) tied the union to its grass-roots members...

...Even union dissidents are embracing QWL in surprising numbers, despite its emphasis on productivity and cooperation with management...

...First, unions must try to convince workers in QWL circles to think of themselves as union representatives...

...their demands for the release of information on hazardous chemicals, investment, and production plans exposed the companies' hidden QWL agendas...

...Workers at the Ford Rouge Glass Plant south of Detroit point to a recently completed construction project they helped salvage through QWL...

...They regularly write for Labor Notes...

...Both are members of the United Auto Workers and active in the anti-concessions movement...

...Indeed, UAW Vice President Donald Ephlin takes pleasure in noting the correlation between active QWL programs and local votes in favor of the Ford concessions contract—a pattern that also showed up in the GM contract vote...

...Not surprisingly, then, it is the concession-wracked UAW that is blazing the QWL trail...

...According to Fortune magazine, "Leaders in quality-of-worklife plants find themselves politically more popular than ever...

...The United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, the Communication Workers of America, and several other AFL-CIO unions actively promote some form of QWL...

...Of course, none of these steps can be taken unless the unions are rebuilt to wage ideological war...

...From the viewpoint of corporations, unions do serve a useful purpose from contract to contract—as conduits for workforce discipline and as efficient consolidators of such workplace discontent as is risked in a time of near-record unemployment...

...Corporations have not been prompted to invest in QWL by some new-found concern for workers' needs, however...

...cross-departmental and even cross-company meetings of unionized circle members can strengthen workers' identification with the union—and with each other...

...QWL encompasses a vast range of schemes, from renamed employee suggestion systems to redrawn plant chain-of-command maps...

...Bosses hope quality-of-worklife programs will not raise workers9 expectations about the right to respect and dignity on the job V*VS TT 11 VSAA UVUVUVVVlUllli QWL is, in a sense, providing the ideological grease for concessions by sowing competitiveness...

...One UE local ended a QWL program by publicizing the antiunion record of the company's QWL consultant...

...Mike Parker is an electrician and Dwight Hansen is a tool and die maker...

...But in some companies the local union found it had to insist on a union committeeman being present at every meeting to be sure that this principle was maintained at least for the first several months before the ground rules were clear...

...For an hour, they brainstorm in a clean office lined with graphs and slogan-packed posters...

...An expanding economy can paper over a lot of problems, but in bad times discussions cannot sustain enthusiasm...

...All bring workers and managers together to improve efficiency at the point of production...

...DAVID SUTER In fact, the promise of a new, personal relationship to one's work—of equality, respect, and dignity on the job—are QWL's strongest appeals to workers...

...GM is pursuing the same strategy...

...combining job classifications, and reducing the number of skilled jobs in the process...

...And jobs depend on such competition: The president of GM Buick Local 599, Al Christner, proudly explains how QWL enabled his division to underbid a GM Pontiac division, and GM Oldsmobile workers, long-time UAW activists, boast that their QWL program helped them win work from GM Buick...

...The older workers are now "slow," and employees who didn't mind "carrying" them in the past now see them as a drag on productivity...

...In these situations, direct opposition to QWL could easily be misunderstood and thus ineffective...

...Quality circles become a Junior Achievement-style management training ground where people learn to think and act like managers...

...In one case, circle members were elected because there were more volunteers than management wanted...

...Sooner or later, QWL programs have to come up against the reality of capitalist industrial relations: Managers run the company, and their bottom line is profits...

...Each participant comes up with an idea to add to a list of possible solutions, and no suggestion is criticized or even discussed until the brainstorm has subsided...

...The ideology of QWL places management inside the workers' concept of "we" and simultaneously positions the union as "them...

...But I don't want to lie to these [management] people, if you are going to have trust and make changes...

...People took it seriously," said Susan Greene, a circle participant at a Bell Telephone garage in Chicago...

...QWL participants should be taught to see increased productivity in terms of its effect on the quantity and quality of work...

...Carla, a custodial worker at a Detroit-area GM plant, describes an encounter with QWL-enlightened management as "the best thing that ever happened to me": "Imagine, I was sitting with the superintendent, and I'm just a janitor...

...Its champions believe, for the most part, that QWL will significantly improve the lives of working people...

...It pushes the message, We have to make our company profitable if we are to save our jobs...

...While unions have historically defended workplaces from what bosses called "rationalization," when the word meant nothing more than speed-ups or job reductions, they now push that same old process in a new form...

...The gloss of QWL appears to wear thin after a year or two...

...Unionists with militant reputations are often selected to head QWL programs...

...In short, unions must project a political program that offers workers a way out of their dead-end dependency on corporate profits as the source of job security...

...Who could oppose the idea...

...they decided that the best protest would be a mass resignation...

...labor is a major production cost, and management's job is to cut it...

...We won some things at first, including a fan in the club room and a bike rack...

...The Circle Game BY MIKE PARKER AND DWIGHT HANSEN Every Wednesday, at a stamping plant in Dearborn, Michigan, twelve of the 120 workers and one of the five foremen interrupt what they are doing and walk away from the assembly line where front sections for the Ford Escort are welded...

...Because it creates a competitive climate, QWL has turned out to be a favorite tool of union busters...

...But even when there is neither heightened personal fulfillment nor a big job-saving success story, QWL at least means a chance to get off the line for an hour to chat over coffee...

...The divisiveness does not stop there...

...In Japan, some managers worry that quality circle activities are becoming ritualized and counterproductive...

...And if only a fraction of the promises of QWL were to work out, it would be a giant step forward...

...If a similar approach is to be tried on OWL, it will take aggressive organizing...

...One measure of QWL's popularity is that union leaders commonly invoke it at election time...

...Nonetheless, union leaders are buying into the concept for their own reasons...

...An appropriate union response to QWL has to be determined by the specific situation...

...We talked and we were equals...

...Union militants often face QWL programs imposed from above by their international leadership or already entered upon by past union officers...

...Can organized labor redeem QWL...

...to them, QWL promises some relief...

...The experience demonstrated that a circle can be bent toward building worker solidarity...

...GM and Ford have set up hundreds of circles and teams...

...Managers assume QWL programs will lead workers to cooperate in their own undoing because they are allowed to help in choosing the means...

...admits he has a problem with circle members who blame production snags on alcoholics and others with personal problems...

...A union that decides to buy into QWL would do well to make circles the vehicle for greater rank-and-file participation in the collective bargaining process...

...The maintenance and construction unit members got a large amount of additional work which everyone enjoyed and really worked hard on...

...Management saved almost one-half of a million dollars and got a better quality job [and] the glass plant unit gained increased job security...

...The company then assigned the work to its plant in Lima, Ohio, which had agreed to concessions...

...It may be that all of organized labor is caught in a QWL bind...

...Ford is homing in on individual plants—even though contracts have long been signed—and threatening to ship work to other Ford factories if workers do not approve give-backs...

...What makes QWL different from yesterday's management fads is that QWL gives bosses a way around the union to the shop floor...

...In Flint, about fifty miles north, thirty-six female fashion models parade around in the latest styles while workers continue to turn out fifty-five cars an hour...

...It used to be like a concentration camp here when I first came six years ago," plant manager Lee Furse told the Detroit Free Press...

...Carla says she feels "caught...

...In throwing in its lot with QWL, the union tells workers to identify with the problems of plant management...

...By consensus, members decide to have a chute realigned, so the aprons can slide smoothly off the line...

...GM has spent $1.6 million on QWL just at its plant in Tarrytown, New York...

...At the Ford Rouge plant, site of the successful Employe Involvement construction project, hourly employment is down more than 50 per cent in three years while Ford looks overseas for more parts...

...Yet QWL eats away at the power of unions: The main point of QWL is to convince workers that their security and future are tied to the success of the company (or plant, or department) instead of to their union—or class...

...And, far from breaking new ground, union backing for the concept reinforces a narrow, purely contractual vision of trade unionism engendered during the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s...

...Wrong...

...To which the United Electrical Workers' News responded: "No better recommendation can be had for the enemies of trade union organization...

...The talent and potential of our membership is unlimited, and when this talent is tapped, we all benefit—as in the glass plant...

...Many QWL showcases involve locals with militant histories...

...Now it's a fun place to work...

...The California Hospital Personnel Management Association conducts seminars on the use of QWL in the fight against unions...

...QWL success stories hint at union impotence: Why should it take a circle meeting to get splash shields installed so machine operators don't get sprayed with coolant...

...When the list has made the rounds, circle members rank the proposals according to handbook instructions the company has given the group's "facilitator...

...The company is pressing to place more restrictions on workers' rights to change jobs...

...A union activist who supports QWL says Ford has become hard-nosed over grievances and is "refusing to move, particularly on terminations, because they have all the replacements they want on the layoff list...

...But QWL "victories" have not offset contract concessions...

...One of the lessons of labor history is that skillful organizers find ways to bend to union purposes all manner of employer-initiated programs...

...The Council on Union-Free Environment publishes a how-to pamphlet on starting "circle" programs and staving off unionization...

...For years we just hired the workers' hands...

...Yet almost anything that affects working conditions at the plant level can be won in collective bargaining, either directly at contract time or in the continuing struggle to interpret the contract and set useful precedents...

...Carla, the janitor and QWL enthusiast, acknowledges that custodial workers in her plant are capable of finishing their daily assignments in less than eight hours...

...The in-plant leaders of UAW Local 595 in Linden, New Jersey, turned their back on QWL and explained the decision with an educational campaign...

...In the last three years, however, QWL has swept through the nation's private and public sectors, thanks, in part, to support from most of organized labor...

...The UAW International stood by and watched...

...A plant spokeswoman says Fashion Day would not have been possible at the Buick factory before General Motors brought in "quality-of-worklife" programs...

...This allows them to draw off those workers who are dissatisfied with their jobs but who have leadership skills and self-confidence—that is, potential union leaders...

...And if unionism is being turned into a management tool, QWL may be the tool's handle...

...The Employe Involvement Circle, as it's known officially, puts another problem on its agenda and moves on...

...Moreover, since the industry is set up so that divisions and individual plants bid on jobs from the parent company, QWL encourages UAW members at, say, the Ford Dearborn stamping plant to find a way to produce at lower cost than fellow unionists at the Ford Woodhaven stamping plant down the road...

...On the other hand, the grudging support some unions have given QWL has reinforced the image of a union bureaucracy threatened by new approaches to shop-floor life...

...Circle 81 is pleased when, in this instance, the solution works out...

...The message conveyed to the rank and file by having a union official assume the watchdog role is that the union itself is threatened, and scrambling to protect its position...

...Some of the QWL success stories of a few years ago, such as Rushton Mine and Harmon Industries, have ended in bitterness on all sides...

...Big business has discovered that QWL is a convenient way to tighten control over the workforce...

...Next steps include "gains sharing"—financial incentives for the suggestions generated by circles—and plant redesign...

...The more advanced QWL programs are explicitly organized so that, in the words of the former GM director of organizational development, "each team is like a small business...

...Production workers begin to bad-mouth "do-nothing" skilled workers...

...And during the lifetime of a contract so arrived at, it ought to be replaced by a period of cooperation, aimed at maximizing the potential success of the joint enterprise, i.e., the company's business or production...

...Unions must not only be able to challenge this or that company's strategy...

...Workers, unions, bosses • • • we're all in this together, right...

...Bob Evans coordinates QWL for Oldsmobile Local 652 in Lansing, Michigan, and Bob Roth, who had been fired five times for leading wildcat strikes, directs QWL for Buick Local 599 in Flint...

...Where elections are not possible because QWL programs are already in place, unions can still make workers "circle reps," and perhaps assign them union duties such as handling the first stages of grievance procedures...

...QWL is a sort of union version of Reaganomics: Help the company make more profits so that some of the wealth will trickle down in the form of more jobs...

...Finally, unions should work to change the accepted jurisdiction of QWL circles, insisting, as the IAM does, that "every aspect of the employer-employee relationship is subject to negotiation through collective bargaining...

...The teams play in what one local union leader described as "a company ball game, with company umpires, on company turf...

...Where election of representatives to circles is possible, it helps employees feel accountable to their fellow workers...

...concessions, like QWL-induced efficiency, will save jobs in the face of the Japanese onslaught and stiffer domestic competition...

...The case for concessions advanced by both the UAW leadership and the automakers echoes their endorsement of QWL...

...QWL paints productivity and competition as the paths to job security, and so anything that gets in the way is suspect, including union-nfegotiated work rules, "excessive" concern for the environment or workplace safety, and absenteeism...

...Union collaboration in setting up the circles therefore makes concrete the notion that a union defends the worker only at contract time...

...Not many have...

...trying to change line rules in the name of efficiency...

...where a union has a solid reputation as an active fighter it can simply refuse to take part...

...I don't want to give anything away and have sixty janitors mad," she says...

...But now, she says, "these people have become so trustworthy and so adept they can handle a show on the sideline...

...The national leaders of both the IAM and the UE are against QWL...

...It is not even a step toward power when the participation undermines the only real power workers still have—the power to act collectively...

...Cole warns union leaders to make sure that "circles do not take up matters which fall under collective bargaining agreements...

...Now we treat them like people...

...Once workers are persuaded that job security depends on increasing our company's productivity, their attitudes change toward other workers in the plant...

...But as time went on, people who were not on the circle began to get upset with our lack of progress and put pressure on us...

...The UAW response to the companies' divide-and-conquer strategy has, in fact, been to campaign for QWL programs...

...Robert Cole, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, has spelled out a common union approach...

...Whether worker discontent is channeled into building a stronger union depends, in large measure, on whether the union has discredited itself during the QWL experience...

...This time, it's how to keep the flanges on the front-end aprons from getting bent during production...

...Says the IAM newspaper, 'The simple reason is that we don't like cooperating on the shop floor while we're being mugged by management at the plant gate...

...The construction project, Gutzman says, "is a good example of the positive benefits that can result when UAW members are given a voice in decision-making and when we all work together...

...Indeed, even pure company unions have been transformed into real ones in some industries...

...A Ford local president who supports QWT...

...He was asking me questions...

...The argument that QWL will weaken unions has not seemed compelling to workers who are already alienated from their union...

...QWL can also be an inspiring personal experience for some workers...

...One member is concerned about the worker who has had the job of hammering bent flanges back into shape, but the foreman offers reassurance: No jobs will be lost because of quality improvements...

...To date [1981] according to UAW leaders, virtually every slate of the union's officers who campaigned by supporting an established quality-of-worklife effort has won...

...Many labor leaders see QWL as a counterweight to contract concessions or as a demonstration of labor "statesmanship...

...The union can counter the tendency, inherent in QWL, for workers to identify with corporate management...

...GM is experimenting with "pay-for-knowledge" systems and "self-managing" departments...

...When Bell tried to reduce overtime pay, the circle convened a meeting of all garage workers...

...Some locals of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the United Electrical Workers (UE) have entered into negotiations over QWL...

...But he continues, "Now, you can tell this to the circle members and management and even get it in writing...

...But increased participation is not the same thing as power...

...And the National Association of Manufacturers estimates there are "roughly 32,000 quality circles in [South] Korea and 1,200 registered in Taiwan...

...GM's quality-of-worklife (QWL) efforts and Ford's Employe Involvement Circles have counterparts at other companies, where they are variously known as Labor-Management Participation Teams or Quality Circles...

...Whatever they are called, the programs are part of a growing QWL movement—the centerpiece of the New Industrial Relations, the "non-adversarial relationship" heralded in some labor and business publications...

...It doesn't take away from their work at all...

...Consider how AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Thomas Donahue reconciles QWL to trade unionism: "The adversarial role, appropriate to the conflict of collective bargaining, ought to be limited to the period of negotiation...

...The work was finished on time and at about half the original projected cost, turning John Gutzman, president of the Maintenance and Construction unit of UAW Local 600, from a skeptic of QWL into a booster...

...Ten years ago, there was little interest in QWL except among a few academics, maverick business leaders, and unionists who drew their models from social democratic Scandinavia...

...What's more, the concessions Ford is demanding are actually quality-of-worklife takebacks...

...Thus, UAW International Representative Al Hendricks told unionists in Ford Local 600 that we must make the company competitive with the Japanese in order to undercut GM and Chrysler—hardly the way to build trade union solidarity throughout the auto industry...

...Donahue's perspective raises an obvious question: Why don't unions just step aside between contracts and let managers manage...

...Some QWL consultants recognize that the attraction fades, and therefore have plans to expand and improve the process...