What Happened?

Some Assembly Required 

by Gregg Shotwell, 1996

“All possible brain work should be removed from the shop floor,” said Frederick Taylor in 1903. As industrialized workers race headlong into the 21st century we seem to be gazing into a rearview mirror where our future recedes before our eyes. We’re on a fast track backward.

Look around. Take your eyes off your repetitive task, your keyboard, your instrument panel, your personal row of buttons. Set your screw driver down and look around.

Have you noticed the high-tech, high-skill jobs disappearing from your plant? Have you observed the actual manufacturing capability of your facility reduced? Piece by piece?

More and more factories have basically become screw driver plants. That is, assembly plants with very little in-house manufacturing and jobs with “no experience required”. We are not only losing jobs, we are losing skills, knowledge, expertise, and ultimately our bargaining power. The less you know, the less value you hold.

While corporations promote countless new programs touting teamwork, progress, and people friendly slogans, the old fashion Taylor System of Scientific Management continues to dominate corporate strategy and accelerate the brain drain.

A key feature of the Taylor system was the dummy down approach. Make every job as stupid as possible. Simplify and standardize procedures into mindless tasks that require minimum (but highly repetitive) motion. Reduce workers’ power by depleting skill, craft, knowledge, and expertise. Minimize individuality. Erase personal pride in the job. Liquidate all sense of ownership. Make workers generic, interchangeable, and replaceable as component parts. Merge classifications. Blur the lines of demarcation.

The current application of Taylorism further depreciates worker value, advances the de-skilling of America, and disassembles solidarity by applying the reduction principle to whole factories. Each manufacturing facility is broken down to its simplest function. Piece by piece, work is removed from the bargaining unit and out sourced to ever smaller and more specialized nonunion suppliers. Even component plants are increasingly dependent on outside suppliers. The strip down process emasculates workers. After ten years in an auto plant you have no marketable skills.

The shakedown process is lubed with sweet talk and enticements. The familiar come-on inviting us to be “partners in the business” is worth less than a pimp’s promise. Wake up. The first indication you’re about to be date raped is an appeal for cooperation.

Once the union/management team is cozily ensconced in the back seat, company con men present the villainous competitive bid, “If we want to save jobs, we have to be competitive. How can we get the cost down?” Boogie. “Now we don’t have room for all the equipment this new product requires. How can we create more space?” Cha-cha. 

The union isn’t busted, it’s disrobed. One piece at a time. Slowly. It’s almost painless.

Have you noticed all the new products require more equipment, less jobs, and lots of out sourcing? (Oh yeah, teamwork too!) The union is gradually reduced by attrition. As the manufacturing process is fragmented, scattered, and decentralized, union shops become smaller and more isolated. Pattern bargaining is shattered. Breaking with tradition the national contract is ratified before local agreements are signed. The solidarity with other plants is broken. Then the isolated victims are whipsawed into cowering shadows of their old confrontational selves.

Skilled trades have not escaped the erosion of skills. The new system contracts out work that requires more knowledge, planning, and experience, such as major construction, complex repairs, and the set up of new machinery. Service reps and engineers set up the new high-tech machines. Skilled trades are left in the dark and reduced to performing simple standard maintenance procedures that require minimal knowledge, ingenuity, troubleshooting savvy, or skill. 

Unions have gradually become smaller and weaker. The UAW has literally been cut in half. How is the leadership responding? With mergers. A strategy gleaned from the CEO’s they play golf with while we are at work. The merger of Auto, Steel, and Machinist unions is a massive cover up for a failure to organize. It won’t stop the out sourcing or the de-skilling of America. It won’t increase union membership. It won’t leverage our bargaining power. It will only conceal the losses a little longer.

Union leaders are busy cutting deals that protect the privileged few at the expense of new hires. The two tier wage system is now an accepted practice. The corporations will build on it. Pattern bargaining is a thing of the past. When Chrysler workers get $7000 bonuses and GM workers get $300, parity is trashed. The UAW has agreed to accept new parts plants at prevailing wage. Welcome Delphi, the whipsawing has just begun. 

We need to take a tip from the CAW. Create a culture of struggle, not cooperation. Stop union shops from competing to see who can bend over the farthest. Make solidarity an action, not a slogan. Promote democracy within the union and demand accountability from the leadership. Be proactive. Take a stand for job ownership. Stop talking about the Flint sit down in ‘37 and take over a plant. Don’t roll over. Fight back. 

Stay Solid, Gregg Shotwell, 1996