Beyond Boredom- A Look at What's New on the Assembly Line
Zwerdling, Daniel
Beyond Boredom A Look at What’s New on the Assembly Line by Daniel Zwerdling Until AT&T’s “Work Itself” program came to North Virginia Bell two years ago, operator Mary Fiala had to raise...
...I’ve been going around to all the Chrysler plants,” UAW Vice President Doug Fraser told me...
...General Motors is experimenting with a teamassembly approach in its new mobile homes (see box...
...The employees’ almost desperate gratitude for Work Itself comes over strong...
...Production teams of about eight workers each meet 15 minutes before and after their shift every day to plan who will do what job and talk about production problems with their “team leader”-their supervisor...
...If General Motors wants to experiment, we have to be a part of that experment,” said a top UAW official...
...The one issue that takes both into account and goes beyond is the question of who controls the safety policies and work redesign programs...
...The unions have some sound instincts which make them leery of humanization of work programsmanagement can use them to co-opt workers-bit t they’re following these instincts in the wrong direction...
...It grows from the notion that much work is now inhuman-boring, monotonous, stiflingly rigid-and that many American workers are dissatisfied with the quality of their working lives...
...It’s a first step toward encroaching on management’s prerogative of controlling and directing the means of production .” The workers stand to gain substantially from the humanization of work movement-but only if they, and the unions, shape the issue as just one element in a long-range strategy for achieving increased workers’ rights and control...
...Ping-Pong Productivity Each company which says it is humanizing work develops its own interpretations of what “humanizing” means...
...GM boasts about the experiment in advertisements but shrouds the actual project in secrecy-the manager refused to let me in, so 1 took off my tie, rolled up my shirt sleeves, donned some safety glasses to disguise myself as a worker, and walked in...
...We’ll come in with demands the workers understand-like improved disciplinary and grievance systems, safer and healthier environment, better lighting, and more time off...
...The answer to these questions transcends technological issues and becomes fundamental politics...
...Corning’s Medford plant is always near the top of the corporate conference lists as a model example of humanization...
...The board of directors sets an hourly “advance” on the profits-about $5.50 per hour-and then divides up the surplus at the end of the year in equal slices...
...They seem enthusiastic about the changes: some hang “brag tags” bearing their names on finished products, such as bloodgas analyzers, as if they were works of art...
...But behind this PR veneer Phe corporations, the government, and the unions are scared...
...So far, management has taken all the initiative and talks about humanization of work like some technological fix that can simply be installed on the production floor...
...How the hell are we going to produce 60 cars an hour on a team...
...We have 110,000 workers, and at all the locals I’ve visited not one worker raised the [humanization of work] problem with me-I mean not one single worker has come up to me and said, ‘Why don’t we do this work differently?’ ” James Wright, director of the the New Unionists of the Movement for Economic Justice in Washington, D. C., said, “If you walked into the factory and asked workers ‘What do you want to change around here?’ I’m sure redesigning jobs is not going to be one of the first things they’ll tell you...
...Still, with all the problems, some workers prefer this plant to any of the others they’ve worked in-not because the teams make them happier, but because the building is airy and light...
...The workers own the plants, elect boards of directors from among fellow workers, and vote on all company policy from major financial investments to setting their own salaries (see box, page 90...
...Every worker-owner makes exactly the same-from the supervisor to the janitor...
...I’m in charge of my own job and I have an influence in the rest of the company...
...The entry fee virtually blocks poor people who can’t scrape together $2,300 in cash, and it severely drains the monthly takehome pay of the workers who do buy a share...
...The UAW and a few other unions will raise the humanization of work issue at negotiations this year, but they’re doing it reluctantly, and then only because management is forcing them to play their hand...
...At least 14,000 people die on the job each year, and perhaps 100,000 more die from “occupationally-caused diseases...
...Some are so bad that we had to strip them down...
...It’s our money that’s involved...
...In GM’s assembly plant in Baltimore job redesign could hardly make a difference: after two hours I became violently headachy and nauseated from the noise and fumes...
...The subject has appeared as a Newsweek cover story, as a documentary on NBC’s First Tuesday, and as massive research grants from the Ford Foundation-all barometers of social acceptance...
...Employees attended seminars and discussed the new concept with management consultants...
...The new, more individualized work flow is supposed to give them a feeling of ownership and expanded responsibility...
...An increasing degree of sabotage is costly, (General Foods dumped a huge batch of dog food when it came out green one day), and so is the use of drugs (15 per cent of the members of a UAW local surveyed at random take heroin...
...If the corporations play the right game, they hope, humanization of work will provide the key to greater profits: workers will be contented, toil harder, and never go on strike...
...Doug Fraser at the UAW, for example, can’t imagine that the auto industry will ever assemble cars in a team-a method which both SAAB and Volvo in Sweden,use to break the monotony and isolation of auto factories...
...By abandoning the workers, tlie unions guarantee precisely the result they say they fear-that management will manipulate it for its own gains...
...He told me the union has no committee, no ongoing project keeping tabs on the work redesign experinients in the auto industry...
...And so the real dilemma, the Research Institute of America explains to executives, “is the need to push for higher productivity at a time when employees are waking up to a new feeling about themselves...
...Safe,Gentle, Works Overnight...
...Management encourages workers to learn different jobs, and pays them more as they do...
...Arthur stressed that “a worker cannot do whatever he wants-I never lose my decisionmaking power as a leader.’’ He also made clear that “There’s nothing we do here that’s not designed to make more profits...
...The women who assemble hotplates (there are only six) package and send them directly to the customers without passing through quality inspection control...
...I’m in charge of my own job-and I have an influence in the rest of the company...
...The Productivity Commission is giving grants to major corporations and unions who want to redesign jobs to improve the quality of work...
...the demands of profit prohibit that...
...The workers’ spirit has suffered as a result...
...If we don’t like it, we’ll change it again...
...They worked through that issue...
...It was an honor to be put here-and I wouldn’t want to be put downstairs again .” The small freedoms and decisionmaking powers that companies like AT&T have granted do make work more bearable, but only because it was so unbearable before...
...The general manager can’t make any substantial expenditures-over $1 0,000without asking the board of directors to vote...
...Through sheer stupidity, for example, engineers have placed myriad bins full of nuts and bolts next to each other, and assemblers can’t tell them apart...
...This year the company agreed to give everyone a 6 to 7 percent pay increase, which will require a $560,000 cost reduction...
...Work schedules, shifts, overtime, shutdowns-all these are issues which profoundly affect people’s life at work...
...We haven’t been able to sell a goddamn job right off the line yet, without having to repair it,” he said...
...The fundamental concept in this place is that every person is creative,” said Vice President Dick Arthur...
...Last time we met at a restaurant down the road for a prime rib dinner, on Donnelly,” Nienhuis said...
...Exploring Foreign Territory Unions are failing their memberships because they’ve settled into a rut...
...Donnelly Mirrors has created its own brand of “selective participative management” over the last 20 years, long before “humanization of work” was coined...
...This conversation did not take place...
...Increased satisfaction on the job is important, but it’s not enough...
...Operators now keep their own attendance records, and when answering calls they no longer have to use canned phrases...
...GM engineers never consulted with workers about the plant’s designand as a result, the moving assembly system doesn’t work...
...This conflict of emotions suggests that humanization of work is much more than a simple reformist movement...
...The employees have the “freedom” to make changes in their work methods, if the changes increase the efficiency...
...Ford Motor, for example, lets workers-only 18 of them-assemble dashboard units for low volume, luxuryline cars on their own...
...Rudisill sometimes munches donuts with the employees, and as he strolls through the plant everyone calls him John...
...Workers seem as frustrated as ever...
...Our job is to see they do their job right...
...When the UAW leadership ordered the Lordstown locals not to strike, the young workers told the leadership, in effect, to go to hell...
...Production is creeping at a snail’s pace-I saw the “Today’s Production” chart list “Scheduled: 20” and “Completed: 0.” Quality, said one inspector, is awful...
...Humanizing work has provided an answer...
...It’s all relative,” said Charles Pfautz, the Bell manager who brought Work Itself to Northern Virginia...
...AT&T’s “humanizing work” is a vague concept which has mushroomed in just two years from the theories of social scientists into one of the most vaunted-and volatile-work issues in years...
...But the cooperatives have gone further toward building a worker democracy than most companies in this country-and the ultimate testimony came from the hired general managers who complained that working for the workers has tied their hands...
...But more unorthodox, all the production workers.are salaried-and they help decide how much money they’ll be paid each year...
...As the Corning Cbrporation’s behavioral psychologist Michael Beers warns, “unless the initiative is taken by management, the risk of more chronic and less profitable change will be increased...
...I’ve worked at seven companies where you’re only interested in getting in your eight hours and taking home the check...
...For every four cents profit we give the workers, we keep six cents...
...But it doesn’t make any sense to pit physical security against psychological security and weigh which is more important...
...By increasing worker responsibility, Corning has managed to eliminate all foremen...
...We try it...
...Beyond Toilet Democracy You can judge the limited scope of even the best humanization of work projects by looking at some other companies in the United Stateswhich the workers literally own and control...
...General 1Mators: Renaissance hk Under the sprawling sinqkestack forest of the General Motors Truck and Coach Division in IPontiac, Michigan, GM is trying to abolish the infamous assembly line...
...He begs the real question: who says we need to produce 60 cars an hour ( I 0 1.6 at the Lordstown plant...
...If the work force-and the unionsare going to turn the humanization of work movement to their benefit, they must develop a long-range strategy rather than stumble on work redesign as managements arbitrarily present experiments...
...The cooperatives are not a perfect system...
...Corporations traditionally do things by fragmenting work and rationalizing it to its smallest components, so inanagement can plug workers in and out like transistors in a radio...
...Many union leaders have been insisting all along that the work redesign issue has been a false one from the beginning-a creation of the intellectuals which the workers have never asked for and may not even want...
...Roy Walters and Associates, a booming New York management consulting firm packages a “job enrichment mod,el’’ specially for banks and insurance firms: “Works relatively quickly,’’ the ads boast, “not so long as to try the patience of management...
...We don’t want a goddamn thing to do with management,” he said...
...The rebellious mood among young workers which is shaking factories is also shaking the union structure...
...Unions got started to protect workers from a management they don’t trust...
...But if they lose control, the corporations fear, the humanization movement could “open a Pandora’s box from which there’s no return,” as Edwin Mills, director of the U. S. Productivity Commission’s Quality of Work program explained...
...If workers can figure out a way to abolish their own jobs, Donnelly guarantees they’ll have other work to do...
...One effect of the corporate stranglehold is that employees-and management too-cannot conceive that the system could be any different...
...When the whistle blew you could almost feel the vacuum as people rushed out the factory door...
...But the biggest changes so far have come through the “socio-technical” approach...
...the board elects a general manager who runs the day-to-day operations of the plant...
...Here are social scientists promoting a movement designed to free workers-psychologically speaking, anyway-and they find the unions blocking the path...
...The company designs a system to promote a sense of worker autonomy and involvement from the ground up...
...They get what the management can be made to give them...
...When salesmen come peddling new equipment, the management sends them to workers on the team who decide whether the gadgets will do the job...
...So they tried it, and it works, and that’s the way they’ve made them since...
...Every workerowner owns one share (to join the company now, you’ve got to pay $23,000-10 per cent down and the remainder over 10 years) and gets one vote...
...But unions are also resisting work redesign-perplexing and frustrating the humanization of work advocates...
...Union leaders fear job redesign which increases worker power partly because they doii’t waiit the workers to have more power...
...The socio-technical system par excellence is General Foods’ dog food plant in Topeka, Kansas...
...The woikers toiled hard here, because whatever profits they make are theirs to keep...
...When employees think a small change in a product’s design or assembly method will work better, they’re encouraged to try it...
...Arthur and his staff below him, whom he carefully trains, try to encourage production workers to try new and better methods...
...The workers don’t feel they’ve had time to adjust...
...The business world knows, deep in its boardrooms, that it faces a profound crisis...
...Workers have locker rooms with showers and carpets and ping-pong tables to encourage them to spend more time together and talk about work...
...Money is what counts...
...Change on the job has got to begin on the bottom...
...It’s important to me that you understand what I’m saying,” he said, “because otherwise ~0~1’1t1h ink I’m a Communist...
...I always have to consider that a guy I’m talking to may be on the board of directors next year...
...When the HEW report was published, the White House tried to freeze it with silence, and Labor Department officials hoped that “if we’d all stop writing about the problem it would go away...
...The ultimate drawback to Donnelly’s system, for the workers anyway, is that “Lately,” Arthur said ruefully, “supervisors have been getting smug and have been slacking off, not calling meetings...
...But the key to the Topeka plant centers not so much on the way the jobs are done as on the way workers approach them...
...David Wheeler, who lifts mirrors off a conveyor and clips them two at a time on a forklift, estimates he made $1,500 in bonuses last year...
...This view was outlined for me by UAW committeeman Red Campbell from GM’s Truck and Coach plant...
...The norm in business is so rigid that even the most minute changes simulate a revolution...
...Part of the research for this article was done on a Ford Foundation grant...
...Either you get their creativity on your side, or it will work against you...
...It’s easy to understand management resistance...
...But it’s the factory workers who run these companies...
...W r i g h t makes an important point: factory workers still confront the problem of day-to-day survival...
...Assembly lines at the Medford plant have now disappeared and workers put together component parts at their own workbenches...
...20 years,” a stockman said...
...When we talk about quality of work, well, whose work are we talking about...
...But perhaps even more important, the teams bring workers closer together and exert pressure on members who aren’t working hard with the group...
...In 1970 and 1971, they boosted their salaries 10 per cent...
...The more money they make for the corporation, the more money they get...
...Workers at Corning labor overtime not so much to get the time and a half, one woman told me, as because “we know what our production schedules are-and we know that we have to produce...
...People are incredibly open with one another,” Brimm said...
...All these projects involve piecemeal changes here and there in the production process-as at Ford, one corner of a room can be “humanized” while the system is not...
...But national acceptance of the concept has grown...
...Workers can organize to gain influence over hiring and firing policies-without this even the most dramatic changes in humanized plants look ultimately meaningless...
...One guy was on the verge of tears...
...Their actual work hasn’t changed, but management has distributed it differently among the workers so each one takes on a more varied and less disjointed set of responsibilities...
...Private consulting firms peddle humanization of work plans like laxatives-take a spoonful when your system isn’t working as it should...
...I don’t know what the reason was for setting us up here,” one said...
...All of us sit around a circle and every one of us has to propose a wage package and explain how we think we should get it-in cash, or benefits-and then justify how we’ll pay for it,” said Wheeler...
...Some corporations, it’s true, have managed to restructure their jobs to make working there relatively pleasant...
...Daniel Zwerdling is a Washington writer...
...When real change happens, it doesn’t happen by someone else’s design,” argued James Wright...
...We don’t need a union,” Michael Nienhuis of Donnelly Mirror told me...
...UAW President Bluestone travels to work conferences around the country saying generally positive things about the movement, but it’s mostly talk...
...The issue is clearly hot politics...
...The plant has made 300 emergency engineering changes in four months...
...We don’t want them going over our heads and violating workers...
...As the workers take over more and more of the small responsibilities the management used to exercise, middle managers feel their own limited powers sapped...
...The companies are not the workers’ companies, the products are not their products, the jobs are not their jobs-and for every extra boost in production someone else is raking off the profits...
...Instead, the unions are condemning the movement and retreating from it like ostriches with their heads in the sand...
...At Bankers Trust, a single stock transfer once passed through the hands of six different workers: one received the order, one typed it, one keypunched it, one checked it-on and on...
...In a private corporation, you can tell a worker what to do and that’s how it’s done,” said Hoquiam general manager Peter Majar...
...But here, the workers all have a say...
...I’ve got good pay in ideal working conditions...
...It’s a matter of priorities...
...That’s the only way humanizing work can deliver worker benefits...
...It’s a highly automated plant-and the company had to deliberately de-automate some jobs so workers could have more things to control...
...We’ve sold 7,000 already and we’ve built only 50,’ ” said one of the production workers...
...Imagine the supervisor in an AT&T operators’ office: struggled hard, worked for the company maybe 10 years, and now at the height of power, tells operators when they may or may not go to the bathroom, taps their lines to judge their performance, and records their every minute’s absence...
...Once the workers are given responsibility for a special area of work, they’re no longer so easy to replace...
...Executives have always exercised complete prerogative over the way work is set up and the way workers perform it, and they fear that any change will threaten their authority...
...But what do I need protection from here...
...While corporations have been forced to pacify their workers, to reduce absenteeism, high turnover, and sabotage, they have been feeling the pressure of foreign competition...
...A recent HEW report, Work in America, suggests that to bring contentment and psychological well-being, companies must redesign jobs so workers no longer feel like soulless cogs in a vast corporate machine...
...What we’re talking about here is a complete change,” sajd Pfautz, “the employees managing themselves instead of being managed...
...1 visited three such companies in the Northwest, plywood companies which each make up to $30 million per year in sales...
...In February the nianager told us ‘The dealers are screaming...
...As far as the workers can see, management is doing some thing to make work more tolerable, while the unions just haven’t delivered...
...largely because they haven’t spent much time or energy trying to figure it out...
...If they can figure out a way to boost their salaries-through increased production or more sales contracts, for example-the company will do it...
...Productivity and quality have never been better, but Rudisill won’t give out any figures...
...The factory really started working about six months before it was even built...
...Donnelly Mirror: Team Players “We don’t have a union because we don’t need a union,” said Michael Nienhuis, sitting on his forklift at Do?nelly Mirror Corporation in Holland, Michigan...
...Foremen never meet with workers to discuss problems...
...Who the Hell Will We Fight?’ To most businessmen, all this is radical stuff...
...Bureau of Labor statistics show that absenteeism has soared 35 per cent since 1961 and annual turnover in the auto industry, for one, has topped 100 per cent (costing General Motors at least $79 million per year, according to a company bulletin...
...We were having problems with these grommets,” an electrode assembler told me, “SO we suggested that they make a trough in the plastic, like this, which would improve air flow...
...We don’t want to be part of management’s job...
...I never saw a girl move her hands so fast in my life...
...In Sweden, cars roll off the line considerably slower than in American plants...
...measurably increasing American productivity, achieved not through speed-up but through new personal employee motivation...
...After a board meeting we go back to the plant and we’re just another one of the boys,” said board member Vern Wolfe at Hoauiam Plywood...
...Their wildcat strike shut down the plant and made headlines in national media for months...
...If the union leaders are really concerned about the well-being and security of their members, they should be plunging into the humanization issue, hashing out a sound strategy with the workers, and negotiating hard with management...
...The board can’t approve any expenditures over $25,000 without asking the full membership to vote...
...Pretty soon you’ll have the workers managing the managers...
...Workers have suggested logical so 1 u tions-like color-coding the parts-but the management never listens...
...An operator’s job is more meaningful than it was, but it’s still pretty awful...
...Work Itself, says Mary Fiala, “makes it just a little bit easier to work here...
...Humanization as the social scientists see it,” he said, “is irrelevant to this set of negotiations...
...Beyond Boredom A Look at What’s New on the Assembly Line by Daniel Zwerdling Until AT&T’s “Work Itself” program came to North Virginia Bell two years ago, operator Mary Fiala had to raise her hand every time she needed to go to the bathroom...
...This slick, manipulative approach is precisely what many corporations like AT&T have engmeered for their pathetically grateful employees today...
...I didn’t talk with the operators myselfChesapeake and Potomac Bell officials refused to let me-but they played some recorded, company-made interviews prepared for humanization of work conferences as testimony of their company’s success...
...While some companies are displaying their humanization of work programs like a United Givers Fund button (I humanized work), most of the 100 or so corporations conducting experiments are keeping them secret...
...It’s pretty much like working for yourself,” said Rudy Anderson, a member of the board of directors who patches holes in the veneer...
...But here it’s altogether different from a private company...
...But so far, workers told me, GM’s half-hearted attempt to “humanize” the plant is a flop...
...This used to irritate the girls-oh, they just hated it,” she says...
...Senators Ted Kennedy and Charles Percy delivered the keynote speeches...
...Humanization of work celebrated its big debut last March: 250 executives gathered in the chandeliered splendor of the New York Hilton to hear a dozen companies including Chase Manhattan, AT&T, and General Foods, testify how they have humanized work...
...It starts operating the moment workers arrive at work: same parking lot for managers and workers, same entrance adorned with a beautiful mural, same decor in the management and production crew cafeterias...
...Management decides what to produce and how to produce it and whom to hire to produce it, and the unions fight for tangible rewards-pay, leave, financial benefits-in return...
...Unless the humanization of work movement encompasses these issues, too, it will all amount to very little...
...A production supervisor reports, “I can’t remember the last time I had a labor problem...
...Vice President Dick Arthur told me...
...I sat through a few meetings in which members felt a few workers were loafing...
...The more effort you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it...
...In the Productivity Commission’s Quality of Work brochure, you won’t see any mention of employee satisfaction for . its own sake-but the brochure, which is sent to corporate executives, does promise that work redesign will bring “increased employee motivation and allegiance to union and company,” the benefits of “decreased work place costs,” and “improved utilization of human and technological resources...
...They can “say it like it is...
...The new loyalty and sense of ownership the workers feel toward their jobs which spurs them to work harder and better is ultimately a massive deception...
...Each team follows a chassis as it glides, hanging overhead from a horseshoe-shaped track...
...1 hope I don’t sound like a radical,” worried Chester Gray, the pin-striped and s h ort-cropped commercial services manager for Washington, D. C. area Bell, after telling me about his “job enrichment” innovations, which include letting his employees cut off service to delinquent customers on their own initiative and take company files home at night...
...We have considerably more interest...
...Last fell, the w o r k e r s voted t o buy a $50,000 system which would recycle water rather than dump it in the bay-but only after the machine committee, workers from the plant, did some research, and some traveling, and recommended the system they liked...
...We did it just this morning,” Neinhuis, a three-year veteran here, told me-he sat down with a supervisor and stock comptroller, at his request, and figured out a way to redesign the boring jobs in the stockroom...
...The best advice is this,” the conservative Research Institute of America advises executives, “accept malaise as a fact...
...But now, explained regional manager Charles Pfautz, “We tell them, ‘Get up from the switchboard and go by yourself.’ ” In the old days, operators passed emergency calls to their supervisorsnow they can handle the calls themselves...
...Workers now exert no control over either...
...Suddenly, Work Itself comes and those powers vanish...
...Hell, those office engineers think they know how to build this...
...Two years ago scarcely anybody had heard of humanization of work, but now it’s a social fad...
...The key to the quality of work program,” according to Edgar Mills, tlie director of the Productivity Coinmission, “is its principal national objective...
...Industry’s temptation, as the unions say, is to buy a palliative which will expand sales and profits first and soothe production workers second...
...If workers can make decisions at work they may also more actively question union policy...
...A top United Automobile Workers official confided that the UAW “has dozens of experiments going with General Motors,” but he added sharply, “This information is not for public consumption, understand...
...Workers can make their own decisions, as long as they make the decision management would have made for them,” said a former employee of the Topeka plant...
...Productivity will soar...
...Although the size of the plant has doubled in the last few years, the company has cut the number of department managers from three to two...
...Labor leaders have forever been wary of programs which somehow blur the distinction between management and workers, apparently even if it means nothing more than workers deciding when to take their breaks instead of depending on supervisors to tell them...
...That’s not the point...
...The fear of authority which pervades the shop floor in most companies doesn’t exist here-because the workers are the authorities...
...The dog food production and packaging lines are run with little supervision, and workers take turns inspecting the food in quality-control labs on their own...
...Who decided we needed to produce 9.3 million automobiles in America last year...
...The unions see threats to their own power in the humanization of work movement, or any movement which expands worker autonomy, just as their inanagement counterparts do...
...Since GM started producing its new inobile home model last October, teams of four workers each have been assembling the chassis and body from start to finish...
...Donnelly Mirror (see box, page 84) has a profit-sharing plan, one of the best in the country, but even then there’s no question who gets the greatest benefits: “Understand that we do nothing here that’s not designed to maximize our profits...
...GM rushed workers into the new method, which requires each person to perform at least 60 different assembly operations instead of just one, in assembly-line tradition, without any training...
...to be equitable, as a start, the corporations must share with the workers whatever extra profits their labors bring...
...But humanizing the working place demands some new kinds of goalsautonomy, responsibility, a say in production methods...
...First he complained that GM doesn’t know what it’s doing and is botching up the mobile home plant: but when I asked him whcther workers should assume more managerial responsibilities in running the plant he became indignant...
...The 400 employees are all divided into “production teams” of about 10 workers each, whom supervisers call together monthly, to chat about production problems...
...Humanization of work advocates have faced enormous resistance in the corporate community as they try to market their more imaginative theories...
...When the company began cautiously tinkering with work design six years ago, the idea was seen as dangerously radical...
...Well, I’ve been working here...
...Workers...
...It was American efficiency at its bestand worst...
...But this is foreign territory, and the unions don’t feel comfortable traveling in it...
...Salvation through Grommets John Rudisill, now manager of the Corning Corporation’s electronics plant in Medford, Massachusetts, remembered his shock when he walked in to a television assembly plant several years ago: “The girls were literally sitting shoulder to shoulder at an assembly line...
...They’ve gone elsewhere in the plant...
...The New York banks and insurance companies, for example, are embracing “job enrichment” in their white-collar factories, where pools of labor-mostly women and minoritieshave for years churned out paper forms like parts on an assembly line...
...If production workers begin to realize the system can work differently, and a workers’ control strategy evolves, workers could negotiate for the right to decide on work redesign, and next for the right to exert controls over company safety policies...
...That’s the way things are done around here-no diagrams, no blueprints...
...Three workers just automated themselves out of a job recently when they suggested the company could do their work With a new machine...
...Fraser asked...
...The women in the glass lathing department get work assignments in four-week blocks, doing the day-to-day scheduling pretty much on their own...
...In some companies which have made work conditions more tolerable the workers don’t want any union at all...
...If we’re taking part in management, who the hell will we be fighting against...
...Each worker in a team is supposed to learn every task.This way, GM’s theory goes, they’ll have varied and interesting work, learn and grow, and share the camaraderie of a team-and stop quitting and taking time off, which costs the company at least $79 million a year...
...All the shareholders elect a nine-person board of directors each year from workers in the plant...
...The auto industries could produce cars by teams if it wanted-its decision to reject that route is governed strictly by far-reaching political and economic choice...
...Puget Sound is one of several dozen plywood companies in the Northwest that workers took over 20 to 30 years ago when the private owners were going bankrupt...
...As work teams walk alongside either the moving chassis or body, they take parts from bins placed alongside the line...
...By convincing employees the have a stake in the business, bringing into their confidence and by giving them responsibilities which manageh used to have, these companies have created a climate in which workers begin to think and act like management...
...They don’t know what ?0 do about humanizing work...
...If the management really wants a happy work force, let them put their money where their mouth is and hand over some of the profits...
...Despite the competition from the giants like Weyerhaeuser, firms like Puget Sound are doing well-$25 million a year in sales...
...What the unions do with the humanization of work movement will largely determine whether the movement starts breaking down the work dictatorships which govern 82 million Americans each day-whether a workers’ democracy will be built or whether the movement fizzles and brings what the Swedes call “toilet democracy”AT&T at its very best...
...Donnelly has built in a system which, the company hopes, guarantees the’ workers will put their creativity on the company’s side: workers take home 40 per cent of all the profits...
...The Plywood Companies: Working Yourself The 270 employees at Puget Sound Plywood Corporation have never heard of “humanization of work” or socio-technical systemsbut they enjoy their work...
...Other companies are tinkering a bit more with the way the work is actually done...
...by the end of the track the chassis is finished, and the body, team-assembled in the same manner on the second floor, drops down and the two halves are joined...
...His boss couldn’t believe he was talking only with the workers...
...If they can replace management functions, why not replace functions of the union leaders...
...They own their company and control it...
...ln a month from now we’ll sit down and see if this is the way we want it...
...I talked with one salesman who had an awful time,” said Michael Brimm, a Harvard Business School student who worked in the plant for six months...
...The humanization of work proposals we bring in to the negotiating table won’t be for team-building autos like Volvo or any of that kind of crap,” a high UAW official told me...
...That’s when they put the pressure on and the team concept fell apart...
Vol. 5 • July 1973 • No. 5
