Working Smart: A Union Guide to Participation Programs and Reengineering. - book reviews

I

The authors of this excellent guidebook for union members and activists are affiliated with the monthly publication Labor Notes, founded in 1979 to "put the movement back in the labor movement." They and the publication operate on the old-fashioned, but in my view entirely correct, assumptions that capitalism is a system of class exploitation, that there is such a thing as the working class, that this working class must be the main vehicle by which capitalism is confronted and changed, and that therefore it is the duty of radicals to help workers to organize themselves for the coming struggles. To this end Parker, Slaughter, and others at Labor Notes have been reporting and examining the rapidly changing workplace and developing strategies with which working people can challenge new managerial initiatives.

This is the third of Parker and Slaughter's collaborations. Their first book, Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL, took apart the "quality of worklife" movement. Problems of absenteeism, wildcat strikes, and other signs of worker distress in the 1970s made it clear that working people were unhappy. QWL's proponents, including some union leaders, argued that improved working conditions brought about through increased worker participation in decision-making were a precondition to higher productivity, product quality, and profitability. Parker and Slaughter were skeptical and argued that management would use the natural desire of workers for greater control over their working lives as a vehicle for tricking employees into giving up hard-won work rules and the monopoly they have over knowledge of the intimate details of their work. Furthermore, QWL almost always involved the creation of organizations independent from the unions themselves, allowing employers to create a wedge between union members and their unions. Instead of bargaining with the union, employers began to deal directly with the newly formed quality circles and teams. The idea was to redirect the loyalty of workers away from the union and toward the employer.

During the 1980s it became evident that QWL had been implemented and encouraged by management largely to soften workers up for a radical restructuring of the labor process. In their second book, Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept, Parker and Slaughter examined the new work organization, which they dubbed "management by stress" (also called "lean production"). Pioneered by the Japanese automobile companies and championed here by noted academics (see especially The Machine That Changed the World by Womack, Jones, and Roos) as a departure from Taylorism, this new system of management aimed at nothing less than total control over the transformation of labor power into labor. Parker and Slaughter demonstrated that far from being the antithesis of Taylorism, "management by stress" represented an attempt to realize Frederick Taylor's dream of a workplace in which workers are powerless to interfere with the labor process. What confused the academic proponents of this system was the introduction of sophisticated techniques to persuade workers to cooperate in their own immiseration.

Taylor believed that monetary incentives coupled with threats would do the trick, but his contemporary counterparts understood that people have needs which go beyond money and that naked force might engender such animosity that productivity is threatened. Therefore, while the ultimate goal was control, the methods used to achieve this control were somewhat roundabout and disguised. Workers were told that they were the company's most important asset, that their well-being was uppermost in management's mind, that the company could not succeed without them, and that they would be empowered in the new workplace as they were taught new skills and allowed to make many decisions unconstrained by hostile supervisors. Thus teams of workers were formed and trained basically to prepare workers for "lean production."

II

In the book under review, the authors repeat and extend their analysis of "management by stress." This is useful both because the second book is out of print and because the discussion in the new book is more extensive. Lean production is seen primarily as a system that allows management to eliminate all waste; to convert labor power into labor during every second that it is possible to do so.

To illustrate how this idea is implemented, consider the opening of a new manufacturing plant. Before production begins, engineers have rigorously Taylorized each job, simplifying it as much as possible and working out exactly what motions it requires and the sequence in which they must be executed. The relationship between jobs and the overall design of the plant is likewise Taylorized. In fact, the product itself will be designed with an eye toward job simplification and time minimization.

As the plant is being built, systematic hiring begins. Lean production is incompatible with certain types of behavior, so employers try to hire only those people least likely to exhibit such behaviors. Since this system employs no relief workers, the absenteeism record of prospective employees is of paramount importance. Since each worker will be part of a production team, it is essential that he or she be a team player. Since each worker will be expected to be devoted to the company and its products, the employer will be looking for enthusiastic and loyal hands. Interestingly, previous experience and formal schooling are of secondary importance, although this is not surprising when it is realized that most of the jobs demand little skill. The hiring process involves aptitude tests, interviews, and many kinds of role-playing exercises. One of the authors actually applied for a job at the Mazda plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, and had to make five trips to the recruitment sites before being hired. Mazda could be especially choosy in its hiring as there were 96,500 applicants for 3,500jobs (conditions of labor surplus provide the lubricant which makes lean production succeed without intolerable friction). Undoubtedly those chosen felt special and ready to work hard for their company, which is exactly what Mazda wanted.

The newly recruited workers labor from the start as members of teams consisting generally of five to eight persons, including a team leader who may or may not be a member of management. The teams are instilled with the spirit of "kaizen" or constant improvement: they are expected to watch vigilantly for ways to produce more efficiently. Team members are provided an opportunity to learn new skills, something which many enjoy, but these skills are then used to eliminate jobs. Team members learn to time study and to chart their own jobs, often without realizing that the purpose of this is to reduce "wasted time." They learn quality control techniques, but at the expense of workers whose former job it was to inspect for quality. In lean production each worker is a quality inspector. Team members learn to do one another's jobs, but this is to insure that management can assign any work to any team member should someone be absent or should there be a need to reduce the workforce. The team leader, whether a supervisor or not, is expected to report to the management any time-saving "tricks" that workers have learned to gain a few seconds or minutes of rest. In other words, one of the functions of the teams is to allow management to quickly gain any time-saving knowledge that the workers have and convert this into labor. Management may also try to gain this knowledge directly by instituting a pay-for-knowledge program or some variation of a quality circle.

The teams are consciously and constantly placed under stress by the employer. The two basic techniques are "stressing the system" and "just-in-time inventory" (JIT). An example of the first is the "andon" board. A row of three lights is placed above each work station: green, yellow, and red. A green light means that everything is proceeding smoothly, yellow means that bottlenecks are developing, and red indicates a crisis which justifies stopping production. If all of the lights are green, this signals slack in the system and the need for stress. Stress is then applied by increasing the speed of the assembly line, by reducing the number of workers, or by increasing the work load. Eventually some of the lights will turn yellow. At this point, all attention is focused on the work stations that cannot keep up. The teams at these stations are now expected to increase their efficiency until the lights are again green. They may simply have to work faster or time study the operations again, but it is their responsibility to solve the problem. Once the lights are green, management stresses the system again. And again. And again. It is a race without a finish line.

Note that upper-level management never troubles itself with the problem, consequently allowing firms to rid themselves of large numbers of managers. Of course, if a light turns red, management's involvement will be more direct but pressure will still be placed upon the individual workers. When lean production plants were first opened, much was made of the right of the worker to stop the line in a red-light situation. In fact, a current television commercial for GM's Saturn car shows a worker stopping the line with the clear implication that at Saturn workers have very untraditional rights. Of course, what is not mentioned is that management's quid pro quo for the right to stop the line is a reduction in union work rules and an agreement by the union not to file grievances. Once the bugs in the new plant have been worked out, the employer becomes much less tolerant of workers stopping die line and puts extreme pressure on any employee who does.

With just-in-time inventory, production is organized so that parts are not delivered until they are needed by an operation. That is, no stocks are kept along the line; inventories are literally zero. Not only does this save storage and interest costs and simplify and cheapen control (one defective part just delivered rather than hundreds of defective parts in a stockpile), but it also allows management to pinpoint problems as soon as they arise. Workers cannot use spare parts to cover up a problem; with JIT there is no place for a worker to hide. As with stressing the system, once a problem is identified, it is up to the team to solve it.

A final component of lean production is subcontracting. Subcontractors, located in close proximity to the main plant (often on the same property), supply the parts required by JIT. Thus the subcontractors assume the cost of inventories, cost made up through the use of the low-wage and nonunion labor made available by the very labor-shedding nature of lean production. The drive to eliminate waste further stimulates the use of subcontractors. Janitorial, landscaping, and maintenance work, which do not directly add value to the product, may be difficult to subject to stress. These types of work are often subcontracted, eliminating the need to control them. It should also be said that lean production encourages firms to use temporary workers, for some of the same reasons they use subcontractors.

III

Working Smart is the best available book about lean production. Not only does it contain a thorough analysis of lean production, but it also discusses important related topics. For example, separate chapters are devoted to total quality management and reengineering, the most contemporary developments in lean production. Similarly, two chapters scrutinize the effects of lean production on women and people of color, arguing that these groups are especially vulnerable. They will be the first workers eliminated as firms downsize, and the constant stress is bound to exacerbate sexism and racism. Subcontracting further splits the working class by race and by sex since the subcontractors' workforces will be more likely to be dominated by racial minorities and women. An interesting and well-documented chapter analyzes the legal aspects of lean production. Readers will be surprised to learn that most labor-management participation teams are illegal in a nonunion setting and are mandatory bargaining subjects in a union establishment.

The use of lean production in three other countries, Japan, Mexico, and Sweden, is the subject of three chapters. Management by stress is facing increasing worker resistance in Japan, the country of its origin, while it is being introduced in poor nations such as Mexico. The Swedish case is of special interest. Severe labor shortages and powerful labor unions created an environment inimical to lean production. In fact, Swedish auto workers were able to force the companies to introduce team work processes which in a few cases permitted workers to exert real control over their labor (interested readers should refer to the important book by Christian Berggren - Alternatives to Lean Production: Work Organization in the Swedish Auto Industry, Ithaca, N.Y.: IRL Press, 1992.).

Especially valuable are the chapters describing the responses that workers have had to lean production. There are case studies from many industries, from telecommunications and railroads to hospitals, the postal service, and higher education. While justice cannot be done to these chapters in a review, the lessons which they teach can be summarized. First, workers must be taught the truth about lean production. This is a difficult task, both because it is a complex system and because workers are often easily convinced to support it. I recently gave a lecture on lean production to a group of local union activists. One person told me that she had been impressed by her employer's description of it. Of course, her employer did not call it lean production but instead stressed teamwork and worker empowerment.

Naturally it is easier for workers to learn about management by stress in a union setting, but this is not always the case. Some unions have developed sophisticated literature, films, and training programs for their members, but the leadership of other unions cooperated fully with their supposed adversaries in implementing lean production. In one of the postal unions, for example, an entire cadre of union officials had a monetary and a power stake in the system, making them allies of management and enemies of their own brothers and sisters. This leads to the second lesson, namely that only an active rank-and-file can effectively combat lean production. Local union members might have to learn about it on their own, often in opposition to their unions. The final chapter of the book has a list of useful resources which are readily available. Many universities have labor studies departments which offer classes on lean production, and these departments might also provide staff to help workers devise effective strategies. Of course, Labor Notes can be of great use, providing literature as well as seminars and conferences (the address is 7435 Michigan Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48210). One advantageous outcome of the independent struggle against lean production in some unions has also been a struggle to democratize and revitalize these unions.

The third lesson is that the key to labor's success is solidarity. One aim of lean production is to force a plant's workers to compete against the workers of every other plant and to get them to believe that this is both necessary for their survival and good for "their" company. This competitive ideology is promoted within each plant as well; the teams are to be in competition with each other. Needless to say, this is a recipe for disaster, leading as it does to a downward spiral of wages and working conditions. This was clearly seen in the recent spectacle of two union locals at GM cutting each other's throats in an effort to convince GM to keep one plant open. Workers must structure their fight against lean production so that such destructive competition does not occur. Parker and Slaughter provide examples of ways to do this, not only in the case study chapters but in a booklet, "A Union Strategy Guide," which accompanies the book.

IV

Working Smart extends and deepens the literature on the labor process pioneered by Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. It convincingly shows that lean production is simply die latest and most sophisticated managerial control mechanism. It also makes clear that control can be resisted, and if not defeated, at least constrained by collective working-class action. It's a must read for union activists and a useful antidote to the armchair theorizing of many postmodern academics. I do have two minor complaints. First, the book could use an index, and second, the editing could have been a little more thorough. Several of the chapters are written by persons other than Parker and Slaughter and this has made the writing uneven in quality. But these are minor quibbles about a fine book.

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