Back in the mid-'80s, Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor who had been exploring the history of the social organization of work, realized the forces of economic globalization were creating one of the most dramatic chapters of history in the workplace right in front of her.
"Everyone was talking about Japanese management and how it might change the U.S. auto industry for the better," says Milkman, who came to UCLA in 1988. General Motors and Toyota had forged a joint venture called New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), at a plant formerly run by GM in Fremont, CA. Under the plan, Toyota ran the plant and GM sold the cars. Using the same workforce, the Fremont plant, which had previously had a reputation for low productivity and poor labor-management relations, earned productivity and quality ratings comparable to those of Toyota plants in Japan and higher than any other U.S. auto plant's.
To study the effects of instituting Japanese management in American plants, Milkman began her own project in 1986. Lasting for nearly 10 years, the case study was conducted at a General Motors assembly plant in Linden, NJ, which had just reopened after a modernization and was attempting to introduce elements of the Japanese management system into the workplace. In addition to analyzing the current and historical data on the plant, Milkman conducted extensive interviews with nearly 100 employees, concentrating on two groups of workers: those who accepted a buyout from the company and left voluntarily, documenting for five years how they fared after leaving GM and whether they regretted their decision, and employees who stayed, studying how they were affected by the plant's efforts to modernize.
Milkman found the attempts to introduce elements of the Japanese system at the Linden plant, on the whole, unsuccessful. They were compromised by two major factors, Milkman suggests. First, an integral facet of so-called Japanese management is a high level of trust between workers and management. At NUMMI, that trust was established by a promise not to lay off any workers unless managers first took a pay cut. But while management followed through at Fremont, worker layoffs at Linden continued, exacerbating long-held suspicions among the labor force. Second, when GM reopened after its 1985-'86 modernization, it promised, among the key changes, "jointness" as a principle of decision-making and problem- solving. "The theory is that auto workers who are assembling, say, instrument panels do this all day long and know more than anyone else about how the process can be improved," says Milkman. "The big contribution of the Japanese management model is to take advantage of that knowledge." But at Linden, the notion of sharing decision-making met with resistance from middle management, and the "Employee Involvement Groups" were eventually scrapped.
"By promising workers opportunities for participation and then not following through," says Milkman, "GM raised workers' expectations only to smash them by returning to the old practices."
As for the GM workers who left? To her surprise, Milkman, who went on to study the impact of direct Japanese involvement in 66 factories in California for her 1992 book, Japan's California Factories: Labor Relations and Economic Globalization, found that while most fared worse economically, few experienced regrets. The workers, mostly young and male, voluntarily relinquished unionized jobs with high wages. "At first, I thought they were crazy," Milkman says. "Why would they do it? The answer is they really hated working at GM." In fact, Milkman discovered, most often it wasn't only the work itself, it was the way they were treated by their supervisors.
— D.G. |