The "New" Labor Relations and The My Job Contest of 1947-48 (Part 1 of 2) Their language may not stand all tests, But let them have their say For on their backs the burden rests, They MAKE the Chevrolet. taken from "Voice of the Chevrolet Workers" poem by Floyd Hoke-Miller 1988 marked the 51st anniversary of the Great Flint Sit- down strike. It also the 40th anniversary of an event much less well known by the current generation -- the "My Job Contest and Why I Like It" of 1947-48. The contest was run by General Motors and thousands of entries were submitted by hourly workers. Also, the "Searchlight", the newspaper of UAW Local 659 (Flint, MI) printed many poems and essays commenting on the contest and the questions raised by it. The events of this contest seem worth reviewing, however, because it seems to provide the background by which to understand some of the developments in the auto industry today. "More Teamwork Needed to Save Jobs in Area," advised a recent headline in the Flint Journal. "GM eyes changes in AC Spark Plug" read a headline in the Detroit News. A recent task force report published by the State of Michigan described how they saw the problem. In order for Michigan to become "Americas Factory of the Future" the report calls for a change in labor relations in industries like auto. "The new complex manufacturing process," explains the report, "cannot work at full efficiency with traditional labor-management relations, marked by total direction from above and quiet resentment from below." ("The Path to Prosperity", 1984, p 62) The report goes on to explain: Michigan was a pioneer in the old, adversial style of labor-management relations, and both inside and outside the state that image persists. Today, however, some of the most exciting experiments in the new, cooperative style are taking place within Michigan. (Ibid., p 63) The task force provides the following illustration: "One critical example is quality control. In the old approach, partsor assemblies were made --well or badly -- and inspectors at the end of the line accepted the good and rejected the bad. There was masssive waste ivolved in the manufacture of defective compponents or products. The new approach involves building quality into the product from the beinning with the role of the inspector being significantly dimished or even abolished. (Ibid., p 62) The report goes on to suggest that this "new" view of labor relations is necessary both to be able to make use of new machinery and production techniques that are unique to the 1980's and that it is also necessary to stimulate management to invest in the new technology. A few years ago, an article called "Why History Matters to Managers" was published in "The Harvard Business Review." The article discussed the importance of looking back to past precedents before embarking on new adventures. One of the writers explains, "history is a way of thinking -- a way of searching for patterns and trying to see if such patterns recur from one situation to another. It helps us think about the parameters of what's possible, what the boundaries of likely action or possible success are. It is a search for pattern. (Jan. - Feb. 1986, p 82) Keeping this advice in mind, it is helpful to look for precedents and forerunners of the "new" labor relations. Peter Drucker, in the epilogue to his book, Concept of a Corporation, provides a description of the origins of the "new" labor relations. Thus it would seem worthwhile to review the story he tells about how this concept of "labor-management" relations was created and what was the previous experience in trying to adopt it. During World War II, Drucker says he was hired by GM to study the structure, policies and internal and external relationship of the corporation. He was to write a report on his conclusions. After studying the corporation, he wrote out his recommendations, later published as Concept of a Corporation. "Specifically," he writes, "Concept of a Corporation recommended that GM, after the return to peacetime production, go to work on developing what I called a `responsible worker' with a `managerial aptitude,' and a `self-governing plant community'." (p 242) Drucker emphasises the importance of these recommendations, noting "And this has been the keynote of all my work in the management field ever since."( Ibid.) According to Drucker, Charles E. Wilson, CEO of GM after WWII, hired him and made him "his consultant on employee relations." Wilson, Drucker writes, "established within GM an Employee Relations Staff separate from Labor Relations, independent from it and with its own vice-president reporting directly to him....The mission," writes Drucker, "of the new staff was to create eventually the `responsible worker' with his `managerial aptitude' and the `self-governing plant community', for which Concept of a Corporation had pleaded. C.E. Wilson was dissatisfied with the union-management relations prevalent in the auto industry and he wanted to make some changes. But he felt he needed information about the workforce in order to achieve his changes. "As soon as the War was over," Drucker writes, "Wilson designed a major research profect to find out what areas might be the truly important ones to the GM worker." (from Adventures of a Bystander, N. Y. 1979, p 275-6) Wilson wanted actual information. "You tell me that you know what these areas are," he is quoted as telling Drucker," and the things you mention sound plausible to me. I have learned, however, to find out rather than be bright." (Ibid.) "At first," Drucker continues, Wilson, "wanted to have a big employe survey and was toldthat he could expect a 5 percent response." He didn't feel that was adequate. "That's not enought," Wilson is quoted as saying. "So he and his staff," writes Drucker, "came up with the idea of a contest -- `My Job and Why I Like It' -- with a lot of small prizes and outside judges." Drucker was one of the judges and George Taylor who had been Chairman of the War Labor Board, was another judge. Drucker reports that there were 200,000 entries, and that not all the entries were read "although every judge read several thousand," he reveals, "with a big staff at GM coding and tabulating the rest." (Ibid., p 276) This was a first step toward the goals of the "new" labor relations, records Drucker. It was "the biggest employee attitude survey every undertaken in American industry." Undertaken under the guise of a `contest,' `My Job and Why I Like It', it was designed to find out what workers actually wanted from company, supervisor, and job, where they saw the major opportunities for improvement in what we now call `the quality of working life', and where they felt themselves competent to take on responsibility for job and performance."(Concept of a Corporation, p 243) C.E. Wilson felt the contest had been a big success. "It was also," notes Drucker, "a veritable gold mine of information ever about workers, their needs and capabilities." (Ibid. p ) Drucker continues, with the information provided by the contest C.E. Wilson "was all set to start what we today would call `quality circles.'(as I remember it," Drucker interjects, "Wilson himself called them `Work Improvement Programs'). He had even picked out, " contiues Drucker "the GM divisions where the program would first be started and tested out." Next comes a startling admission. Drucker writes: And then the whole program was hastily dropped. Indeed, even work on the entries of the contest was stopped and its findings suppressed. (They have never been published.) The main reason was violent opposition to the contest, its findings and especially to anything like a work improvement program on the part of GM's union, the UAw. To the UAW anything that would establish cooperation between company and workers was a dirct attack on the union." (Concept, p 244) Even though assurance was given that the union would be involved in the process, the UAW, according to Drucker, took a strong stand against instituting any such activity. He goes on, "Walter Ruther, the President of the UAW, and then America's most visible and most powerful labor leader, remained adamant. If GM went ahead with its plan -- even if it only continued work on the contest entries and published the findings -- Reuther said the UAW would file unfair labor practices against the company and would call a general strike against GM." (Concept, p 244) "This was not a desirable situation," Drucker explains, "to GM. This was just at the timewhen GM could least afford a strike. Automobile demand, after the stoppage of production during World War II, was at its peak and GM was launching the first truly new models, the first ones, for instance, with an automatic transmission. And in the climate of the times -- the Truman years -- public opinion and government alike were certain to side with the union." (Ibid.) Opposition, Drucker reports, came not only from the UAW, but also from within GM management. C.E. Wilson "might still have risked defyingthe union," writes Drucker, "had he had support from his own management within GM. But there the approach to employee relations that Wilson had taken from Concept of a Corporation and Wilson's entire employee relations policy were just as unpopular as they were with the UAW. And while Wilson was nominally CEO," Drucker reminds his readers, "he was not really the boss. Alfred Sloan was still Chairman and still, by far, the most powerful man in the company -- and Sloan had little use for the responsible worker or for the self-governing plant community."(Concept, p 244-245) Why was Alfred Sloan so opposed to "quality circles"? Drucker's stories about Sloan provide some clues to sort out this puzzle. Concept of a Corporation had been written to describe and analyze General Motors. When the book was published, it was adopted by Henry Ford II as the text to guide the reorganization of Ford Motor Company, Drucker tells us. It was also, he claims, used as a guide by other companies like General Electric, by universities like Michigan and Michigan State, and even by the armed forces. But General Motors, he admits, not only rejected the book, but totally ignored it. In fact, Sloan, according to Drucker, felt he had been compelled to write his book "My Years with General Motors," (New York, 1964) to refute the conclusions of Concept of a Corporation and to "lay down what a book on GM should really be and should really focus on." (Concept, p 238). GM not only ignored his book, Drucker explains, but they also made clear that there was a fundamental difference. The difference wasn't merely over particular policies, we are told, but over "the nature of policies" themselves. (Concept, p 241). GM. management, Drucker claims, believed "that they had discovered principles " and further "that these principles were...like laws of nature. Once thought through and tested," writes Drucker, "they were considered to be certain." The writer presents his own contrasting philosophy. "I do not believe that there is the `one right answer'," he maintains. "There are answers that have a high probability of being the wrong ones -- at least to the point where one does not even try them unless all else has failed." (Ibid.) When Drucker brought out his first substantial book on management, he claims he called it "The Practice of Management" to distinguish his view from that of Sloan. The General Motors executives, he writes "saw themselves as the pioneers of a science," while Drucker saw management as "fundamentally a practice" which "like medicine...uses a lot of sciences as its tools." (Concept, p 241) This difference in views between Sloan and Drucker was also reflected in the way Drucker conducted his study. He realtes that Sloan introduced himself and Drucker, "You have probably heard, Mr. Drucker that I didn't initiate your study. I saw no point to it. My associates overruled me." (Adventures, p ) But though Sloan didn't agree with Drucker's assignment, he promised to provide him with every assistance. "Come and see me any time I can be of help," he told the researcher, "Ask me any question you think appropriate. But above all, let me make sure that you get all the information you can possibly use." He told Drucker he could come and sit in on meetings of the top committees at GM so he would be able to find out "how we work and what makes a corporation run." In return Sloan requested of Drucker that he be willing to presention his observations and conclusions honestly. "You tell us what you think is right," was his charge to Drucker," Don't worry about who is right. Don't worry whther this or that member of our management - including myself - will like your recommendations or conclusions. I'll tell yo fast enough if what you think is right seems to me to be wrong." (Ibid., p ) In retrospect, Drucker laments that he failed to fulfill Sloan's charge to him. "if I had listened to his advice," he writes, " and not made compromises, I might even have had an impact on GM. But I was too green and inexperienced. And so I made concessions to deflect what I thought might be Marvin Coyle's objections [a GM manager -ed], and only earned Coyle's contempt. Or I emphasized points on which I thought to have the support of people like Dreystadt [another manager-ed] or Wilson, only to find that they couldn't care less." (Ibid, p 280) Why did Sloan make this request for honest to Drucker? After attended a top committee meeting with Sloan, Sloan would ask the visitor for his opinion. Drucker didn't understand the reason for the questions so he asked Sloan "Mr. Sloan you couldn't possible care about the objections I might have. After all, you've fifty or more years of experience." Sloan's response was "That's precisely why I do care and should care," Drucker reports. "I have been top man for fifty years and am used to having my own way. I'd better find out whether I'm an Emperor without clothes, and no one inside GM is likely to tell me. (Ibid. p 280) The reason that GM management eventually gave for rejecting the `quality circles' of 1947-48 was that they felt they would impede their accountability. "We are accountable," Drucker says was GM management's argument, "and not only to the company, its shareholders, and its customers, but above all to the workers themselves...."(Concept, p 245 ) Because of Sloan and other GM manager's opposition to `quality circles', C.E. Wilson was "forced to give up his project -- and with it the entire approach Concept of a Corporation had urged on him and on American industry as a whole. Many years later," Drucker writes, "when Wilson had left GM to become President Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense, he told me in confidence that he had accepted the President's offer in large part because he felt himself totally frustrated in his attempt to change American employee relations and to base them on worker responsibility for performance and work quality." But the "My Job and Why I Like It Contest" didn't die with its rejection at GM. According to Drucker, the Japanese auto companies adopted the system of labor relations that had been cast aside by GM. He writes: But while GM paid no attention to the recommendations of Concept of a Corporation (further developed later on in my books The New Society [New York: John Day, 1949] and The Practice of Management [New York: Harper & Row, 1954), the Japanese did....And while GM paid no attention to the findings of the "My Job and Why I Like It" contest, Toyota in the early 1950's, somehow managed to get a copy of the unpublished findings and modeled its own employee relations on them. (Concept, p 245) But then Drucker admits "Until the mid-sixties, GM's manufacturing productivity did indeed rise faster than its labor costs...."(p 253) With this comment, Drucker seems to be admitting that GM did indeed benefit from the path it took of opposition to Drucker's proposals . And it wasn't until 1979 that GM again tried to institute the `quality circles' that had been rejected 40 years earlier. Drucker writes: Around 1979 GM changed its employee relations policy. It launched a massive program to "improve the quality of working life" in its plants, and began to form "quality circles." It even got the union to participant...." (Concept, p 257) And Drucker notes that despite the reject for 40-years of these "new" labor-management relations, GM hascurrently adopted them as part of its new long-range strategy. Part 3 of this strategy, writes Drucker, are, "employee realtions that are designed to produce eventually the responsible worker and the self-governing plant community which Concept of a Corporation first suggested forty years ago, and which Charles Wilson, despite his being the Chief Executive Officer of GM, could not push through against the resistance of his colleagues in management and of the company's labor union." (Concept, p 257) In order to understand why these "new" labor-management relations were rejected 40 years ago, it will be helpful for the current generation to review the comments in verse and prose of the auto workers of 1947-48 as represented in the pages of "The Searchlight" during that period. What follows are a selection of these responses. My Job and Why Do I Like It Some Letters By They Who Remember (Excerpts Taken from the Pages of the Searchlight - 1947 - 1948) * * * What I Like Or What I Don't Like About My Job If General Motors wants a real cross section of opinion from its employes about their working conditions and relations with management, the question in their recently announced contest should be What I Like or What I Don't Like About My Job. "The General Motors contest is an attempt to conduct a one- sided opinion poll of the workers," Reuther said. "The corporation hopes by offering a number of valuable prizes, to buy employe statements to the effect that General Motors is a kindly, fatherly and understanding employer, sympathetic to the workers problems and needs, which will later be used in so-called goodwill advertising. "If GM is sincerely interested in a true opinion poll of its workers, the Corporation should be willing to offer equal prizes for letters stating what is wrong with GM employer-employe realtions with constructive suggestions for improving such relationships. "An honest worker opinion poll would bring a flood of letters on problems and questions such as: "1. Why the Corporation continues to hire new employes while subjecting its other employes to three day work weeks and periodic wholesale layoffs. "2. GM's refusal to work out the contract clause providing for transfers of older employes to more desireable jobs in line with their seniority. "3. GM's refusal to arbitrate the issues in dispute between the corpoation and its employess in the fall of 1945, a refusal that forced GM workers to strike for their demands. "4. The corporation's later refusal to accede to the recommendations of the President's Fact Finding Committee in the dispute, thus unnecessarily prolonging the strike. "5. The corporation's action in backing the unemployment compensation claims of veterans and other GM workers. "6. The corporation's refusal, following the strike in 1945- 46, to work out provisions that would give all veterans in its employ full vacation pay. "7. The corporation's practice of granting discounts in the purchase of GM products to supervision and higher management, while it denies the same benefits to workers. "8. General Motors' practice of setting aside $25,000 a year as a retirement fund for executives earning hundreds thousands of dollars a year while at the same time it has refused to date to work out a pension plan for its workers. "This one-sided approach proves that General Motors doesn't want a frank cross-section of opinion from its employes. Itwants material for a high pressure publicity and advertising campaign that will try to convince prospective car-buyers that General Motors employes are just as contented as Carnation's cows. "The cost of the prizes (which GM can get at slightly less than the resale rate, is a cheap enough price to pay for grist for their advertising mill)." * * * WAGE SLAVES CREDO If you're satisfied, keep your mouth shut; if not call your Committeeman. * * * MY JOB AND WHY I LIKE IT I like my job because we have a union in our shop that has made it a very good place to work. It has improved so much in the last ten years that a man who left there then would not believe his eyes if he came back now. We have a committee to bargain for our rights hwich we have been deprived of for so many years; call in pay, holiday pay; vacation pay; we are not docked one hour if we fail to ring our card. We don't have to buy the foreman a Christmas present to get a raise and are treated like human beings, have smoking privileges which used to be limited to me behind big desks and glass windows; we don't have to ring our cards both ways at noon. Of course, the sanitary conditions are deplorable; the place is only cleaned up every time Charles Wilson comes to town, but I am living in hopes that the next generation will get that taken care of. Yours for bigger and better Unions. Rosco N. Hodges * * * MY JOB AND WHY I LIKE IT The reason I like my job, I think can best be expressed in the vernacular of the parayer of the pharasee from the parable of the Publican and the pharasee taken from the bible. My prayer is as follows: "Lord I thank thee that I do not have jobs that other people have. That I do not have to dig in the filth and dirt of compound tanks and dirty machines important as it may be. And I also thank thee that I do not work on the Giant Octopus called the Assembly Line whose long tentacles reach into every department to demand more and ever more pieces of stock to feed its ceaseless movements." "I thank thee father that I do not have the responsibility heaped upon my shoulders as do the poor setup men whose backs bend with burden of carrying dull and broken tools to and from the tool room amid the mans and groans of their overseers because their production demands cannot be met." "And finally I am deeply thankful that I am not one of the lowly overseers who must be a combination of a Philadelphia lawyer, diplomat, and nursemaid to be able to discern phoney grievances from the real one to bend strong willed men to their assigned tasks, to sell thesmart ones their jobs and to plead and beg the weak willed to do their utmost. With the least amount of grief these things I am thankful for." And as the bell tolls the day's end I drive my weary way homeward it is a good timefor reflection. Jobs well done have made many men great; formed great nations molded better civilization; discovered untold wealth and produced the best living standards to this day. While nothing is perfect, but thee Oh Lord, may you hasten the day when I will not look down on the Publican and that we may walk in hand thru the years with mutual respect and understanding. Amen. A. Tool Grinder * * * (To be continued)